John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. It was exactly this prospect that the economist John Maynard Keynes conjured up in a little essay published in 1930 called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Its thesis was very simple. As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they would have to work hardly at all.

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ALSO BY ROBERT SKIDELSKY Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009) John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2004) John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946 (2000) 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal 2001 Lionel Gelber Prize The World After Communism: A Polemic for our Times (1995) Interests and Obsessions: Historical Essays (1993) John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 (1992) John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920 (1983) Oswald Mosley (1975) English Progressive Schools (1969) Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931 (1967) ALSO BY EDWARD SKIDELSKY Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (2009) Copyright © 2012 Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Production Editor: Yvonne E.

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Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 188–9. 4. A. W. Plumptre, quoted in Skidelsky, Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, p. 237. 5. For a discussion of growth rates in the USA, Europe and the rest of the world, see Fabrizio Zilibotti, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren 75 Years After: A Global Perspective,” in Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga (eds.) Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 27–39. 6. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 325. 7. Wenchao Jin et al., Poverty and Inequality in the UK (London: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2011). 8. The Week, July 16, 2011. 9.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

Antoin Murphy, “Money in an Economy Without Banks – the Case of Ireland,” The Manchester School (March 1978), pp. 44-45. 9. Donal Buckley, “How six-month bank strike rocked the nation,” Independent (December 29, 1999). 10. Umair Haque, op. cit. 11. Roger Bootle, “Why the economy needs to stress creation over distribution,” The Telegraph (October 17, 2009). 12. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in: John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York, 1963), pp. 358-373. 13. Alfred Kleinknecht, Ro Naastepad, and Servaas Storm, “Overdaad schaadt: meer management, minder productiviteitsgroei,” ESB (September 8, 2006). 14. See: Tony Schwartz and Christine Poratz, “Why You Hate Work,” The New York Times (May 30, 2014). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html?

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BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970) 2 A 15-Hour Workweek Had you asked the greatest economist of the 20th century what the biggest challenge of the 21st would be, he wouldn’t have had to think twice. Leisure. In the summer of 1930, just as the Great Depression was gathering momentum, the British economist John Maynard Keynes gave a curious lecture in Madrid. He had already bounced some novel ideas off a few of his students at Cambridge and decided to reveal them publicly in a brief talk titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”1 In other words, for us. At the time of his visit, Madrid was a mess. Unemployment was spiraling out of control, fascism was gaining ground, and the Soviet Union was actively recruiting supporters.

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This specifically concerns young adults in North America, but the same trend is visible in other developed countries. 30. Quoted in: Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Bloomberg Businessweek (April 14, 2011). http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm 31. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), Essays in Persuasion. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 32. Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (2005). Also see my last (Dutch) book, De geschiedenis van de vooruitgang (2013), in which I discuss Jacoby’s distinction between the two forms of utopian thought. 33.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

Arthur Burns, “Progress Towards Economic Stability,” American Economic Review 50, no. 3 (March 1960): 1–19. 22. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 220. 23. Keynes, Economic Consequences, 235–236. 15. The Neoliberal Turn 1. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 22. 2. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” reprinted in John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9, Essays in Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 328. 3. Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things.… Their number is negligible and they are stupid.41 In 1930, as the Great Depression started, John Maynard Keynes distracted an audience one evening with a talk on “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Suppose the problems of managing the economy to maintain full employment; of providing incentives for technological discovery, development, and deployment; of providing incentives for savings and investment; and of keeping people confident that society was working, in the sense that equals were not being treated too unequally and that unequals were not being treated too equally, could be solved.

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The twentieth century’s important moments were set in motion by this creative destruction and the corresponding shaking and fracturing. Here are two moments I see as important. Both come from about the long twentieth century’s midpoint: The first moment occurred in 1930 when John Maynard Keynes gave his speech “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (quoted in Chapter 7), in which he concluded that economic problems were not humanity’s most “permanent problem,” but that instead, once our economic problems were solved, the real difficulty would be “how to use… freedom from pressing economic cares… to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

They have caused market economists to respond to their deft criticisms and improve the classical model that Adam Smith created. Today the neoclassical market framework is stronger than ever before, and its applications are ubiquitous. In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an optimistic essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." After lambasting his disciples who predicted never-ending depression and permanent stagnation, Keynes foresaw a bright future. Goods and services would become so abundant and cheap that leisure would be the greatest challenge. What productive things can be done in one's spare time?

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productivity theory. Yale Professor Irving Fi Cambridge professor Alfred Marshall 1947) created the first p (1842-1924) helped transform eco- and developed the qu£ T H E G E N E R A L T H E O R Y OF E M P L O Y M E N T I N T E R E S T A N D M O N E Y JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES MACMILLAN AND CO.. LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET. LONDON 1936 John Maynard Keynes ( 1 8 8 3 - 1 9 4 6 ) , B r i t i s h e c o n o m i s t and s t a t e s m a n , published his influential General Theory in 1936: "I believe myself to be writing a book which will largely revolutionise the way the world thinks about economic problems."

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Essays in Persuasion. New York: W.W. Norton. . 1963 [1930]. Essays in Biography. New York: W.W. Norton. . 1971. Activities 1906-1914: India and Cambridge. The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 15. London: Macmillan. . 1973a [1936]. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. . 1973b. The General Theory and After, Part I, Preparation. The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 13, ed. by Donald Moggridge. London: Macmillan. Klamer, Arjo, and David Colander. 1990. The Making of an Economist. Boulder, CO: Westview. Knight, Frank H. 1959. "Review of Ricardian Economics."

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

, Economic Outlook No. 99, 1 June 2016, oecd.org, accessed 5 June 2016. 7Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? London: Zed Books, 2001, p. xiii. 8Darren K. Carlson, Americans Weigh In on Evolution vs. Creationism in Schools, 2005, gallup.com, accessed 8 June 2016. 9John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, 1930, econ.yale.edu. 1. Credit Power 1Michael Hudsen, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, New York: Nation Books, 2016. 2Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 3Sir Mervyn King in an interview with Martin Wolf, ‘Lunch with the FT’, Financial Times, 14 June 2013, ft.com, accessed 6 June 2016.

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Published in John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, The Royal Economic Society, 1972, p. 335. 15Eric Platt and Jo Rennison, ‘US Stock Funds Suffer $11bn Outflows – Redemptions Since the Beginning of the Year Top $60bn’, Financial Times, 6 May 2016, ft.com, accessed 6 June 2016. 16Hoisington Investment Management Company, Quarterly Review and Outlook: First Quarter 2016, hoisingtonmgt.com, accessed 6 June 2016. 17Transcript of Eric Holder to the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘Attorney General Eric Holder on “Too Big to Jail”’, American Banker, 6 March 2013, americanbanker.com, accessed 3 October 2013. 18Wolfgang Münchau, ‘Europe Is Ignoring the Scale of Bank Losses’, Financial Times, 23 June 2013, ft.com, accessed 17 September 2013. 5. Class Interests and the Moulding of Schools of Economic Thought 1This chapter is based on the paper What Are the Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren? drafted in collaboration with Dr Geoff Tily. It was delivered in Cambridge on 16 November 2015 by the author as one of the events organised by King’s College’s Politics Society to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the completion of the stonework of King’s College Chapel. 2Mervyn King speech, ‘Twenty Years of Inflation Targeting’, Stamp Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, 9 October 2012. 3P.

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As evidence of this arrogance, Professor Steve Keen in Debunking Economics cites the words of Ben Bernanke, governor of the US Federal Reserve at the time of the crisis: ‘the recent financial crisis was more a failure of economic engineering and economic management than of what I have called economic science.’7 The ‘economic scientists’ of the profession (and many on the Left) have also systematically ignored or downplayed the monetary theory and policies of the genius that was John Maynard Keynes – theory and policies that could have averted the 2007–09 crisis. Instead ‘Keynesian’ policies are derided as ‘taxing and spending’, even while Keynes’s primary concern was with monetary policy (the management of the currency, the money supply and interest rates). He was concerned with prevention of crises, not cure.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies – ‘Meeting the Challenges of the Financial Crisis’; www.frbsf.org/our-district/press/presidents-speeches/yellen-speeches/2009/april/yellen-minsky-meltdown-central-bankers/ 23.  Ibid. 24.  Allen, Irving Fisher, p. 9. 6 – John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? 1.    John Maynard Keynes, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 129. 2.    Ibid. 3.    John Maynard Keynes, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton, p. 373. 4.    John Maynard Keynes, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. XII, Economic Articles and Correspondence: Investment and Editorial, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 109. 5.    

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Torsten Persson, Singapore: World Scientific, pp. 61–126 Keynes, John Maynard, 1924, ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, Economic Journal, 34(135), pp. 311–72 ________, 1931, ‘The Pure Theory of Money: A Reply to Dr Hayek’, Economica, 34, pp. 387–97 ________, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan ________, 1937, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51(2), pp. 209–23 ________, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton ________, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press King, John E., 2013, David Ricardo, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Krugman, Paul, 1998, ‘The Hangover Theory’, Slate, 4 December; www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1998/12/the_hangover_theory.html Lucas, Robert E., Jr., 1988, ‘On the Mechanics of Economic Development’, Journal of Monetary Economics, 22(1), pp. 3–42 Marshall, Alfred, 1890, Principles of Economics, vol.

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Fisher was at the vanguard of modern economics, essentially inspiring the leading central bankers who were at the helm when the entire banking system was on the brink of collapse. There is no doubt his thinking continues to remain relevant today. 6 John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? Few questions have been as prominent since the banking crash: should the British and European governments have cut public spending and adopted austere policies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis? In another parallel to the 1929 crash, this was also the question debated in Britain in the 1930s, which launched the Keynesian revolution in economics. John Maynard Keynes advocated government spending in a sharp break with neoclassical economics that eschewed the active use of fiscal policy in response to a downturn.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies – ‘Meeting the Challenges of the Financial Crisis’; www.frbsf.org/our-district/press/presidents-speeches/yellen-speeches/2009/april/yellen-minsky-meltdown-central-bankers/ 23. Ibid. 24. Allen, Irving Fisher, p. 9. Chapter 6 – John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? 1. John Maynard Keynes, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 129. 2. Ibid. 3. John Maynard Keynes, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton, p. 373. 4. John Maynard Keynes, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. XII, Economic Articles and Correspondence: Investment and Editorial, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 109. 5.

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Torsten Persson, Singapore: World Scientific, pp. 61–126 Keynes, John Maynard, 1924, ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, Economic Journal, 34(135), pp. 311–72 ———, 1931, ‘The Pure Theory of Money: A Reply to Dr Hayek’, Economica, 34, pp. 387–97 ———, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan ———, 1937, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51(2), pp. 209–23 ———, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton ———, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press King, John E., 2013, David Ricardo, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Krugman, Paul, 1998, ‘The Hangover Theory’, Slate, 4 December; www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1998/12/the_hangover_theory.html Lucas, Robert E., Jr., 1988, ‘On the Mechanics of Economic Development’, Journal of Monetary Economics, 22(1), pp. 3–42 Marshall, Alfred, 1890, Principles of Economics, vol.

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Fisher was at the vanguard of modern economics, essentially inspiring the leading central bankers who were at the helm when the entire banking system was on the brink of collapse. There is no doubt his thinking continues to remain relevant today. CHAPTER 6 John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? Few questions have been as prominent since the banking crash: should the British and European governments have cut public spending and adopted austere policies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis? In another parallel to the 1929 crash, this was also the question debated in Britain in the 1930s, which launched the Keynesian revolution in economics. John Maynard Keynes advocated government spending in a sharp break with neoclassical economics that eschewed the active use of fiscal policy in response to a downturn.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

Macfarlane, 5 June 1945, reproduced in the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XXV II, 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1923)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (IV) Tract on Monetary Reform. London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1930a)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (V) A Treatise on Money: The Pure Theory of Money. London: Macmillan. 442 Bi bl io g r a p h y Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1930b)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (VI) A Treatise on Money: The Applied Theory of Money. London: Macmillan.

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M. (1978), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (IX) Essays in Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1979), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXIX) The General Theory and After: A Supplement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1980a), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXV) Activities 1940–1944: Shaping the Post-War World, The Clearing Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1980b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXVII) Activities 1940–1946, Shaping the Post-War World: Employment and Commodities.

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London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1973a (1936)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (VII) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1973b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XIII) The General Theory and After, Part I: Preparation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1973c), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XIV) The General Theory and After, Part II: Defence and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Chapter 5 • John Maynard Keynes117 Further reading Paul Davidson, John Maynard Keynes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Dudley Dillard, The Economics of John Maynard Keynes (Prentice-Hall, 1948). J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). J.M. Keynes, A Treatise on Money (1930). J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). J.M. Keynes, How to Pay for the War (1940). J.M. Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1980). Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga (eds), Revisiting Keynes (MIT Press, 2008). Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 3 vols (Macmillan, 1992–2000).

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James Becker, Alfred Marshall in Retrospect, New York University, Department of Economics (1991). Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890). Alfred Marshall, The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry (1907). Alfred Marshall, Money, Credit, and Commerce (1923). CHAPTER 5 John Maynard Keynes – the rise, fall, rise … and fall 91 92 The Great Economists ‘This ‘long run’ is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.’ John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1923 Of the ten economists in this book, none has enjoyed such a posthumous revival of interest in their work as Keynes. In the wake of the global financial crisis which began in 2007–8, politicians, central bankers, financial analysts and journalists have all blown the dust off the cover of their copies of his major work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to revisit his lessons from the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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But it must be remembered that the resurgence in popularity of Keynes’s ideas followed a period when they had fallen out of favour. This happened after a concerted attack by some of Chapter 5 • John Maynard Keynes93 the monetarists who will appear in the following chapters and an increasing feeling that his theories could not explain the way many economies behaved in the 1960s and 1970s. That argument will doubtless continue over the coming decades, but for now Keynes is at the centre of economic debate. Early life and influences John Maynard Keynes enjoyed a gilded upbringing. He was born in 1883 – just six weeks after Marx was laid to rest. He benefited from a private education that saw him go to Eton College, where he won a handful of prizes, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he became president of the Cambridge Union Society.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

Harrod, Roy (1958). ‘The Possibility of Economic Satiety’, in Problems of US Economic Development, Vol. 1, New York: Washington Committee for Economic Development. Hirsch, Fred (1976). Social Limits to Growth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keynes, John Maynard (2015 [1930]). ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), The Essential Keynes, Penguin Classics. Marshall, Alfred (1890). Principles of Economics, London: Macmillan. McConnell, Campbell, Brue, Stanley and Flynn, Sean (2009). Macroeconomics, New York: McGraw-Hill. Menger, Carl (2007 [1871]). Principles of Economics, Online: Mises Institute.

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‘Economics and Knowledge’, Economica, New Series, Vol. 4 (13): 33–54. Jevons, W. Stanley (1987 [1871]). The Theory of Political Economy, London: Macmillan. Kaldor, Nicholas (1939). ‘Welfare Proposition of Economics and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility’, The Economic Journal, Vol. 49 (195): 549–52. Keynes, John Maynard (2015 [1930]). ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), The Essential Keynes, Penguin Classics. Layard, Richard (2005). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, London: Penguin. Locke, John (1764 [1689]). Two Treatises of Government, London: A. Millar et al. Marx, Karl (1887 [1867]). Capital, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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I have taken advantage of writing the book to repair omissions from the much shorter lectures, and also to reconsider some of the things I said, following comments and criticisms the lectures received. In what way am I qualified to talk about these matters? My first degree was in history; my Ph.D was in politics. I was always interested in the economic aspects of history and politics, but when I decided to write about the great economist John Maynard Keynes, I quickly realised that it was not enough to have a nodding acquaintance with economics. So I studied the subject seriously, wrote three volumes on Keynes, and ended up with a chair in political economy in the economics department of Warwick University. These personal facts have a bearing on what follows, in two related ways.

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt
by Kwasi Kwarteng
Published 12 May 2014

Stacey, English Accountancy: A Study in Social and Economic History, 1800–1954, London, 1954, p. 37. 25Kynaston, The City of London: Golden Years, p. 21. 26Ibid., p. 319. 27Ibid., p. 26. 28Camplin, The Rise of the Plutocrats, p. 60. 29Saemy Japhet, Recollections from my Business Life, London, 1931, p. 114. 30DNB, ‘Ernest Cassel’. 31Cassis, City Bankers, p. 7. 32Niall Ferguson, ‘Political Risk and the International Bond Market between the 1848 Revolution and the Outbreak of the First World War’, Economic History Review, vol. 59, no. 1 (2006), pp. 70–112, at pp. 72, 91, 98. 33Alexander D. Noyes, The War Period of American Finance, 1908–1925, New York, 1926, p. 51. 34Ibid., p. 54. 35W. R. Lawson, British War Finance, 1914–1915, London, 1915, p. 6. 36Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, p. 284. 37Hartley Withers, War and Lombard Street, London, 1915, p. 1. 38Noyes, The War Period, p. 57. 39Ronald Knox, Patrick Shaw Stewart, London, 1920, pp. 99–100. 40Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, p. 290. 41Ibid. 42Knox, Shaw Stewart, p. 100. 43B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 601–3. 44Bernard Mallet, British Budgets, 1887–88 to 1912–13, London, 1913, p. vii.

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The phrase ‘golden fetters’, coined by Keynes, provides the title of Barry Eichengreen’s pioneering study of international finance in the inter-war period. 28Harold James, The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 1924–1936, Oxford, 1986, p. 372. 29Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London, 2006, p. 45. 30Quoted in ibid., p. 220. 31Arthur Schweitzer, ‘Schacht’s Regulation of Money and the Capital Markets’, Journal of Finance, vol. 3, no. 2 (June 1948), pp. 1–18, at p. 16. 32Tooze, Wages of Destruction, p. 230. 33www.usgovernmentspending.com. 34Hjalmar Schacht, 76 Jahre meines Lebens, Bad Wörishofen, 1953, pp. 390–1. 35Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, London, 2009, p. 81. 36Paul Einzig, Bankers, Statesmen and Economists, London, 1935, p. 147. 37Ibid., pp. 135, 226–7. 38Clarke, Keynes, p. 76. 39Ibid., p. 168. 40John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, 2 vols, London, 1930, vol. 2, p. 149. Chapter 10: Bretton Woods 1Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, London, 2009, p. 81. 2Lionel Robbins quoted in Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, London, 1951, p. 576. 3Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Money Talks: Fifty Years of International Finance, London, 1968, p. 316. 4Harrod, John Maynard Keynes, p. 536. 5Stanley W. Black, A Levite among the Priests: Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System, Boulder, CO, 1991, pp. 39, 44. Bernstein’s comments were derived from a series of interviews he gave in Washington in November 1983. 6David Rees, Henry Dexter White: A Study in Paradox, London, 1973, p. 137. 7Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, Princeton, 1996, p. 93. 8Clarke, Keynes, pp. 88–9. 9Paul Davidson, John Maynard Keynes, Basingstoke, 2007, p. 149. 10Philip Coggan, Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order, London, 2011, p. 100. 11Clarke, Keynes, p. 88. 12Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar, Oxford, 2011, p. 47. 13DNB, ‘Robert Boothby’. 14Robert Boothby, Goods or Gold?

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Shaw, George Bernard, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, London, 1929 (1st edn 1928). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, London, 1905. Simon, William E., A Time for Truth, New York, 1978. Sisson, C. H., The Case of Walter Bagehot, London, 1972. Skidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946, London, 2000. Skidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920, London, 1983. Slivinski, Stephen, Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government, Nashville, 2006. Sloan, Alfred, My Life with General Motors, London, 1986 (1st edn 1963). Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London, 2007 (1st edn 1776).

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
by John Lanchester
Published 14 Dec 2009

Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. 3 There’s a chilling account of it in his book The Ascent of Money, chap. 6. 4 www.fsa.gov.uk/pubs/other/turner_review.pdf. 5 Posner, A Failure of Capitalism, xii. 6 Quoted by Gillian Tett in Fool’s Gold, p. 97. 7 Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” op cit. 8 Paul Krugman, “Out of the Shadows,” The New York Times, June 18, 2009 9 Financial Times, June 12, 2009 10 You can, amazingly, listen to this meeting in its entirety at The New York Times’s website. 11 “The Reckoning,” The New York Times, October 3, 2008. 12 Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, “The End of the Financial World as We Know It,” The New York Times, January 4, 2009. 13 Testimony to the House financial services committee. 4 February 2009. 14 Richard Posner, A Failure of Capitalism, p. 268. 15 “AIG Trail Leads to London Casino,” The Daily Telegraph, October 18, 2008. 16 Quoted by Richard Bitner in Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance, p. 117. 17 Ibid., p. 112. 18 Charles R. Morris, Trillion Dollar Meltdown, p. 77. CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BILL 1 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” From Essays in Persuasion. Volume IX of the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, pp. 324 et seq. 2 Meena Thiruvengadam, U.S. Bailouts So Far Total $2.98 Trillion, Official Says The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2009. 3 www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/big-bailouts-bigger-bucks. 4 Interview with Bloomberg Television, 20 January 2009.

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Almost everyone in the West lives a quality and length of life which would have been the envy of a pharaoh or a Roman emperor and which most of our ancestors, and most of the populations of the rest of the world, would swap for their own prospects in an eye blink. It’s an amazing state of affairs—and one which, broadly speaking, was predicted by the greatest economist who ever lived, John Maynard Keynes, in an essay he wrote in 1930, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” He was writing in the immediate aftermath of the great Crash (which incidentally, in his capacity as an investor, cost him a packet), but he wasn’t pessimistic; indeed, he thought the general contemporary climate of pessimism was overdone. Britain had got steadily richer for decades and was going to continue to do so.

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INDEX accounting, 26, 28, 106, 231 Against the Gods (Bernstein), 149 AIG: bailout of, 39, 76–78 in CDS market, 75–78, 201 aircraft industry, 227 Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act (AMPTA), 100 Animal Spirits (Akerlof and Shiller), 145n Annie Hall, 1–2 Apple, 34 appraisals, 128 arbitrage, 54–55 arms manufacturing, 200 Arthur Andersen, 106 Asano, Yukio, 18 asset price bubble, 176–77 assets, 10, 25–42, 106, 176 in balance sheets, 25–34, 37–38, 70, 120 banks and, 25, 32–42, 70, 74, 120, 194 of businesses, 29–30, 34 derivatives and, 38, 48–50, 52, 57–58, 120, 205–6 housing and, 96, 126, 130, 176–77 intangible, 30 leverage and, 35–36, 41 liquidity and, 28–29 risk and, 37, 146, 165 toxic, 37–38, 42, 75, 165, 189 ATMs, 7–9, 176 Austen Riggs Center, 140–41 automobiles, automobile industry, 1–2, 24, 40, 134, 197, 222 in balance sheets, 27–28 stocks in, 148–49 balance sheets, 25–35 banks and, 25–34, 37–39, 41–42, 70, 120, 205–7 of businesses, 29–34, 37, 106 of individuals, 27–29, 35 Baltimore, Md., 83–86, 127, 129, 163 Bankers Trust, 150 banking, bankers, banks, 19–22, 24–43, 169, 171–78, 216–20, 222–30 assets and, 25, 32–42, 70, 74, 120, 194 ATMs of, 7–9, 176 bailouts of, 32, 39–41, 77, 120, 204, 212, 219–20, 225–26 balance sheets and, 25–34, 37–39, 41–42, 70, 120, 205–7 of Canada, 116, 211–12 central, 36, 40, 52, 92, 102, 142, 167, 172–78, 180–81, 183, 189, 194–95, 206 check-clearing system of, 33 collapses of, 5, 39, 75, 78, 94, 180, 194, 204, 206, 225 credit and, 37, 41, 43, 209, 211 customer deposits of, 25, 27, 31–34, 74, 187, 224 derivatives and, 20, 51–54, 57–58, 63–71, 74–75, 77, 79, 115–17, 120–21, 132, 183–84, 200, 205–6, 211 economic centrality of, 24–26, 41 of Europe, 8, 35–36, 40, 51, 77, 83, 92, 120, 227 financial industry’s ascent and, 20–21 Glass-Steagall Act on, 64–65, 187–88, 200 holding, 40 housing and, 83–84, 86, 89, 91–95, 102, 126–27, 129–31, 174, 177, 194, 216–17 Iceland’s economic crisis and, 9–12, 24, 40 incentives and bonuses of, 19, 37, 76–78, 206–8, 224, 228 interest rates and, 24, 172–78 investment, 19, 39–40, 65, 77–78, 186–87, 163, 190, 200, 224–25, 227–28 lending of, 22, 24, 27, 33–36, 41–42, 58–60, 67, 69–70, 74, 83–84, 91–94, 102, 117, 127, 129–30, 143, 146, 165, 187, 216–17, 229 leverage of, 35–36, 41–42, 70, 190 mathematicization of, 53–54 narrow, 224–25 nationalization of, 39–40, 228–30 nonbank, 22, 201, 205, 224 paying the bill and, 219–20, 223 regulation and, 21, 33, 180–91, 194–96, 199–200, 202, 204–5, 208, 211, 223–27 risk and, 19, 34–37, 41, 133, 135–36, 143, 150–54, 156–57, 160, 165–66, 174, 187–88, 191–95, 202, 204–7, 216, 224, 226, 228, 230 of U.K., 5, 11, 32–36, 38–40, 51–54, 76–77, 89, 94, 120, 146, 180, 194–96, 199, 202, 204–6, 211–12, 217, 227–28 of U.S., 36–37, 39–40, 43, 63–71, 73, 75, 77–78, 84, 116, 120–21, 127, 150, 152, 163, 183, 185, 190, 195, 204, 211–12, 219–20, 225, 227–28 wish list of, 186–87, 195 zombie, 43, 229 banking-and-credit crisis, 192–96, 215–21, 225–28, 231 aftermath of, 215–17 bases of, 201–2 causes of, 182–83, 186, 196, 205–7, 217 economists on, 192–94 failure in forecasting of, 193–94, 211 journalists on, 192–93 profits in, 78, 227–28 and regulation, 182–83, 194–96, 202, 205, 211, 225–26 and risk, 192–95, 202, 205–7, 216 Bank of America, 39 Bank of England, 36, 52, 102, 167, 177–78, 206 and banking-and-credit crisis, 194–95 and interest rates, 178, 180 and regulation, 180–81, 195 Barclays, Barclays Bank, 11, 35–36, 77, 146, 227 Baring, Peter, 52 Barings Bank, 51–52, 54, 180 Barofsky, Neil, 219 Basel rules, 154, 208 derivatives and, 67–68, 120, 183 Bear Stearns, 39, 190 Belair-Edison Community Association, 127 Belgium, 40 Bell, Madison Smartt, 89 bell curve, 154–56, 160 Berlin Wall, fall of, 12, 16, 18, 23 Bernstein, Peter, 149 “Big Bang,” 22, 195–96, 200–201 Bitner, Richard, 124–27, 131 Black, Conrad, 59 Black, Fischer, 45, 47–48, 147 Black-Scholes formula, 48, 54, 116–17, 151 Blank, Victor, 40 BNP Paribas, 36, 77 bond market, bonds, 20, 22–23, 58–59, 73, 107–12 Broad Index Secured Trust Offering (BISTRO), 70–71, 121 corporate, 154, 210 derivatives and, 58, 63–67, 112, 114, 118–19, 210–11 of governments, 29–30, 61–62, 103, 109, 118, 144, 176–77, 208 incentives and, 209–11 investing and, 62–63, 102–3, 107–8, 111, 208–9 investment grade, 62 junk, 42, 62, 208 prices and, 61, 63, 102–3, 108–10, 144 in raising capital, 59, 61–63, 102–3 ratings of, 61–63, 114, 118–19, 208–11 risk and, 61–63, 103, 118, 144, 154, 208 Russia’s default and, 55–56, 162, 164–65 bonuses, 19, 37, 76–78, 207, 218, 224, 228 Bradford & Bingley, 40 Bragason, Valgarður, 10–11 British Airways, 199 Brown, Gordon, 12, 33, 88, 178 Buffett, Warren, 150 credit rating of, 123, 125 derivatives and, 56–57, 78 Bush, George W., 2, 78, 99, 142, 203, 219 regulation and, 19–20, 191, 195 businesses, 15, 58–63, 105–6, 187, 198–99, 221 balance sheets of, 29–34, 37, 106 banks and, 195, 229 bonds and, 59, 61–63, 102–3, 154, 208, 210 derivatives and, 112, 114, 153 lending to, 41–42, 60, 108 offshore, 70, 72 regulation and, 183, 195 risk and, 37, 145, 150–51, 153–54, 195 Canada, banks of, 116, 211–12 capitalism, 12–19, 116 banks and, 19, 25, 182–83, 202, 218, 228, 231 communism vs., 12, 16–17 failure of, 228, 230 free-market, 13–19, 21, 23–24, 96, 105n, 143, 173–75, 184, 192, 196, 202–4, 230–32 in Hong Kong, 13–14 laissez-faire, 142–43, 173, 182–83, 189, 191, 195–96, 202, 211–12 Marxist analysis of, 15–16 regulation and, 182, 192 as secular religion, 202–4 success and spread of, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 23–24 Carville, James, 22–23 cash ratios, 25 Cassano, Joseph, 201 check-clearing systems, 33 Chicago Board Options Exchange, 48 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 47 China, People’s Republic of, 115, 124 economic boom in, 3–4, 14, 108–9 Hong Kong and, 13–14 U.S. investment of, 109, 176–77 Cisneros, Henry, 99 Citigroup, 120, 163, 219–20, 227 Citron, Robert, 51 City of London, 32, 195–97, 199–202, 217–18 and banking-and-credit crisis, 205–6 and Big Bang, 195–96, 200–201 derivatives and, 56–57, 79, 201 and financial vs. industrial interests, 197, 199 ideological hegemony of, 21–23 Wimbledonization of, 195–96 Civil Justice Network, 85, 128–29, 131 Cleveland, Ohio, 83 Clinton, Bill, 22, 43, 107 housing and, 99–100 regulation and, 19–20 Coggan, Philip, 25 cognitive illusions, 141–42 Cold War, 201–2 end of, 16, 18, 21, 164 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 183, 201, 210–12 bonds and, 112, 114, 118–19, 210–11 of CDOs, 119, 206 Gaussian copula function and, 116–17, 157–60, 163 mathematics and, 115–16 mortgages and, 75–76, 112–22, 132, 157, 159–60, 172, 210 risk and, 114–15, 117–22, 158–60, 163, 167, 212 securitization and, 113–14, 11719, 122 shortage of borrowers for, 121–22 tranching and, 117–18, 122 commodities, 227 derivatives and, 47, 49n, 51–52, 184 prices of, 3–4, 107–8, 148–49 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, 184 communism, 12, 16–18, 23 competition, 58, 96, 105n, 203, 226–27 regulation and, 187–88, 226 Confessions of a Subprime Lender (Bitner), 124, 127 Congress, U.S., 77, 100, 204 regulation and, 184–86 risk and, 142–43, 164–66 conservatism, housing and, 98 correlation, correlations: CDOs and, 115–16, 158, 167 risk and, 74, 148–49, 158–59, 165, 167 credit, 8, 169–73 banks and, 24–26, 37, 41, 43, 209, 211 bubbles in, 42, 60, 109, 170, 176, 216–17, 221, 223 CDOs and, 114–15, 119–20, 172 crunch in, 37, 41, 43, 54n, 77, 84–86, 92–93, 94n, 136, 163–64, 169, 171–73, 182, 193, 201–2, 215–16, 218–19 histories and ratings on, 85, 100, 123–26, 158, 163, 165, 208–11 housing and, 84–86, 92–93, 94n, 100, 109, 112, 125, 129–30, 132, 163–64 Iceland’s economic crisis and, 10–12 interest rates and, 172–73, 175, 209 risk and, 136, 158, 165 see also banking-and-credit crisis Crédit Agricole, 36 credit cards, 27, 217 credit ratings and, 123–24 Iceland’s economic crisis and, 9, 11–12 risk and, 158–59, 163 credit default swaps (CDSs), 20, 63, 65–80, 117, 158–59, 183–86 AIG and, 75–78, 201 attractive aspects of, 72–74 examples of, 57–58 Exxon deal and, 67–70, 121 over-the-counter trading of, 184–85, 201 regulation and, 68, 70, 73, 184–86 risk and, 58, 66–70, 72–75, 78–80, 212 securitized bundles of, 69–70, 74 streamlining and industrializing of, 68–69 unfortunate side effect of, 74–75 Credit Suisse, 36, 227 Cuomo, Andrew, 99 Cutter family, 126–27 Darling, Alistair, 172, 220 debt, debts, 27–29, 34, 59–63, 118, 172n, 179, 216, 229 in balance sheets, 27–28, 30–31 benefits of, 59–61 bonds and, 59, 61–63, 208, 210 credit and, 123–26, 221 derivatives and, 52, 67, 69–72 housing and, 93, 100, 132, 176 paying the bill and, 220–22 personal, 221–22 regulation and, 181, 190 Russian default on, 55–56, 162, 164–65 see also collateralized debt obligations default, defaults, default rates, 162–65 CDOs and, 114–15 on mortgages, 159–60, 163, 165, 229 risk and, 154, 159–60, 163 of Russia, 55–56, 162, 164–65 see also credit default swaps Demchak, William, 69 democracy, democracies, 15–18, 108–9, 179, 213 free-market capitalism and, 15, 17, 23 housing and, 87, 98 DePastina, Anthony, 85 Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA), 100 deregulation, see regulation, deregulation derivatives, 45–58, 63–80, 86, 210–12 in balance sheets, 30–31, 70 banks and, 20, 51–54, 57–58, 63–71, 74–75, 77, 79, 115–17, 120–21, 132, 183–84, 200, 205–6, 211 Black-Scholes formula and, 48, 54, 116–17, 151 bonds and, 58, 63–67, 112, 114, 118–19, 210–11 Buffett and, 56–57, 78 and City of London, 56–57, 79, 201 complexity of, 52–54, 56–57 Enron and, 56, 105–6, 185 futures and, 46–47, 49n, 51–52, 54, 184 Greenspan on, 166, 183–84 in history, 45–48, 147 mathematics and, 47–48, 52–54, 115–17, 166 offshore companies and, 70, 72 options and, 46–47, 50–52, 151, 174, 184 over-the-counter trading of, 184–85, 201, 205–6 prices and, 38, 46–52, 54, 56, 75, 158–59, 166 regulation and, 68, 70, 73, 153, 183–86, 200–201 risk and, 46–47, 49–52, 54–55, 57–58, 66–75, 78–80, 114–15, 117–22, 151, 153, 158–60, 163, 166–67, 184–85, 205, 212 size of market in, 48, 56, 80, 117, 201 see also collateralized debt obligations; credit default swaps Detroit, Mich., 81–82 Deutsche Bank, 36, 77, 83, 227 diversification, 146–48, 177 dividends, 101, 147–48 Doctorow, E. L., 64 Dorgan, Byron, 188 dot-com bust, 3, 104–7, 109, 142, 175 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 152 Drake, Sir Francis, 214 Dunfermline Building Society, 40 Dutch tulip bubble, 47, 104, 136 Ebbers, Bernie, 105 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 213–15 economics, economy, economists: booms in, 2–4, 14, 16, 23, 81, 108–9, 214, 216 contractions in, 170–71, 222–23 crises in, 4–6, 9–12, 16, 23–24, 39–40, 57, 73, 76–79, 142, 150–52, 160–62, 164–67, 170–72, 175–76, 182–83, 185–87, 189, 191–96, 199, 201–2, 205–7, 211, 213, 215–21, 223, 225–28, 230–31 ignorance of, 5–6, 23 liberalism in, 136 rationalism in, 136–38 Economist, The, 3, 170, 193, 202–3 education, 4–5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 198, 200, 217, 222 efficient portfolio, 149 Elizabeth I, Queen of Great Britain, 214 Ellis, William Webb, 201 employment, employees, 8, 28, 40, 51, 171, 179, 203–4, 217 banks and, 206, 229 economic contractions and, 222–23 Enron and, 106, 226 and financial vs. industrial interests, 197–98 free-market capitalism and, 15–17, 19 housing and, 86, 88–89, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 126–27, 131, 163 interest rates and, 102, 172–73, 221 Marxist analysis of, 15–16 paying the bill and, 221–23 Enron: collapse of, 105–7, 175, 226, 231 derivatives and, 56, 105–6, 185 equality, inequality, 15–17, 21, 164 in free-market capitalism, 15–16, 23 in mortgage market, 99–101 equity, 27–31, 34–37, 41–42, 55, 190 leverage and, 35, 41, 60 negative, 28–29, 42 return on (ROE), 36–37 selling of, 58–59 Europe, European Union, 177, 180, 191 banks of, 8, 35–36, 40, 51, 77, 83, 92, 120, 227 comparisons between U.S. and, 17 contracting economies in, 222–23 housing in, 40, 83–84, 91–95, 110 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 68–70 Exxon, 67–70, 121 Failure of Capitalism, A (Posner), 174 fair value theory, 147–48 Fannie Mae, 39, 95, 99–100, 113, 124 Federal Reserve (Fed), 40, 102, 142, 173–74, 183, 189 Ferguson, Niall, 177 FICO scores, 123–24 films, film industry, 1–2, 198–99 finance, financial industry: favored treatment of, 19–21 gap between world of general public and, 5–6 industrial interests vs., 196–99 power of, 164 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 180–82, 194–95, 201 Financial Times, 193, 227 Flanders, Stephanie, 37 Florida, 10, 59, 83, 115 Fooled by Randomness (Taleb), 53 Fool’s Gold (Tett), 121 foreclosure rescue, 129–31 Fortis, 36, 40 Fortune, 105 4:15 report, 152 France, French, 36, 156, 229 housing in, 92–94 Nazi occupation of, 138–39 Freddie Mac, 39, 95, 99–100, 113, 124 Friedman, Thomas, 208 front running, 192 Fuld, Richard, 204, 206 funny smells, 169–73, 208, 211 and banking-and-credit crisis, 194, 201 credit crunch and, 169, 171–72 Galway’s water and, 169–71 Greenspan and, 173, 176 regulation and, 169, 192, 201, 211 futures, 46–47, 49n, 184 how they work, 47, 51–52 losing money on, 51–52, 54 Galway, 169–71 Garn–St.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 17(4): 607–635. Keynes, John Maynard 1978. Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, John Maynard 1937. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 21, World Crises and Policies in Britain and America, reprinted 2012. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, John Maynard 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, reprinted 2007. London: Macmillan. Keynes, John Maynard 1930. ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’. Essays in Persuasion. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Keynes, John Maynard 1926.

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With labour productivity continually rising, there is only one escape from this ‘productivity trap’, namely to reap the rewards in terms of reduced hours worked per employee – or in other words to share the available work amongst the workforce. So it’s perhaps not surprising to find that proposals to shorten the working week are enjoying something of a revival in recent years. In fact, the idea has a strong pedigree. In an essay entitled ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, published in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes foresaw a time when productivity gains would allow us all to work less and spend more time with our family, our friends and our community.13 Since the time Keynes was writing, societies have indeed taken some of the labour productivity gains achieved through technology in the form of increased leisure time.

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As early as 1848, John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of classical economics, reflected on the advantages of a ‘stationary state of population and capital’. He insisted that there would be ‘as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress’ within such a state.2 Keynes’ essay ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ also foresaw a time when the ‘economic problem’ would be solved and we would ‘prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes’. Like Mill, Keynes saw this change as broadly positive in the sense that we would ‘once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful’.3 In the language of this book, Keynes and Mill were both essentially saying that prosperity without growth is not just possible but desirable.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

We hope this book will contribute to that debate. 2 The Future of Work Robert Skidelsky A society, wrote Jan Patočka, is decadent if it encourages a decadent life, ‘a life addicted to what is inhuman by its very nature’.1 It is in this spirit that I want to explore the impact of technology on the human condition, and especially on work. Is technology making the human race redundant materially and spiritually—both as producers of wealth and producers of meaning? For an optimistic answer to this question, let me turn to John Maynard Keynes. In his 1930 essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Keynes thought that technological progress would produce so much extra wealth that in about 100 years or even less, we would be able to reduce working hours to just 15 a week, or 3 a day. This process, he warned, was unlikely be smooth. 1 Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 97.

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London: Oneworld. Gorz, A. (1985). Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work. London: Pluto Press. Jensen, C., & Meckling, W. (1976). Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Capital Structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3, 305–360. Keynes, J. (1930). Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. In J. Keynes (Ed.), Essays in Persuasion (pp. 358–373). London: Norton. Layton, E. (1962). Veblen and the Engineers. American Quarterly, 14(1), 64–72. Marx, K. (1977). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mokyr, J., Vickers, C., & Zierbarth, N. (2015).

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Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Graeber, D. (2013). On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. Strike! Magazine. Retrieved August 2, 2019, from https://strikemag.org/ bullshit-jobs/ Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. London: Allen Lane. Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930). In Essays in Persuasion. New York: Harcourt Brace. Sahlins, M. (1972/2017). Stone Age Economics. Reprint. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge Classics. Sirota, D. (2006, June 26). Mr Obama Goes to Washington. Nation. Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving
by Celeste Headlee
Published 10 Mar 2020

“Our society measures personal worth”: Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009). “For the first time since his creation”: John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930; repr., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). “This prediction is not so much”: Karl Widerquist, “John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” Dissent, Winter 2006. “By the late 1950s”: Schor, The Overworked American. “when we reach the point”: “Prof. Huxley Predicts 2-Day Working Week,” New York Times, November 17, 1930.

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At that point, efficient production became not just a goal but a necessity, in order to support the war effort. After World War I ended in 1918, there was a reconsideration of labor and productivity among economists. If anything, the allure of the American Dream grew stronger. Not even the Great Depression dimmed the optimism of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His famous essay from 1930, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicted that the Depression was a blip on the financial radar screen, temporary and soon forgotten. Keynes predicted that by 2030, people would work only fifteen hours a week and that would be enough to keep everyone fed, clothed, and housed.

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“Leisure held the first place”: Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class, ch. 3, “Conspicuous Consumption,” p. 74. “harried leisure class”: Staffan B. Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). “The average consumer”: Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). “When people are paid more”: Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” 493–517. “When I was a kid”: Graeme Maxton, interview with the author, July 11, 2018. A survey of golfers in 2015: Michael Roddy, “A Round of Golf Takes Too Long to Play, Survey Finds,” Reuters, April 27, 2015.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
by Stephen D. King
Published 17 Jun 2013

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Feb. 2001 Keynes, J. M. ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill’, in Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. ‘The Economy Bill (Sept. 19, 1931)’, in Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. ‘Einstein’, in The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 28: Social, Political and Literary Writings, Macmillan, London, 1982 Keynes, J. M. Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan, London, 1936 Keynes, J.

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And that history should cover not just the obvious episodes – the Great Depression, the inflation of the 1970s – but also those many occasions during which nations tried to live beyond their means, pretending that it would all turn out all right on the night when, in reality, both economic and political disaster threatened. Only by studying these events can economists really claim to have anything useful to say about the challenges we face today and, doubtless, will face tomorrow. ECONOMIC CHALLENGES FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN In 1930, Keynes published a short essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’.11 Even as the world economy was heading into depression, Keynes was confident that, in decades to come, incomes would rise rapidly: It is common to hear people say how the epoch of enormous economic progress … is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down …; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement … I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us.

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(i) government bonds (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) government borrowing borrower of last resort (i) heavy (i) international (i) and low interest rates (i), (ii) and the New Deal (i) to offset private saving (i) relative to national income (i), (ii) rising (i) see also credit: queues government debt and central banks (i) eurozone crisis (i) excessive (i), (ii) France (i) and inflation (i) and national incomes (i), (ii), (iii) and quantitative easing (QE) (i) governments and central bank bailouts (i) and credit queues (i) mistrust (i), (ii), (iii) social spending (i) spending (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) spending increases (i), (ii) Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (i) Great Depression (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and the UK (i), (ii) Great Railroad Strike (i) Greece (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and the euro (i) and political extremism (i), (ii) Greenback Party (i) Greenspan, Alan (i) growth forecasting (i) global (i) start of the 21st century (i) targeting (i) Hamada Marine Bridge (i) Hayek, Friedrich (i), (ii) HBOS (i) health spending (i) Helmsley, Leona (i) high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) (i) home bias (i), (ii) Hong Kong (i), (ii) Hoover administration (i) housing markets (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) foreign buyers (i), (ii) see also mortgage-backed securities; subprime HSBC (i), (ii) Hundred Years War (i) Hungary (i) hyperinflation (i), (ii) Iceland (i) Illinois (i), (ii) illusions and asset prices (i) illusory prosperity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and investment philosophy (i) public sector (i) IMF (i), (ii) import tariffs (i) income inequalities (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) income, national (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Germany (i) Japan (i) UK (i), (ii) US (i) incomes, per capita (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Argentina (i) China (i) France (i), (ii) Germany (i), (ii), (iii) India (i), (ii) Indonesia (i) Japan (i) Korea (i) Malaysia (i) UK (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) US (i), (ii) India (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Indonesia (i), (ii), (iii) industrial relations (i) Industrial Revolution (i) IndyMac (i) inflation and ageing populations (i) Argentina (i) and commodity prices (i) deflation (i), (ii) excessive (i), (ii) housing market (i) and the New Deal (i) and stagnation (i) targeting (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) UK (i) US (i) infrastructure projects (i) innovations, financial (i), (ii), (iii) interest rates and asset prices (i) credit queue jumping (i), (ii) expected future (i) falls (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) inflation versus GDP targeting (i) Libor (i) and monetary and fiscal policies (i) persistently low (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and stimulus (i) subsidizing (i) UK (i), (ii), (iii) US (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) intergenerational divide (i), (ii), (iii) see also ageing populations International Monetary Fund (IMF) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) international/domestic conflict (i) investment demand for financial services (i) and income inequality (i) international (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) private investors (i) Ireland (i), (ii) Israeli–Palestinian conflict (i) Italy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) ageing populations (i) Japan (i) ageing populations (i) attempted reforms (i) debt repayment (i) exports (i) government borrowing (i) government debt (i) liquidity trap (i) living standards (i) national income (i) and quantitative easing (QE) (i) stockpile of assets (i) and trust (i) unreliable estimates (i) Jay Cooke and Company (i) Jerusalem trip (i) Jews, attitudes towards (i), (ii), (iii) jobs (i) see also labour; unemployment Kahneman, D. (i) Kalecki, Michael (i) Das Kapital(Marx) (i) Keynes, John Maynard (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ (i) Essays in Persuasion (i) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (i), (ii) on the Gold Standard (i) How to Pay for the War (i) Keynes Plan (i) Keynesian policies (i) on the Snowden budget (i) King, Mervyn (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Knetsch, J. L. (i) Knickerbocker Trust Company (i) Korea (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Krugman, Paul (i), (ii), (iii) labour market (i), (ii) productivity (i) Landes, David (i) Latin American debt crisis (i) Layard, Richard (i), (ii) Lehman Brothers (i), (ii) Leveson inquiry (i) Libor (i) life expectancy (i) liquidity (i), (ii) liquidity trap (i) Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) (i) Little Dorrit (Dickens) (i) living standards (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) belief in ever rising (i), (ii) China (i) Indonesia (i) Japan (i) Korea (i) late 19th century (i), (ii) Malaysia (i) post-Second World War (i) US (i), (ii) loan-to-value ratios, mortgage (i) Long Depression (i) loss aversion (i) lotteries (i) Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) (i) macroeconomic policies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Japan (i) macroprudential rules (i) Madoff, Bernie (i) Mahathir Mohamad (i), (ii) Malaysia (i), (ii), (iii) Malthus, Thomas (i) Manchester United (i) Marr, Wilhelm (i) Marx, Karl (i), (ii) Mary Poppins (i) May Report (i) Megawati Sukarnoputri (i) Mellon, Andrew (i), (ii) Mexico (i) Mieno, Yasushi (i) miners (i) Mississippi (i) mistrust creditors and debtors (i) cross-border (i) endemic (i) governments (i), (ii) of money (i) and political extremism (i) monetarism (i) monetary policy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) a new monetary framework (i) see also Gold Standard; interest rates; quantitative easing (QE) Monetary Policy Committee (i) monetary unions (i) see also eurozone moral hazard (i) mortgage-backed securities (i), (ii), (iii) mortgages (i), (ii) Napoleon Bonaparte (i) Napoleon III (i) National Bank of North America (i) national incomes (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Germany (i) Japan (i) UK (i), (ii), (iii) US (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) National Lottery (i) nationalism (i) the Netherlands (i) New Deal (i) ‘new economy’ of the 1990s (i) New Order (Indonesia) (i) New Zealand (i) Nicholson, Viv (i) Nigeria (i) Northern Rock (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Norway (i) Occupy movement (i), (ii) Office for Budget Responsibility (i) Oliver Twist (Dickens) (i) Osborne, George (i) Overend, Gurney and Co.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

The “7.53 billion people” is the global population in 2017, also from the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?page=2. Joseph Stiglitz does this calculation as well, when thinking about John Maynard Keynes and his prophecies. See Joseph Stiglitz, “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economics Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 20.  John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 4. 21.  Charlotte Curtis, “Machines vs.

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Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, et al., World Inequality Report (Creative Commons, 2018), p. 9. 52.  Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 360. 53.  Ibid., p. 373. 54.  Ibid., p. 367. 55.  Joseph Stiglitz, “Towards a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economics Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 56.  In my view, the economic problem is already shifting away from the traditional growth problem of making the pie bigger for everyone, and toward the distribution problem of making sure that everyone gets a decent slice.

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The Turk. New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2002. Stiglitz, Joseph. “Inequality and Economic Growth.” Political Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2016): 134–55. ________. “Towards a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economics Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Summers, Lawrence. “The 2013 Martin Feldstein Lecture: Economic Possibilities for Our Children.” NBER Reporter 4 (2013). Susskind, Daniel. “Automation and Demand.” Oxford University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series No. 845 (2018). ________.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
by Oliver Burkeman
Published 9 Aug 2021

In fact, I did get better at racing through my to-do list, only to find that greater volumes of work magically started to appear. (Actually, it’s not magic; it’s simple psychology, plus capitalism. More on that later.) None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”

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it is “possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do”: David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2015), 3. “what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water’ ”: Allen, Getting Things Done, 11. “For the first time since his creation”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), downloaded from www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. “Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this”: Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013), 2. “The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency”: Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 4. 1.

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Cathleen Kaveny, “Billable Hours and Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life,” Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 33 (2001): 173–220. “The ‘purposive’ man…is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), downloaded from www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. “[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of, ‘Well, there it is,’ ”: Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 341. that quotation from the bestselling Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, trans.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough
by Peter Barnes
Published 31 Jul 2014

On the upside, everyone will enjoy free Wi-Fi and limitless entertainment.23 Other plausible futures are even grimmer: climate mayhem, financial collapse, a surveillance state. A strong case can be made that any of these futures is likelier than a middle-class renaissance. Yet it’s too soon to throw in the towel. In the darkest days of the Great Depression, with Hitler rising in Germany, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Reading it now, in the lifetime of those grandchildren, I’m surprised not only by how hopeful Keynes was but also by how prescient. Keynes predicted that, barring all-out war, “the standard of life in progressive countries … will be between four and eight times as high as it is today,” and he was right, even with an all-out war.

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See also Alaska model cap-and-dividend system, 105–107 carbon taxing and, 115 from co-owned wealth, 3–4, 86 from electromagnetic spectrum, 145 Europe, plans in, 129–130 from intellectual property rights, 144 offshoots and, 75 perceptual advantage of, 77 potential dividends and co-owned wealth, 139–146 practical application of, 87–89 sources of money for, 93–94 for sustaining middle class, 75–76 universal dividend systems, 73–74 wind energy dividends in Oregon, 128 Dobbs, Lou, 86–87, 125 Dole, Bob, 79 E Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 81 Earth Day, 134 “The Economic Equivalent of War” (Barnes), 34–35 Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Keynes), 135–136 Economic stimulus package, 37 The Economist on robots, 26 Education, 21, 24–25 80/20 rule, 30–31 Eldredge, Niles, 120 El Paso Natural Gas, 102 Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), 81–82 Employment. See Jobs; Unemployment Energy and Commerce Committee, 109 England, textile machinery in, 18 Environmental Defense Fund, 99 Environmental movement, 134–135 Epstein, Joshua, 31–33 Equity leverage, 47–48 European carbon trading system, 99, 104–105 European Union (EU) universal guaranteed income ideas in, 129–130 value added taxes (VATs) and, 140–141 Euthanasia of the rentier, 56 Everyone-gets-a-share capitalism, 3–4, 42, 126 Externalities, 63–64, 98–99 Extracted rent, 43, 45–57 recycled rent compared, 60 Extreme inequality, 33–34 ExxonMobil, 102 F Facebook, 48 Fair market value, 52 Fallacy of composition, 24–25 Family Assistance Plan, 80–81 Federal Reserve on new money creation, 144 quantitative easing, 22 shared market economy and, 83 FedEx, 26 Fee and dividend program, 115 Financial derivatives, global value of, 57 Financial infrastructure.

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Further, it not only adds no value to the economy but “distorts resource allocation and makes the economy weaker.”14 And finally: “There’s no begrudging the wealth accrued by those who have transformed our economy—the inventors of the computer, the pioneers of biotechnology. But, for the most part, these are not the people at the top of our economic pyramid. Rather, to a too large extent, it’s people who have excelled at rent seeking in one form or another.” EIGHTY YEARS AGO, JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES looked forward to what he called “the euthanasia of the rentier.” That day would come when the supply of capital was so large, relative to the demand for it, that the return to capital “would have to cover little more than [its] exhaustion by wastage and obsolescence together with some margin to cover risk and the exercise of skill and judgment.”

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

The labor movement used to demand shorter hours rather than higher wages. People expected the future to look like the cartoon The Jetsons, whose protagonist works two hours per week, and they actually worried about what people would do after being liberated from work. In the essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a few generations, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.8 And In a discussion from 1956, the Marxist philosopher Max Horkheimer begins by casually remarking to his comrade Theodor Adorno that “nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings.”9 Work and Meaning Getting past wage labor economically also means getting past it socially, and this entails deep changes in our priorities and our way of life.

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Communism: Equality and Abundance 1Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, p. 302. 2Ibid., p. 61. 3Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition” in Capital, Volume I, Marxists.org, 1873. 4Karl Marx, “The Trinity Formula” in Capital Volume III, Marxists. org, 1894. 5Ibid. 6Ibid. 7Karl Marx, “Part 1” in Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marxists.org, 1875. 8John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” Essays in Persuasion, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010, pp. 358–73. 9Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, New York and London: Verso Books, 2011, pp. 30–31. 10Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb, “Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment,” Economic Journal 124: 575, 2014, pp. 149–66. 11Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb, “Identity and Wellbeing: How Retiring Makes the Unemployed Happier,” VoxEU.org, 2012. 12Ibid. 13Zeynep Tufekci, “Failing the Third Machine Age: When Robots Come for Grandma,” Medium.com, 2014. 14Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1990. 15André Gorz, Strategy for Labor, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967. 16Ibid., p. 6. 17Ibid., pp. 7–8. 18Robert J. van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs, “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” Theory and Society 15: 5, 1986, pp. 635–55. 19Ibid., p. 637. 20Ibid., p. 645. 21Ibid., p. 646. 22André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, New York and London: Verso Books, 1989, p. 169. 23Van der Veen and Van Parijs, “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” p. 646. 24Corey Robin, “Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years,” CoreyRobin.com, 2013. 25Pamela Chelin, “Rebecca Black Fighting Ark Music Factory over ‘Friday,’” Cnn.com, 2011. 26Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, New York: Tor Books, 2003. 27Ibid., p. 10. 28Aaron Halfaker et al., “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s Reaction to Sudden Popularity Is Causing Its Decline,” American Behavioral Scientist 57: 5, May 2013, p. 683. 29Tom McKay, “Bitcoin vs.

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Even in the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor supported a law to reduce the work week to thirty hours. But after World War II, for a variety of reasons, work reduction gradually disappeared from labor’s agenda. The forty-hour (or more) week was taken for granted, and the question became merely how well it would be compensated. This would have surprised the economist John Maynard Keynes, who speculated in the 1930s that people in our time would work as little as fifteen hours per week. That would mean working less than a third of the forty-hour work week that is still widely considered to be the standard. And yet productivity since Keynes’s time has more than tripled, so it would have been possible to take that growth in the form of free time for the masses.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Kerr, J. et al. (2012) ‘Prosocial behavior and incentives: evidence from field experiments in rural Mexico and Tanzania’, Ecological Economics 73, pp. 220–227. Keynes, J. M. (1923) ‘A Tract on Monetary Reform’, in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 4, 1977 edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1924) ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, The Economic Journal, 34: 135, pp. 311–372. Keynes, J. M. (1931) ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Keynes, J. M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1945) First Annual Report of the Arts Council (1945–46), London: Arts Council.

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Oxfam (2013), ‘Tax on the “private” billions now stashed away in havens enough to end extreme world poverty twice over’, 22 May 2013. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2013-05-22/tax-private-billions-now-stashed-away-havens-enough-end-extreme 59. Tax Justice Network (2015) ‘The scale of Base Erosion and Profit Shifting’ (BEPS). http://www.taxjustice.net/scaleBEPS/ 60. Global Alliance for Tax Justice, http://www.globaltaxjustice.org 61. Keynes, J.M. (1931) ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ in Essays in Persuasion, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, p. 5, available at: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 62. Coote, A., Franklin, J. and Simms, A. (2010) ‘21 hours: why a shorter working week can help us all flourish in the 21st century’ London: New Economics Foundation. 63.

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In 1968, the prestige of Nobel Prizes awarded for scientific advances in physics, chemistry and medicine was controversially extended: Sweden’s central bank successfully lobbied and paid for a Nobel-Memorial prize to be awarded annually in ‘Economic Sciences’ too, and its laureates have become academic celebrities ever since. Not all economists have been comfortable with this apparent authority. Back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes – the Englishman whose ideas would transform post-war economics – was already worrying about the role played by his profession. ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else,’ he famously wrote.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

Consider, now, the ethical concern that most exercised John Maynard Keynes, namely the central role of the money motive in capitalism – or, to put it more bluntly, greed. One of the sayings attributed to the great economist is that capitalism amounts to ‘the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds’.220 And that certainly is consonant with the view he expressed – only slightly tongue in cheek, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky – in his essay ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great change in the code of morals.

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Shaw’s fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde was less of a windbag, but of much the same conviction: ‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.’ A further dimension to the argument is provided by the great economist John Maynard Keynes. Like Dr Johnson, who declared that ‘there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money’, Keynes thought that moneymaking was a socially productive way of channelling the basest instincts: Dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement.

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How far society’s waning tolerance of these excesses will lead to a much more heavily regulated, lower growth form of capitalism turns heavily on these difficult issues about the moral character of money. Certainly money and business have suffered a major setback on the path towards respectability as a result of the great financial crisis that struck in 2008. CHAPTER TWO ANIMAL SPIRITS Few understood better than John Maynard Keynes the importance of enterprise for the workings of the capitalist system. Yet the great economist had a poor view of entrepreneurs. His celebrated reference to their so-called animal spirits in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a lofty implicit put-down and he regarded the money motive as a form of morbidity.

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order
by Benn Steil
Published 14 May 2013

The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume I, Indian Currency and Finance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1919 [1971]. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume II, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1923 [1971]. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume IV, A Tract on Monetary Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1925–1926. Unpublished fragment. Keynes Papers, PS/6. King’s College Archive Centre, University of Cambridge. ———. 1930 [1971]. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume V, A Treatise on Money in Two Volumes: 1 The Pure Theory of Money.

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Economic Journal LVI, No. 222: 172–187. ———. 1978. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XIV, The General Theory and After: Defence and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1978. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XVI, Activities 1914–19: The Treasury and Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1978. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXII, Activities 1939–45: Internal War Finance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1979. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXIII, Activities 1940–43: External War Finance.

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. ———. 1979. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXIV, Activities 1944–46: The Transition to Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXV, Activities 1940–44: Shaping the Post-war World: The Clearing Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXVI, Activities 1943–46: Shaping the Post-war World: Bretton Woods and Reparation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXVII, Activities 1940–46: Shaping the Post-war World: Employment and Commodities.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

In 1839, Thomas Carlyle (who famously called economics “the dismal science”) fretted about the “demon of mechanism” and its prospects for “oversetting whole multitudes of workmen.”26 Around the same time, Karl Marx took aim. “Capitalist production,” he warned, “develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the laborer.”27 In 1930, John Maynard Keynes contemplated “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.28 Keynes foresaw only “a temporary phase of maladjustment.”

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“The Return of the Machinery Question,” The Economist, June 25, 2016, https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/06/23/the-return-of-the-machinery-question. 27. Karl Marx, Capital, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, (Hertfordshire, UK, Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013) Kindle edition location 8018, page 391. 28. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–73, http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. 29. Matthew Scherer, “Regulating Artificial Intelligence Systems: Risks, Challenges, Competencies, and Strategies,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 29, no. 2 (Spring 2016), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

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It’s the kind of advice that any household should heed: if you can trim your spending to avoid running up your credit cards, you’ll be in a much healthier state. But when it comes to governments, the rules are not the same as for households. Governments have options that households do not. They can issue bonds, and they can increase the money supply. They can stimulate demand. The disciples of the legendary British economist John Maynard Keynes argue against the Austrian school. Pointing to the Great Depression, these economists advocate for reviving a sluggish economy with borrowed cash. Keynesians argue fiscal stimulus can prevent painful and damaging depression and insolvency. Keynes recognized the paradox of thrift. When one household owes more than it can manage, prudent families cut spending and increase savings as much as possible.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King
Published 3 Mar 2016

Keynes (1914a), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 18, Activities: 1914–1919, Macmillan, London, 1971, p. 4. —— (1914b), ‘War and the Financial System’, Economic Journal, 24, 1971, p. 473. —— (1919), The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Macmillan & Co., London. —— (1922), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 17, Activities: 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, ed. Elizabeth Johnson, Macmillan, London, 1977. —— (1923a), A Tract on Monetary Reform, Macmillan, London. —— (1923b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 18, Activities: 1922–1932: The End of Reparations, ed.

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. —— (1923b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 18, Activities: 1922–1932: The End of Reparations, ed. Elizabeth Johnson, Macmillan, London, 1978. —— (1930), A Treatise on Money, Macmillan, London. —— (1931), ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, Macmillan, London. —— (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan, London. —— (1937a), ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 51, pp. 209–23. —— (1937b), ‘Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population’, The Galton Lecture published in Eugenics Review, XXIX, pp. 13–17. King, Mervyn (2000), ‘Balancing the Economic See-Saw’, Speech at the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce and Industry 187th Anniversary Banquet, 14 April 2000, Bank of England website. —— (2003), Speech in Leicester, 14 October, Bank of England website. —— (2006), Speech in Ashford, Kent, 16 January, Bank of England website. —— (2007), ‘The MPC Ten Years On’, Lecture to the Society of Business Economists, 2 May, Bank of England website. —— (2009), Speech to the CBI Dinner, Nottingham, at the East Midlands Conference Centre, 20 January, Bank of England website. —— (2012), ‘Twenty Years of Inflation Targeting’, Stamp Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, 9 October, Bank of England website.

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I experienced at first hand the evolution of macroeconomics from literary exposition – where propositions seemed plausible but never completely convincing – into a mathematical discipline – where propositions were logically convincing but never completely plausible. Only during the crisis of 2007–9 did I look back and understand the nature of the tensions between the surviving disciples of John Maynard Keynes who taught me in the 1960s, primarily Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson, and the influx of mathematicians and scientists into the subject that fuelled the rapid expansion of university economics departments in the same period. The old school ‘Keynesians’ were mistaken in their view that all wisdom was to be found in the work of one great man, and as a result their influence waned.

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath
Published 23 Jun 2014

Bresnahan, The Economics of New Goods, University of Chicago Press for National Bureau of Economic Research, Chicago, 1997, at: http://papers.nber.org/books/bres96–1/ Page 31 gives a wax candle's emission as 13 lumens; Table 1.4 gives hours of labour at prevailing US wages required to buy 1,000 lumens in different years. 21. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion: The collected writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978. The relevant essay is available online: at: www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 22. In the first ‘lost decade’, 1991–2000, real growth averaged just 0.5%; over the second, 2000–10, the average was 0.8%.

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At that time, Thomas De Quincey was admittedly guessing when he ventured that a quarter of all human misery was toothache; but thanks to progress in dentistry – and our ability to afford it – no one would make the same guess today. All this growth, then, is real money; it should be able to offer society real protection against hard times. As the world slid towards the abyss in 1930, Keynes took a brief break from peering over the edge and looked forward instead, to the ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’.21 He correctly predicted how much magic technology would work, and then suggested that there might come a point when getting richer would ‘no longer [be] of high social importance’. It has always been said that the most valuable things are those that money can't buy. Keynes’ essentially accurate long-range forecast prompts the thought that we might already have reached a pass where we can afford to protect the things that really matter – things like mental health, family and community – from the vicissitudes of the business cycle.

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, BBC News, 24 July 2012, at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk–18973923; on anti-depressants see Mark Easton, ‘The north/south divide on antidepressants’, BBC News, 2 August 2012, at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk–19076219 8. On Gallup's 0–10 scale the overall average score fell from 6.9 to 6.4 between February and November 2008. By January 2009, however, the overall average score was back at 6.9. 9. Layard, Happiness, pp. 49–50. 10. Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, available online at: www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 11. Rather than a 1–10 life satisfaction score, Eurobarometer asks respondents whether they are satisfied with their lives on a four-point scale. In the text we concentrate on the total proportion satisfied, i.e. the proportion ‘very’ or ‘fairly’, as against those who are ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ dissatisfied.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

CHAPTER 13 1Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management: The Principles of Scientific Management [and] Testimony Before the Special House Committee, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1947. 2Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001 (1961), p. 232. 3Peter Drucker, Management: tasks, responsibilities, practices, Heinemann, London, 1973. 4Samuel Gompers, ‘The miracles of efficiency’, American Federationist 18 (4), 1911, p. 277. 5John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life, Part II, Chapter 10, 1887, Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7952. 6Ibid., Part I, Chapter 2. 7Fabrizio Zilibotti, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren 75 Years after: A Global Perspective’, IEW – Working Papers 344, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, 2007. 8Federal Reserve Bulletin, September 2017, Vol. 103, no. 3, p. 12. 9https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf. 10Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1996. 11John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1975. 12Advertising Hall of Fame, ‘Benjamin Franklin: Founder, Publisher & Copyrighter, Magazine General’, 2017, http://advertisinghall.org/members/member_bio.php?

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People like Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, who in 1776 sung the praises of the ‘very pretty machines’ that he believed would in time ‘facilitate and abridge labour’, or Oscar Wilde who a century later fantasised about a future ‘in which machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work’. But none made the case as comprehensively as the twentieth century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. He predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first century capital growth, improving productivity and technological advances should have brought us to the foothills of an economic ‘promised land’ in which everybody’s basic needs were easily satisfied and where, as a result, nobody worked more than fifteen hours in a week.

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It connotes not just effort but also suffering, and so evoked the recent tribulations of France’s Third Estate – the lower classes – that had laboured for so long under the yoke of wigged aristocrats and monarchs with a taste for grandeur. And in linking the potential of machines to liberate the peasantry from a life of labour, he invoked an embryonic version of the dream, later taken up by John Maynard Keynes, of technology leading us to a promised land. ‘Work’ is now used to describe all transfers of energy, from those that occur on a celestial scale when galaxies and stars form to those that take place at a subatomic level. Science also now recognises that the creation of our universe involved colossal amounts of work, and that what makes life so extraordinary and what differentiates living things from dead things are the very unusual kinds of work that living things do.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

He described unemployment as something close to a mirage: “the army of the unemployed is no more unemployed than are firemen who wait in fire-houses for the alarm to sound, or the reserve police force ready to meet the next call.”14 The creative forces of capitalism, in short, required a supply of ready labor, which came from people displaced by previous instances of technological progress. John Maynard Keynes was less confident that things would always work out so well for workers. His 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” while mostly optimistic, nicely articulated the position of the second camp—that automation could in fact put people out of work permanently, especially if more and more things kept getting automated. His essay looked past the immediate hard times of the Great Depression and offered a prediction: “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment.

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In one paper, Erik estimated that the elasticity of demand for computer hardware was about 1.1, implying that each 1 percent increase in price led to a 1.1 percent increase in demand, so as a result total spending increased as technology made computers more efficient. See Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Contribution of Information Technology to Consumer Welfare,” Information Systems Research 7, no. 3 (1996): 281–300. 22. This is an example of Say’s Law, which states that demand and supply are always kept in balance. 23. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes on Possibilities, 1930, http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. 24. Tim Kreider, “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” Opinionator, June 30, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/. 25. Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz has argued that rapid automation of agriculture, such as via gasoline-engine tractors, is part of the explanation for the high unemployment of the 1930s.

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We’re making things here in the U.S. that we’re shipping over to China. . . . We just need to make sure that we’ve . . . got the infrastructure in place to be able to handle the increased work.”25 There’s an interesting historical wrinkle in discussions about infrastructure investment. The legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, whose name is attached to a school of thought that advocates stimulus spending, famously suggested in 1936 that during recessions the government should put money in bottles, bury the bottles deep in old coal mines, then sell the rights to dig them up.26 Doing so, he argued only partly in jest, would “be better than nothing” because it would create demand during periods when labor and capital would otherwise go unused.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

The Starship Enterprise exists not to fight or colonize or extract, but to explore. Esteem and respectability become social proxies for wealth. The universe is one of artisans, scholars, religious thinkers, and philosophers. Economists have long pondered such worlds of abundance. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes wrote a famed 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicting that such economies would be in reach by the year 2030: Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes—those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.

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agriculture went from employing 40 percent: David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” MIT Technology Review, June 12, 2013. textile workers destroyed their looms: Richard Conniff, “What the Luddites Really Fought Against,” Smithsonian Magazine, Mar. 2011. an end to long hours: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–73. “the combination of the computer”: Linus Pauling et al., “The Triple Revolution” (Santa Barbara, CA, The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 1964), http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/​coll/​pauling/​peace/​papers/1964p.7-01.html.

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a man with a white-collar job: Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, “The Expanding Workweek? Understanding Trends in Long Work Hours Among U.S. Men, 1979–2004” (NBER Working Paper no. 11895, Dec. 2005). “Labor cannot be distinguished from leisure”: Manu Saadia, Trekonomics: The Economics of “Star Trek” (New York: Inkshares, 2016). “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930).” help smooth transactions: Matthew Yglesias, “The Star Trek Economy: (Mostly) Post-Scarcity, (Mostly) Socialism,” Slate, Nov. 18, 2013. dystopian visions: Yglesias, “The Economics of The Hunger Games,” Slate, Nov. 22, 2013. “The future is already here”: Pagan Kennedy, “William Gibson’s Future Is Now,” New York Times, Jan. 13, 2012.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

For example, residents of a rich country in Europe might decide that the level of welfare they enjoy now is exactly sufficient and that it can be maintained thanks to technological progress with a much smaller labor input. They might decide to work only fifteen hours per week, the number of hours that John Maynard Keynes, in “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), believed would be sufficient to “satisfy old Adam in most of us.” But very soon such a country and its population would discover that they had been overtaken by others. Perhaps, happy in their comfortable lifestyle, they would not worry too much about global economic rankings at first.

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Some two hundred years ago, Jean-Baptiste Say, one of the most renowned early economists, claimed that “no machine will ever be able to perform what even the worst horses can—the service of carrying people and goods through the bustle and throng of a great city.”27 Other famous economists, like David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes (in “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”), thought that human needs were limited. We should know better today: our needs are unlimited, and because we cannot forecast exact movements in technology, we cannot forecast what particular form such new needs will take. The third “lump” fallacy is the “lump of raw materials and energy” fallacy, the idea of the so-called carrying capacity of the earth.

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“Freedom of Movement for Workers.” IZA World of Labor 2014: 86, September. https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/86/pdfs/freedom-of-movement-for-workers.pdf. Keynes, John Maynard. 1919. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: Macmillan. Keynes, John Maynard. 1930. “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” parts 1 and 2. The Nation and Athenaeum 48, October 11 and 18. Keynes, John Maynard. 1972. Essays in Biography. London: Macmillan. Kissinger, Henry. 2011. On China. New York: Penguin. Kristov, Lorenzo, Peter Lindert, and Robert McClelland. 1992. “Pressure Groups and Redistribution.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

During the pandemic, governments concluded that, through no fault of their own, people could not earn money and so deserved to be paid for not working. Further down the line, could the state decide that people forced out of work by AI similarly deserve to be compensated? In his 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes pondered this exact question. He looked forward to a world of fifteen-hour workweeks made possible by technology. But even if such a world materializes, we will need to find a way to give people things to do. That could involve creating extra jobs in a variety of fields, from education to public works projects to park and wilderness maintenance—just as FDR’s celebrated Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps hired millions of Americans to expand infrastructure and beautify the country.

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Haidt, “Number of Truckers at All-Time High,” US Census, June 6, 2019, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps-on-trucking.html. 111 4,000 drivers a week: Fred Smith, Federal Express CEO, “Transcript: The Path Forward: Business & the Economy,” Washington Post Live, May 14, 2020. 111 Machines Like Me: Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me: A Novel (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2019). 112 algorithms that can write literature: Brian Merchant, “When an AI Goes Full Jack Kerouac,” Atlantic, October 1, 2018. 113 “spread the bread thin on the butter”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (originally written 1930), reprinted in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–73. 113 Jetson of the 1960s cartoon: “works three hours a day, three days a week,” per Sarah Ellison, “Reckitt Turns to Jetsons to Launch Detergent Gels,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2003; pushing a button, per Hanna-Barbera Wiki, “The Jetsons,” https://hanna-barbera.fandom.com/wiki/The_Jetsons. 113 four-day workweek: Zoe Didali, “As PM Finland’s Marin Could Renew Call for Shorter Work Week,” New Europe, January 2, 2020, https://www.neweurope.eu/article/finnish-pm-marin-calls-for-4-day-week-and-6-hours-working-day-in-the-country/. 114 “bullshit jobs”: David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 115 “slaves of time without purpose”: McEwan, Machines Like Me. 116 atoms in the observable universe: David Silver and Demis Hassabis, “AlphaGo: Mastering the Ancient Game of Go with Machine Learning,” Google DeepMind, January 27, 2016, https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering-ancient-game-of-go.html. 116 all fifty-seven games: Kyle Wiggers, “DeepMind’s Agent57 Beats Humans at 57 Classic Atari Games,” Venture Beat, March 31, 2020; Rebecca Jacobson, “Artificial Intelligence Program Teaches Itself to Play Atari Games—And It Can Beat Your High Score,” PBS NewsHour, February 20, 2015. 117 Stuart Russell: Stuart Russell, “3 Principles for Creating Safer AI,” TED2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_3_principles_for_creating_safer_ai/transcript?

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The last great era of global integration was in the early years of the twentieth century. The world was largely at peace. The technological revolutions that drove the era were stunning—telegraphs, telephones, radio, trains, steamships, automobiles, and electric lighting. Trade had swelled to unprecedented levels. Describing that heady time, the economist John Maynard Keynes observed that people were getting used to previously unimaginable conveniences: “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.”

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford University Press 2005), 109. epilogue 1. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 21. 2. Ibid., 325. 3. President John F. Kennedy, News Conference 24 (14 February 1962), https://www. jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/Press-Conferences/ News-Conference-24.aspx, archived at https://perma.cc/LDS6-Y8X7 4. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 325. 5. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?

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For the industry to operate to everyone’s benefit, however, we need to ensure that platforms can no longer arbitrage around existing rules and have to bear the cost of their operations. Employment law is the key to equitable conditions for all workers, and equal competition amongst businesses new and old. * * * * * * Epilogue Amidst the economic depression of the 1930s, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes penned a note about the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Where others saw stagnation and decline, he predicted prosperity and development. Unprecedented technological improvements in manufacture and transport were key to this vision. In the long term, the resulting productivity gains would bring manifold improvements in living standards for all.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

And, for that matter, when Faludi was writing her book in the mid-1990s, the depiction of a downsized Dad, the manly breadwinner, was a growth industry, as anybody who has seen Toy Story or Terminator II can attest. In fact, it’s been almost a century since we started hearing this lament, this warning, about the end of men as a result of the end of work. By now we’re all familiar with what John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”—dozens of writers, including Rosin, have recently cited the piece as introduction to their own studies of the endings impending in the crash of the labor market. All of them wonder how he went so wrong, predicting increased leisure, less labor time, more pleasure.

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If growth no longer requires net additions to the labor force, work itself can’t be justified by the invocation of economic necessity, and income must be decoupled from work—full employment becomes a fool’s errand. And if growth requires neither more capital nor more labor, less work and more leisure become the key not just to the good life, as John Maynard Keynes insisted, but to life as such. So if we want to save the planet, and with it, ourselves, we need to work less, not more. That’s what I mean when I say Fuck Work! No More Work Introduction I Work means everything to us. For centuries—since, say, 1650—we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth).

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

Government’s Role in Technology Development, ed. Fred Black and Matthew R. Keller (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011), 5–10. 21. Robert Whaples, “Hours of Work in U.S. History,” Economic History Association, February 1, 2010, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.cork.hours.us. 22. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). 3 The Cushion Deflates For the three decades immediately after World War II, U.S. wages and incomes rose three times as fast as they had in the previous seven decades. Then suddenly the paycheck prosperity came to a halt.

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Although not quite as secure, the largest concentrations of wealth held by Americans also have a sort of immortality that is the special privilege bestowed on the corporation by the state. Individual corporations can die from bad luck and incompetence or a reorganization of investors’ portfolios. But adequately managed, the wealth moves from one protected corporate nest to another—deathless as long as its special status is indulged by society. “In the long run,” John Maynard Keynes famously said, “we are all dead.” But living off large privileged stores of capital, most members of the governing classes are protected on the downside from the natural capitalist cycles of boom and bust. Recessions, even depressions and other economic calamities, are not typically life-threatening.

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Even Herbert Hoover—who, somewhat unfairly, was blamed for the Depression—understood that there was something fundamentally wrong in this response. In 1931, he signed the Davis-Bacon Act, which established the eight-hour workday in construction and required employers to maintain prevailing wage levels in government-financed projects. British economist John Maynard Keynes provided the economic theory for what almost all businesspeople understood in practice: that they expanded their businesses not when workers received lower wages but when they saw customers coming in the door with money in their pockets. In 1914, Henry Ford, otherwise a brutal and repressive employer, doubled the basic wage he paid to his auto workers.

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Published 14 May 1994

In practice, the analytical apparatus excludes from consideration the possibility that the movement to higher and higher indifference curves is of declining urgency. [back] *** 7 J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 365–66. Notice that Keynes, as always little bound by the conventional rules, did not hesitate to commit the unpardonable sin of distinguishing between categories of desire. [back] *** 1 J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 365. [back] *** 2 James'S. Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 28.

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Randall, A Creed for Free Enterprise (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1952), pp. 3, 5. [back] *** 2 "Tenth Philosophical Letter." Quoted by Henri See, Modern Capitalism (New York: Adelphi, 1928), p. 87. [back] *** 3 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 232. [back] *** 1 J. M. Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 360. [back] *** 2 E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, "Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders' Wage Rates." Economica, New Series; Vol. XXIII, No. 92 (November 1956). [back] *** 3 have used the phrase "central tradition" to denote the main current of ideas in descent from Smith.

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By the second year of the Hoover administration, the budget was irretrievably out of balance. In the fiscal year ending in 1932, receipts were much less than half of spending. The budget was never balanced during the depression. But not until 1936 did both the necessities and advantages of this course begin to triumph in the field of ideas. In that year, John Maynard Keynes launched his formal assault in The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. Thereafter, the conventional insistence on the balanced budget under all circumstances and at all levels of economic activity was in retreat. Keynes, as we shall see presently, was on his way to being the new fountainhead of conventional wisdom.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations1 Don’t mourn for me, friends, don’t weep for me never, For I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever. Epitaph for a charwoman, traditional, quoted in ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, John Maynard Keynes, 19302 Introduction In January of 2014, The Economist, my employer, published a piece I had written on the future of work in an age of rapid automation. A sample: Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master.

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Utopia might, then, seem to be waiting just over the horizon (as a number of recent books, such as Postcapitalism by Paul Mason,13 argue); all that must be managed is the slow reduction of hours devoted to menial work, combined with the distribution across society of the common wealth generated by productive technologies. But is this better world of work achievable? Scholars have been imagining it for generations. In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay describing his view of how the economic future would unfold.14 At the time, the world was caught in a deepening depression. ‘We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism,’ Keynes noted in the opening to his essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Yet in the piece he invited readers to look past short-term troubles to the remarkable long-run process of growth and progress in which humanity was engaged.

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Abbreviations BEA US Bureau of Economic Analysis BLS US Bureau of Labor Statistics EIA US Energy Information Administration IMF International Monetary Fund NBER National Bureau of Economic Research OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development EPIGRAPH   1.  Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776).   2.  Keynes, John Maynard, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931). INTRODUCTION   1. ‘The Onrushing Wave’, The Economist, 18 January 2014.   2. ‘Is 4.4 jolt an end to Los Angeles’ “earthquake drought”?’, Los Angeles Times, 17 March 2014.   3. http://www.statista.com/chart/612/newspaper-advertising-revenue-from-1950-to-2012/   4. 

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

It concerned a fascinating essay I first read some years ago by perhaps the greatest economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, the Englishman who had ushered in the social democratic style of capitalism that dominated many Western nations between 1950 and the mid 1970s – the man whose economic vision, you’ll remember, was finally upended by the Thatcher and Reaganite neo-liberal revolution that still dominates our economy today. The essay in question was entitled ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, and in it Keynes envisioned how the world would look by the 2020s, should his style of economics be allowed to unfurl unimpeded.

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Margaret Thatcher therefore still demands our attention because her values almost spiritually align with the new materialistic capitalism dominant today – the neo-liberal vision first hatched by Fredrick Hayek in the 1930s, elaborated by Milton Friedman in the 1960/70s, and enacted by her and Reagan in the 1970/80s. In 1964, in the heyday of John Maynard Keynes’s influence on the economies of Western capitalism, a group of eminent psychologists met in a modest and dimly lit conference room on the outskirts of Saybrook, Connecticut. Their intention was to share and consolidate their ideas on the fundamentals of human psychology. What resulted was more than just a sharing of minds but the inauguration of what would become known to psychology undergraduates today as the ‘third force’.

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Whether self-betterment came in the form of developing our ‘virtue’ (as in Aristotle’s ethics), or our unique artistic and intellectual powers (as Francesco Petrarch and Pico della Mirandola claimed),5 or our critical and scientific reason (as Benedictus de Spinoza, Adam Smith and John Locke stated),6 or our individuality and creative possibilities (as John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt insisted),7 the humanistic psychologists valued the development of our highest human qualities as the epitome of health-seeking activity, as of course did John Maynard Keynes.8 But these psychologists also offered something new. For them, self-realisation was not just a goal for which to strive, but an innate human compulsion and necessity. Just as our physical development could only be fully realised under the right conditions (proper nutrition, exercise, health care), so our psychological development was dependent upon having supportive conditions around us.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen
by James Suzman
Published 10 Jul 2017

In the winter of 1930, Keynes was understandably preoccupied with the depression that was strangling the life out of European and American economies and the collapse of his personal fortune in the stock market crash the preceding year. Perhaps to persuade himself of the ephemeral nature of the crisis, he published an optimistic essay titled “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”1 “My purpose in this essay … is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future,” explained Keynes in its introductory paragraphs. The future to which Keynes’s wings flew him was an economic Canaan: a promised land in which technological innovation, improvements in productivity, and long-term capital growth had ushered in an age of “economic bliss.”

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—Seneca AFFLUENCE WITHOUT ABUNDANCE Southern Africa and the Kalahari Basin Khoisan Peoples and Language Groups of Southern Africa Key Archaeological Sites in Khoisan History Eastern and Central Namibia The Bantu Expansion Notes Chapter 1: The Rewards of Hard Work 1   All quotes by Keynes in this chapter are from his essay “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” published in J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–73. 2   Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968). 3   Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 4   Sherwood Washburn, foreword to Richard B.

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To me their apparent indigence was neither a consequence of laziness nor even entirely a consequence of their ill fortunes. Instead I saw in their behavior a trace of how their parents and grandparents had lived before the white settlers came, a way of life that shines a new light on an ever more urgent and perplexing problem that was first raised by the economist John Maynard Keynes at the height of the Great Depression, a time when in this part of the Kalahari manketti nuts still fell from the trees and kudu bearing their giant spiral horns walked gamely into hunters’ paths. In the winter of 1930, Keynes was understandably preoccupied with the depression that was strangling the life out of European and American economies and the collapse of his personal fortune in the stock market crash the preceding year.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

CHAPTER TEN VALUES MAXIMIZING CLASS Few people in history can take credit for creating as much economic growth as John Maynard Keynes. The British economist was the founder of macroeconomics and a key architect of the global economy. During the Great Depression he successfully convinced world governments to spend public funds to create jobs and other forms of social support. Maybe you’ve heard someone say “Keynesian economics” on a podcast before. They meant this guy. Keynes was a great champion of capitalism. In a 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he points out that from 2000 BCE until 1700 CE (aka the bloodletting era) there was little economic growth or technological development in the world.

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this was thirty-five years away: Isaac Asimov’s predictions of the future were published in the Canadian newspaper the Star (“35 Years Ago, Isaac Asimov Was Asked by the Star to Predict the World of 2019. Here Is What He Wrote,” December 27, 2018). CHAPTER TEN: VALUES MAXIMIZING CLASS “economic necessity into daylight”: John Maynard Keynes’s words about the nature of capitalism come from the 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” collected in a book of Keynes’s writings called Essays in Persuasion. 271 times more than the average worker: From Fortune (“CEO Pay: Top Execs Make 271 Times More Than Workers,” July 20, 2017). seventeenth in 2018: From U.S. News & World Report (“Quality of Life” 2018 ratings).

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See also specific companies cultural heritage, 180–81 Curtis, Adam, 270–71 data/data science, xv, 97, 123, 150, 159–62, 215 decision making, 28, 96–97 affects other people, 127–28, 144 and Bentoism, 130, 134, 138–40, 206–11 best-case outcome for, 126, 152, 243 guided by defaults, 22–23, 34–35 and making money, x–xi, 23, 135 of Maximizing Class, 62–63 rational, xiii, 134–35, 137, 139 values-driven, xiii, 132, 138–39, 152–53, 174–76, 209–10, 223 See also autonomy defaults (hidden) and bento box, 129–30 explanation of, 19–23 and financial maximization, x, 22–26, 64, 83 and game theory, 32, 34–35 and maximizing here/now, 136–37 set what’s normal, 34–35 and values, 214–15, 223 defaults (visible), 22 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 78–79 deregulation, 77–78, 83, 257 disrupting, in business, 87–88, 95–99, 103 downtown, demise of, 48, 51–52, 54 Drive (Pink), 117–19 drugs, xii, 23, 81, 249 Dublin, Ireland, 9–10 e-commerce, 47, 162 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 193–94 economy, 261 downturn in, 61–62, 71, 120 and financial maximization, x, xiii, 70, 72, 116 growth of, 120, 151, 193–95, 267 “Mullet,” 66–74, 77, 84, 110, 163 shareholder-centric, 60–61, 67–73, 82–85 See also gross domestic product (GDP); stock buybacks education, 24–26, 74–75, 110, 170–71, 197, 216, 259 electric cars, 173–75, 183 Ellison, Larry, 109–10 emotions, 22–23, 103, 113–15, 195, 260 Enron, 78, 210 Entrepreneurial State, The (Mazzucato), 78 entrepreneurship, 52–54, 75, 78–81, 196, 241 environmental issues, 14–15, 77, 172–74, 201, 212 Etsy, 212 “evergreen” model, 217 exercise, xiv, 177–78, 184–87, 189–90, 265, 267 Facebook, 53–54, 98, 109 fairness, xii–xiii, xv, 102, 142, 145, 158, 163, 195, 202, 216 family, the, xiii, xv, 26–27, 90–91, 111, 127, 138, 142, 222 Federal Reserve, 49 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 72–73 financial crises, 77–78 debt, 65–66, 74–75 growth, xv–xvi instability, 110, 112 security, xi, 109–14, 116, 141, 201, 205 Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE), 166–69 financial maximization, 236 becomes mainstream, 59–61, 63–65, 91, 180 case against, 110–11, 115–16, 119 dominance of, x–xiii, xvi, 23–25, 27, 37, 73, 97, 104–5, 133–35 downsides to, xi–xiii, 45, 196–97, 199, 243 ending its reign, xiii, 13–14, 225 four phases of, 83–85 growth of, xi, 92, 123, 196, 265 moving beyond it, 163, 168–69, 206, 209, 212 normalization of, 91, 183 not the goal, 9–10, 43–44 origins of, x, xvi, 26–32, 255 prioritizing it, 14, 63, 82–83 Financial Times, 70–71 First Amendment, 39 Fonda, Jane, 187 Food and Drug Administration, 188 Fortune, 68 Fox News, xii Friedman, Milton, 59–61, 63, 82, 90–91, 105, 180, 255, 261 Future Me examples of, 138, 167–69, 202–6, 211 explanation of, 132, 143, 206 and values helix, 218–23 Future Us, 196 examples of, 138, 169, 171–75, 201–6, 211 explanation of, 132, 144–45, 206 and values helix, 218–19 game theory, 237, 250 and collaboration, 32–34 and Community Game, 33–35, 98 its notion of rationality, 29–35, 97 and Prisoner’s Dilemma, 28–34, 130–33, 198–99 and Stag Hunt, 32–34 and Wall Street Game, 33–35, 98 Garfield, James, 146–47, 149, 179 Gates, Bill, 109–10 generational change, xiv, 180–84, 187, 191–92, 266–67 influence, xi, 152, 218–24, 271 generosity, xii, 7, 118, 134, 175 Gomory, Ralph, 82 Google, 53–54, 110, 123 Great Depression, 71, 77, 120, 193 Greatest Generation, 192 grit, 135, 143–45 gross domestic product (GDP), xii, 23, 83, 120–24, 196, 235 gross domestic value (GDV), 217–18 Groupon, 96–97, 100 gyms, xiv, 20, 186–87 Hanchett, Thomas, 49 happiness.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do
by Richard Robb
Published 12 Nov 2019

“Keynes Predicted We Would Be Working 15-Hour Weeks. Why Was He So Wrong?” NPR Planet Money. Podcast audio, August 13, 2015. http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong (accessed February 2, 2019). Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” In Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. ———. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt, 1964. ———. “My Early Beliefs.” In The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum, 82–97.

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Finally, I began to wonder what effect seeing the world in terms of rational choice has on our inner lives. Does removing everything from its context to determine the rate of exchange at which we would trade this for that—even if subconsciously—impoverish our experience? I wondered whether John Maynard Keynes might have been right when he warned, the “pseudorational view of human nature [leads] to a thinness, a superficiality, not only of judgment, but also of feeling.”4 Theory Collides with Evidence In 1992, I moved to New York City to become the head options trader for the derivatives subsidiary of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank (DKB), Japan’s largest bank at the time.

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As Jacob Viner wrote in 1925, “There are many who would place greater stress on the importance of the process of desire-fulfillment itself than on the gratifications or other states of consciousness which result from such fulfillment” (“Utility Concept in Value Theory,” 641). 3. Veblen, “Limitations of Marginal Utility,” 620. 4. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 224. 5. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 13. 6. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 160. 7. See Dow and Dow, “Animal Spirits Revisited.” 8. Sen, “Maximization,” 747. 9. An experimental literature stretching back to 1956 (Brehm, “Postdecision Changes”) finds that subjects who choose between two equally valuable options will reevaluate the options after they choose.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

But what is certain is that the rise of the money form and the capacity for its private appropriation has created a space for the proliferation of human behaviours that are anything but virtuous and noble. Accumulations of wealth and power (accumulations that were ritually disposed of in the famous potlatch system of pre-capitalist societies) have not only been tolerated but welcomed and treated as something to be admired. This led the British economist John Maynard Keynes, writing on ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ in 1930, to hope that: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.

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This fascinating story is told in Paul Seabright (ed.), The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies, London, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 2. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, New York, Classic House Books, 2009, p. 199. 3. Silvio Gesell, (1916); http:www.archive.org/details/TheNaturalEconomicOrder, p. 121. For some further discussion of Gesell’s ideas see John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1964, p. 363, and Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition, Berkeley, CA, Evolver Editions, 2011.

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N., Process and Reality, New York, Free Press, 1969 Wolff, R., Moore, B., and Marcuse, H., A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Beyond Tolerance, Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook, Repressive Tolerance, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969 Wright, M., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

, New York Times, 11 December 2017 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/style/robots-jobs-children.html>. 3 ‘Labor: Sabotage at Lordstown?’, Time, 7 February 1972 <http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,905747,00.html> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 4 John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), pp. 321–332 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-59072-8_25>. 5 Creative Destruction Lab, ‘Geoff Hinton: On Radiology’, 24 November 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ> [accessed 24 February 2021]. 6 Paul Daugherty, H.

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I shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture.’, Aftenposten, 8 September 2016 <https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/i/G892Q/dear-mark-i-am-writing-this-to-inform-you-that-i-shall-not-comply-wit> [accessed 1 October 2020] Hardin, Garrett, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162(3859), 1968, pp. 1243–1248 <https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243> Haskel, Jonathan, and Stian Westlake, Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018) Holzhausen, Arne, and Timo Wochner, ‘Is There Really an Ever-Widening Rural-Urban Divide in Europe’, Euler Hermes Global, 17 July 2019 <https://www.eulerhermes.com/en_global/news-insights/economic-insights/Is-there-really-an-ever-widening-rural-urban-divide-in-Europe.html> [accessed 18 March 2021] ‘How Covid-19 Is Revealing the Impact of Disinformation on Society’, King’s College London, 25 August 2020 <https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/how-covid-19-is-revealing-the-impact-of-disinformation-on-society> [accessed 3 January 2021] Howe, Jeff, ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’, Wired, 1 June 2006, <https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/> [accessed 28 September 2020] Intangible Asset Market Value Study, Ocean Tomo <https://www.oceantomo.com/intangible-asset-market-value-study/> [accessed 27 August 2020] Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) Janeway, William H., Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Jean, Joel, Patrick Richard Brown and Institute of Physics (Great Britain), Emerging Photovoltaic Technologies (Bristol, UK: IOP Publishing, 2020) <https://iopscience.iop.org/book/978-0-7503-2152-5> [accessed 12 October 2020] Kallenborn, Zachary, and Philipp Bleek, ‘Drones of Mass Destruction: Drone Swarms and the Future of Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons’, War On the Rocks, 14 February 2019 <https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/drones-of-mass-destruction-drone-swarms-and-the-future-of-nuclear-chemical-and-biological-weapons/> [accessed 26 April 2021] Karlis, Nicole, ‘DoorDash Drivers Make an Average of $1.45 an Hour, Analysis Finds’, Salon, 19 January 2020 <https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/doordash-drivers-make-an-average-of-145-an-hour-analysis-finds/> [accessed 27 March 2021] Katsifis, Dimitrios, ‘The CMA Publishes Final Report on Online Platforms and Digital Advertising’, The Platform Law Blog, 6 July 2020 <https://theplatformlaw.blog/2020/07/06/the-cma-publishes-final-report-on-online-platforms-and-digital-advertising/> [accessed 30 March 2021] ———, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), pp. 321–332 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-59072-8_25> Khan, Lina M., ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’, Yale Law Journal, 126(3), January 2017, pp. 710–805 Klenert, David, Enrique Fernández-Macías and José-Ignacio Antón, ‘Don’t Blame It on the Machines: Robots and Employment in Europe’, VoxEU, 24 February 2020 <https://voxeu.org/article/dont-blame-it-machines-robots-and-employment-europe> [accessed 10 September 2020] Klinger, Joel, Juan Mateos-Garcia, and Konstantinos Stathoulopoulos, ‘A Narrowing of AI Research?’

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They were protesting against increasing automation, which they claimed was resulting in layoffs and an inhumane increase in what managers expected of workers.3 In other words, we’ve seen the ‘rise of the robots’ before. Anxieties like these usually crop up during periods of rapid technological change. And it’s not just the workers themselves. The economist John Maynard Keynes popularised the idea of ‘technological unemployment’ in 1928, when he noted, ‘The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption’ – that is, the ability to find work for workers.4 Now we have entered the Exponential Age, new technology appears to be challenging workers’ raison d’être once again.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2015/february/economic-growth-information-technology-factor-productivity/ 21 The economist Brad DeLong makes this point in: J. Bradford DeLong, “Making Do With More”, Project Syndicate, 26 February 2015. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/abundance-without-living-standards-growth-by-j--bradford-delong-2015-02 22 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 1931. 23 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”, Oxford Martin School, Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, University of Oxford, 17 September 2013. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf 24 Shelley Podolny, “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?”

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We need, however, to also recognize and manage the negative impacts it can have, particularly with regard to inequality, employment and labour markets. 3.1.2 Employment Despite the potential positive impact of technology on economic growth, it is nonetheless essential to address its possible negative impact, at least in the short term, on the labour market. Fears about the impact of technology on jobs are not new. In 1931, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously warned about widespread technological unemployment “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”.22 This proved to be wrong but what if this time it were true? Over the past few years, the debate has been reignited by evidence of computers substituting for a number of jobs, most notably bookkeepers, cashiers and telephone operators.

The Lights in the Tunnel
by Martin Ford
Published 28 May 2011

Keynesian Grandchildren While few contemporary economists seem particularly concerned about the seemingly inevitable transition to an automated economy, one legendary economist did have remarkable insight into the future. In 1930, as the world plunged into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”52 In his essay, Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment,” writing: We are being inflicted with a new disease of which some readers many not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment.

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Not Much”, New York Times, August 30, 2005, web: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30profile.html 51 See Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, a book based on an article in Wired Magazine, October 2004. Web: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html 52 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” (written in 1930), Essays in Persuasion, New York, W.W. Norton, 1963. Web: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf p. 195 footnote, Einstein’s view on technological unemployment, see: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2007, p.403.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

We need optimistic speculation and vision to go where no one has gone before. This includes reimagining the financial system. So in that spirit, I’d like to do some reimagining in this concluding chapter and speculate about the future of finance and the finance of the future. “COMPUTER, MANAGE MY PORTFOLIO!” In his important essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes wrote that “there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.”2 Keynes believed, as do I, that a Star Trek–like “age of leisure and of abundance” for everyone is within human reach.

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Behavioral Ecology 13: 757–765. Kendall, Maurice G. 1953. “The Analysis of Economic Time-Series, Part I: Prices.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Ser. A. 96: 11–25. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. ___. 1963. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: W. W. Norton. Khandani, Amir, and Andrew W. Lo. 2007. “What Happened to the Quants in August 2007?” Journal of Investment Management 5: 5–54. ___. 2011. “What Happened to the Quants in August 2007? Evidence from Factors and Transactions Data.”

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Shaw Research, 240 Dahan, Ely, 40, 41 Damasio, Antonio, 102–104, 183, 186 Danziger, Shai, 166, 167 Darwin, Charles, 8, 137–140, 214, 217, 218, 226–227, 244 Data Encryption Standard (DES), 238–239 Dawkins, Richard, 142 Deason,, Stephen, 354 de Becker, Gavin, 1 Debreu, Gerard, 212 debt ratios, 300, 309–311 decimalization, 327–329 decision fatigue, 166–167 Deep Blue (chess computer), 112, 131–132 deep parameters, 203 delayed gratification, 119, 120–121 delta-hedging strategy, 274 De Nederlandsch Bank (DNB), 391 depression, 159, 160 derivatives, 10, 212, 243, 266, 270, 371, 407; complexity of, 11, 321; options and, 97, 357; regulation of, 7, 308; volume of, 358 Descartes’ Error (Damasio), 102 Desrochers, Theresa M., 121–122 deterministic strategy, 190, 191, 192, 197, 200 de Waal, Frans, 337 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 125–126 Dictator Game, 337 differential reproduction, 146, 152, 187 Digital Age, 163 discount rate, 98, 416 DNA, 187; database of, 402–403; discovery of, 137, 144, 401; evolutionary theory confirmed by, 137–138; of identical twins, 159, 161; mutations of, 418–419; of related species, 136, 146, 150, 151–152 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 140 Dodd, David, 234 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010), 228, 329, 375 dodo, 149 dopamine, 87–88, 89, 91, 97, 99, 409 dopamine dysregulation syndrome, 186 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, 86 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, 337, 339 double blind tests, 123 Double Eagle Fund, 234 doubling down, 60–61, 62, 84, 189 Douglas, Michael, 345, 346 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 22, 358 Down syndrome, 111 Duchenne muscular dystrophy, 409 Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, 160 Dyck, I. J. Alexander, 353–354 dynamic index funds, 267–269, 271, 273, 398–399 dyscalculia, 125 dyslexia, 125 East India Company, 412 ECM1 gene, 144 e-commerce, 405 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 397 Eddington, Arthur, 141 Edison, Thomas, 356 Education of a Speculator, The (Niederhoffer), 277 Efficient Markets Hypothesis, 5, 14, 16, 35, 92, 112–113, 122, 213; Adaptive Markets Hypothesis vs., 2, 198, 207–208, 214, 225; counterintuitive quality of, 21, 25, 26–27; experimental validation of, 40–43; Fama’s formulation of, 21–25, 209; index funds inspired by, 27–28, 263; irrationality explained away by, 108–109; limitations of, 3, 175, 176–177, 206; as orthodoxy, 38, 70, 72–74, 182, 185, 234; physics in lineage of, 211; Samuelson’s formulation of, 20–21, 25.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

In the views of these modern critics and of those who had taken part in the “Occupy Wall Street” movements a few years earlier, modern capitalism is clearly not “leading to a destination far better than our present place” for many people and workers. In the United States and in some other countries workers’ wages have stagnated for decades, the income distribution has become less even, and, in the views of these critics, our grandchildren will not live in a world as good as the present one. In another famous essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” written in 1930, Kenyes may not have offered as good a forecast of the future as some have interpreted those “possibilities” to offer. In that essay, Keynes worried about the fact that “technical efficiency [has] been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labor absorption” (Keynes, 1933, p. 358).

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Can it be assumed that the poor and the average middle class voter will be grateful to the rich individuals, because the rich individuals are not allowing their absolute incomes to fall? This question merits being addressed, especially in countries that have market economies and continue to have democratic governments. In a classic article titled “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, first written in 1930, Keynes wrote that “the needs of human beings … fall into two classes – those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to our fellows”; he added that “needs of the second class … may … be insatiable” (in Keynes, 1933, p. 365).

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See Sovereign debt Deconstruction of administrative state, 86 Defense spending lobbyists and, 178–79 as public good, 175–78 in US, 178 Deficits, 72 430 Index Democracy income inequality and, 400 income redistribution and, 223 legal rules and, 134 regulations and, 134 welfare policies and, 384 Demsetz, Harold, 151 Denmark executive compensation in, 364 ex post income distribution in, 118 income redistribution in, 210 marginal tax rates in, 376 public spending in, 122 taxation in, 371, 381 Dependency, income redistribution and, 209–10 Dependent workers income inequality and, 221, 316, 387 increase in, 384–85 marginal tax rates for, 373 regulations and, 23 in US, 250 Depreciation, 308 Deregulation overview, 87–88 economic freedom and, 86 income redistribution and, 197 potential for future crises and, 108, 109 in US, 82 Deutsche Bank, 364 Dickens, Charles, 358–59 Direct government intervention, 32–33, 36, 230 Discretion, 71, 151–52 Dishonesty, effect on market, 79, 83 Djokovic, Novak, 351–53 Dorfman, Robert, 3 Drones as externality, 165 Drucker, Peter, 82 Duesenberry, James R., 3, 319 Du Pont, Pierre, 307 Dutch Republic, welfare policies in, 50 Dynamic scoring, 76 Eastern Europe Gini coefficient in, 317 laissez faire in, 35 taxation in, 381–82 Easy credit, 107–9 Eckstein, Otto, 2–5 Economic aristocracy, 117–18 Economic freedom deregulation and, 86 economic planning and, 159 income redistribution and, 159–60 regulations, effect of, 130–31 Economic growth. See Growth Economic planning. See also specific country overview, 25–28 economic freedom and, 159 Hayek on, 159 “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 29 Economics. See also specific topic constitutions and, 270–72 legal rules and, 252–53 supply-side economics, 33, 74–78, 395, 397 Economics of Our Patent System (Vaughan), 359 The Economist, 77, 203, 343, 355–56, 361, 366 Education entrepreneurs and, 309 income redistribution and, 193 as public good, 180–81 in US, 208 Efficient market hypothesis, 86–87 Einaudi, Luigi, 269, 342 Eisenhower, Dwight, 4, 40, 178 Elizabeth I (England), 215 Elmore, Bartow, 325 Employment entrepreneurs and, 309 quotas, 145–46 role of government, 189–90 stabilization policies and, 237 unemployment compensation, 237–38 “The End of Laissez Faire” (Keynes), 31–32 Energy industry, 17, 167, 283–84 Enron, 127–28, 172–73 Entertainment industry, 345, 348, 353 Entitlements, 50–51 The Entrepreneurial State (Mazzucato), 196 Entrepreneurs corporations and, 308 desires of, 308–9 education and, 309 employment and, 309 government, relationship with, 309–10 historical background, 306–7 income tax and, 308 infrastructure and, 309 laissez faire and, 307–8 obstacles to, 307–8 public resources and, 310 referee, government as, 310 Smith on, 307 taxation and, 309 in UK, 307 in US, 307 Environmental regulations, 147, 182, 183 Index Envy income inequality and, 319–21 poverty and, 216–18 Equitable growth, 310, 312 Esping-Anderson, Costa, 47 Ethical values of market, 398 European Central Bank, 244 European Commission, 113 European Monetary Union, 5, 69, 72, 260, 273 European Union Constitution (proposed), 271 “fake goods” in, 149 intellectual property in, 347 mislabeling of fish in, 149–50 occupational licensing in, 125–26 regulations in, 276 Exchanges, 91–94 asymmetry in, 94 complexity of, 92–94 contracts in, 92–94 Friedman on, 114–15 Hayek on, 93, 112–15 individuals, role of, 112–13 information in, 93, 112–13 Executive compensation in Australia, 364 in Austria, 364 bonuses, 82–83, 85–86 in Denmark, 364 directors, role of, 364–65 in financial institutions, 168–69 income inequality in, 82–83, 85–86, 105–6 increase in, 387, 398 intellectual property and, 348, 363–64 in Japan, 364 in Norway, 364 performance-based compensation, 363–64 in Sweden, 364 in UK, 364 in US, 169, 363, 364 Ex post income distribution, 118, 119 Expropriation, 136 Externalities balancing of, 164 Coase Theorem and, 183–85 correcting or reducing through regulations, 147, 281–82 cross-border externalities, 185–86 drones as, 165 environmental regulations and, 182, 183 federalism and, 183–84 global government and, 120–21 guns as, 165 income inequality and, 321 inter-institutional externalities, 290 431 legal rules and, 255 poverty and, 216–17 public goods and, 181–82 regulations and, 164 smoking as, 164 urbanization and, 91, 163–64 Facebook, 347 “Fake goods,” 149 Fascism, 23, 231, 266–67 Fashion industry, 345 Federalism in Australia, 284 in Brazil, 284 in Canada, 284 externalities and, 183–84 legal rules and, 260 regulations and, 125, 126, 173, 284–85 in US, 260, 284 The Federalist Papers (Madison), 249 Fees, 142 Financial crises complexity and, 156 government intervention and, 156 Great Depression, 22, 26, 31, 253 Great Recession, 76, 109, 318 moral hazard and, 156–57 Southeast Asian financial crisis (1997-1998), 109, 243–44 2007-2008 Financial Crisis.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Commentary on Evans and Stanovich (2013)’, Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 8, No. 3 (2013), 257–62 Keren, G. and Schul, Y., ‘Two Is Not Always Better than One: A Critical Evaluation of Two-System Theories’, Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 4, No. 6 (2009), 533–50 Keynes, G. and Keynes, J. M., Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933) Keynes, J. M., ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ (1930) in Keynes, J. M., Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan and Co., 1931) Keynes, J. M., ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics , Vol. 51, No. 2 (1937), 209–23 Keynes, J. M., The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan and Co., 1936) Keynes, J.

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And over the last century economists have attempted to elide that historic distinction between risk and uncertainty, and to apply probabilities to every instance of our imperfect knowledge of the future. The difference between risk and uncertainty was the subject of lively debate in the inter-war period. Two great economists – Frank Knight in Chicago and John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, England – argued forcefully for the continued importance of the distinction. Knight observed that ‘a measurable uncertainty, or “risk” proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all’. 17 Keynes made a similar distinction.

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We assumed that the Duke and Marquis were equally likely to win each of the remaining games, and perhaps there was a frequency distribution of past results of similar games to guide our conjecture. In the Monty Hall problem, we judged that if there were three identical boxes the probability that the keys were in any one of them was one third. 17 John Maynard Keynes is known to everyone for his many contributions to public policy in Britain and internationally during the inter-war period and the Second World War. Before the Great War, however, Keynes had completed a fellowship dissertation – in effect, his doctoral thesis – at King’s College, Cambridge.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

Describing the economy as driven only by abstract economic forces suggests that the economy operates in a moral vacuum, that there is no criticism of their leadership. John Maynard Keynes: Narrative Economist Kristol’s dismissal of opinion polls notwithstanding, some of the most famous economic forecasts in world history appear to be based substantially on observations of narratives and worries about their human consequences. In his 1919 book Economic Consequences of the Peace, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that Germany would become deeply embittered by the heavy reparations imposed by the Versailles treaty ending World War I.

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History of Political Economy 39(3):529–43. Kermack, William Ogilvy, and Anderson Gray McKendrick. 1927. “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics.” Proceedings of the Royal Society 115(772):701–21. Keynes, John Maynard. 1920 [1919]. Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: Macmillan. ________. 1932. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930).” In Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: Harcourt Brace. ________. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirnarskaya, Dina. 2009. The Natural Musician: On Abilities, Giftedness, and Talent. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Irving Kristol, writing in 1977, expresses the typical economist’s view succinctly, dismissing public opinion polls purporting to measure business confidence: It is all supremely silly. Business confidence—as represented by the willingness to invest in new plant and equipment—is not a psychological phenomenon but an economic one. It is what Mr. Carter and what Mr. Burns do that counts, not what they say. John Maynard Keynes may have believed—and some of his disciples obviously still believe—that the propensity to invest is governed by the high or low “animal spirits” that prevail among businessmen. But then, Keynesian economists have always had a poor opinion of the intelligence of businessmen, whom they represent as temperamental children, to be paternalistically “managed.” … What governs business confidence are the prospects for profitable investment.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

only 9 percent of jobs are truly threatened: “Automation and Independent Work in a Digital Economy,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, May 2016, https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/Policy%20brief%20-%20Automation%20and%20Independent%20Work%20in%20a%20Digital%20Economy.pdf. “technological unemployment”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 358–83. Harvard economist Wassily Leontief: Charlotte Curtis, “Machines vs. Workers,” New York Times, February 8, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/08/arts/machines-vs-workers.html. Hal Varian: Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” Pew Research Center, August 6, 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/.

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“stultifying utilitarianism”: Farhad Manjoo, “The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable,” New York Times, May 28, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/the-soylent-revolution-will-not-be-pleasurable.html. “Imagine a meal”: Sam Sifton, “The Taste That Doesn’t Really Satisfy,” New York Times, May 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/technology/the-taste-that-doesnt-really-satisfy.html. “The ideas of economists”: John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. 7, The General Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 383. “tool for solving”: Thomas H. Cormen et al., Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 5. George Dantzig: George B. Dantzig, “Linear Programming,” Operations Research 50, no. 1 (February 2002): 42–47, https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.50.1.42.17798.

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Engineering has obviously brought humanity lots of good. But the story of Soylent is powerful because it reveals the optimization mindset of the technologist. And problems arise when this mindset begins to dominate—when the technologies begin to scale and become universal and unavoidable. The Education of an Engineer In 1936, John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists ever to live, observed the following: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
by Jerry Kaplan
Published 3 Aug 2015

We can do this by adjusting the incentives for people to do other productive things with their time. I’m by no means the first one to consider what the world will be like when our basic needs can be met without our own labor. None other than John Maynard Keynes, the legendary economist, wrote a fascinating meditation on this question in 1930 entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In this thoughtful essay, he projects that within a century (which is nearly up, of course), continued economic growth would permit us to meet the basic needs of all humans with little to no effort. As he puts it, “All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem” (his italics).

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See assets ownership stock markets IP addresses, 28 iPhone, 46, 198 IRAs (individual retirement accounts), 169 Jain, Kapil, 213n7 Jennings, Ken, 30, 150 Jeopardy! (TV quiz show), 30, 36, 150, 198–99 job mortgage loans proposal, 13–15, 153–57 jobs. See labor market John, George, 70, 72 Johnson, Lyndon B., 167 Kaiser Permanente, 214n8 Kennedy, John F., ix Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” 186 kitchen equipment, multipurpose, 46–47 Kiva Systems, 135 Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, 95 knowledge engineers, 23 Komisar, Randy, 218n15 Labor Department, 157 labor market, 119–27 advanced technology and, 191 alternatives to paid work and, 185–86 autonomous systems as threat to, 10–12, 20, 126–27, 131–58 average salary and, 116 competition for jobs and, 121–25 conventional economics and, 12 education-work sequence and, 13, 153, 157–58 excess workers and, 158 exclusions from, 170–71 federal measures and, 170, 171–72 historical comparisons and, 115–16, 164, 222n3 job skills and (see skills) letters of intent to hire and, 14, 154, 155 predictions about, 138–39, 140 reasons for working and, 184–85 salaries and, 116, 120, 145 tectonic shifts in, 133–35 turnover (2013) in, 137 workday standardization and, 171 work incentives and, 184–85 working adult statistics and, 172–74, 176.

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As a first approximation, I would suggest that the closure has to be computed until it reaches a natural person. 43. William McBride, “New Study Ponders Elimination of the Corporate Income Tax,” Tax Foundation, April 11, 2014, http://taxfoundation.org/blog/new-study-ponders-elimination-corporate-income-tax. 44. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Classic House Books, 2009). OUTRODUCTION 1. These are called “portmanteaus,” ironically itself a mash-up of the French words porter (carry) and manteau (coat). 2. John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” Appleton’s 8 (1906), http://explorepahistory.com/odocument.php?

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

The other correlated parts that have to change to reduce cultural lag are our systems of governance, beliefs, habits, cultural norms, and values. Almost a century ago John Maynard Keynes foresaw many of the economic and cultural challenges we are now facing. Keynes was deeply worried about a new societal dysfunction—technological unemployment (what he called job loss due to automation).6 He knew then, just as we know now, how difficult it would be for people who were threatened by change to adapt to it, and he accurately foresaw the stresses that rapid increases in productivity would exert on our value system. In 1930, in his now-classic article, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes postulated the end of the Protestant work ethic—one of our most basic values—and imagined a time when the accumulation of wealth would no longer be of high social importance: [T]echnical improvements in manufacture and transport have been proceeding at a greater rate in the last ten years than ever before in history.

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“Gilgamesh and Civilization,” Chamelionfire1, December 17, 2013, https://chameleonfire1.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/gilgamesh-and-civilization/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 5. “Fintech, the Incredible Growth of P2P (Peer to Peer) in China,” Marketing to China, September 22, 2017, https://www.marketingtochina.com/fintech-incredible-growth-p2p-peer-peer-china/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 6. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Marxists.org, 1930, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm (accessed June 28, 2019). 7. Ibid. 8. “What Does Voluntary Compliance Mean, in Regard to Taxes?,” Optima Tax Relief, July 29, 2014, https://www.optimataxrelief.com/voluntary-compliance-mean-regards-taxes/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 9.

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See also retail sector cybercrime and security, 132, 153–154 credit card, 74–76 cyber currencies, 78–80, 177–178 evolution of, 172–173 fake news classification as, 169–170 financial, 39–40, 75–76, 78–80, 171–172, 177–178 global effort needed for, 179 government response to, 172–176, 179 public utilities threat with, 173, 174 response rate relation to rate of, 171–172 Russia-based, 174 cyber currencies, 10, 83 blockchain technology of, 79, 80 electricity and miners involved with, 176 governance rules and systems, 176–178 government regulation needed for, 176–177 security with, 78–80, 177–178 as spatial equivalence, 16 cyber weapons, 16, 172–173, 174, 176 Daimler, Gottlieb, 53 Data and Goliath (Schneier), 127 Data Protection Directive, 129 data tracking/collection: advertising revenues’ role in, 89, 90, 120–123 algorithmic prisons with, 13, 114, 123–128 behavior manipulation in, 117, 121, 123 consumer protections against, 127–128 cookies’ role in, 89, 116, 117–118, 128 of credit rating agencies, 118–119 evolution and factors behind abuses of, 116–118 freemium business model role in, 121–123, 129–130 government agencies purchasing, 119, 131 information fiduciaries as protection for, 129–131 laws and regulations on, 128–130 liberty threats to and factors with, 13, 116–117, 123–128 privacy threat evolution with, 116–119 from social networking sites, 116, 118 transparency of, 127 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 109 Deep Blue, 46–47 delivery services, 102 democracy: authoritarianism threat to, 158–159 collective identity of citizens key to, 163, 166, 168 income inequality in relation to, 163–164 social media/networking threats to, 7, 18, 168–169 depression, 147–148, 166 Dichter, Ernest, 135 discrimination, 162–163, 165–166 displacement: business, 71, 72–73, 99 job, with job creation historically, 51–54, 106 job, without new job creation, 43, 51, 60–64, 98–99, 105–106 Distracted Minds (Gazzaley), 155 Echo, 119 economic policy and metrics: Depression-era, 67, 160 on monetizable productivity, 58–59 non-monetizable productivity in relation to, 52, 58–59, 66, 67, 68 unemployment rates in relation to, 106–107 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 187–189 economy: automation impacts on, 12–13 Autonomous, 60–61, 96–98 entrepreneurship, 110 gig, 7, 34, 63, 84, 85, 94 Second Economy contrasted with traditional, 97–98, 103 sharing, 70, 83–87, 100, 101–102 social empathy decline with decline of, 164–165 traditional compared to Autonomous, 96 elder care, 111 election tampering, 89, 167, 180, 186 electricity: cyber currency mining use of, 176 invention of, 29, 182 ELIZA, 46 Elsevier, Reed, 119 email, 60–61, 150 emotion detection technology, 115–116 empires, rise and fall of, 6–7, 24–25 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama), 158 Enlightenment, xii, 2, 22, 152 entrepreneurship, rates of, 110 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 24, 183–184, 185 Equifax, 75–76, 118, 126, 130 Estonia, 174 ethnicity.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

James Robbin, “Free Market Flawed, Says Survey,” BBC News, Nov. 9, 2009, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8347409.stm. 44. “New Poll: Socialism Is Gaining Popularity in America,” Cleveland Leader, Apr. 9, 2009, clevelandleader.com/node/9655. 45. See John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 358–73. The essay was first published in 1930. 46. John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” Yale Review 22 (1933): 761. 47. Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (New York: Crown, 2012), 239. 48. Schor, Plenitude; Wolff, Democracy at Work; Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, 2d ed.

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This is a recession, and it is a part of a business cycle that has always existed under capitalism. Of course, recessions end when conditions change—inventories run down, wages fall, bad debt is cleared off the books—and generally turn into booms. Even at the business cycle’s peak, as contemporary Americans know well, it will not necessarily gravitate to full employment. Instead, as John Maynard Keynes posited in his General Theory, the logical resting spot for an advanced capitalist economy may be with significant unemployment and unused capacity. The business cycle may “peak” with millions unemployed and incomes in decline.75 A major conclusion of Keynesian economics was the need for an increased role of the government in the economy.

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It is only recently, as capitalism has floundered, that it has become almost mandatory to regard capitalism as permanent, irreplaceable, and benevolent. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, when it produced golden-age results in America by today’s standards, it was more common to have frank, no-holds-barred discussions of the system’s merits and demerits. Going back further, many of the great economists, including John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes, understood capitalism as a historically specific system, not as the eternal state of nature for humanity. Mill and Keynes saw capitalism as solving the “economic problem” and eventually making a world without scarcity—and therefore without capitalism—possible. Granted, Mill and Keynes saw that outcome as generations away and championed capitalism in their own times, but their historical perspective sharpened their critique and gave it tremendous lasting significance.45 During the depths of the Great Depression, Keynes wrote an extraordinary essay acknowledging that economists, as well as business and political leaders, had been woefully wrong about the economy and how to make it work for the bulk of the population.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Nordhaus, “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement,” National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 10433, issued April 2004, doi:10.3386/w10433. 297 had to change its policies: Sam Shead, “Apple Is Finally Going to Start Publishing Its AI Research,” Business Insider, December 6, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-finally-going-to-start-publishing-its-artificial-intelligence-research-2016-12. CHAPTER 14: WE DON’T HAVE TO RUN OUT OF JOBS 298 “live wisely and agreeably and well”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–73, available online from http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ 116a/keynes1.pdf. 298 the world has been getting better: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” OurWorldIn Data.org, first published in 2013; substantive revision March 27, 2017, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/. 299 once destroyed factory jobs: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A.

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As Max Roser, creator of Our World in Data, a remarkable collection of visualizations about how the world has been getting better over the last five hundred years, notes: “Even in 1981 more than 50% of the world population lived in absolute poverty—this is now down to about 14%. This is still a large number of people, but the change is happening incredibly fast. For our present world, the data tells us that poverty is now falling more quickly than ever before in world history.” Much of Keynes’s essay, titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” concerns the issue of what people might do with their time when productivity has increased to the point where the machines do all the work. Is there really not enough work left for humans to do? Keynes didn’t think so in 1930, and I don’t think so now. “We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism,” he wrote.

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See fake news disruptive forces, xxiii disruptive technology, 351–52 Dobbs, Richard, xxiii “Dog and the Frisbee, The” (Haldane), 175 Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (Janeway), 104–5, 274 DonorsChoose, 183 dot-com boom, 29 Dougherty, Dale, 28–29, 81, 99–100, 337 Drucker, Peter F., 250 Dvorak, John, 41 Dyson, George, 45 eBay, 39, 182–83, 294 “Economic Mechanism Design for Computerized Agents” (Varian), 261 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 298–99 economics, 271–73 assigning a value to caregiving, 310–11 efficiency wages, 197 employers’ 29-hour loophole, 194–95, 196 fundamental law of capitalism, 268 invisible hand of competition, 262–70 the “laws” of economics, 257–62 and leisure time, 308–11 machine money and people money, 306–7, 308, 309 minimum wage, 197–98, 264–68 secular stagnation, 271 Stiglitz exposes the 1%, 255 trickle down, 244, 265, 273 universal basic income, 305–6, 307–11 wealth inequality, 263–65 welfare economics, 263, 266, 307 economy, xxii and adaptations to change, xxiv–xxv creativity-based, 312–19 financial crisis of 2008, 172–73, 175, 238, 265, 275, 359 as government’s thick marketplace, 133 of Korea, 134 technology and the future of the economy scenario plan, 364–67 See also financial markets economy and Silicon Valley, 274–75 the Clothesline Paradox, 295–97 digital platforms and the real economy, 288–89 market capitalization/supermoney, 276–79, 280–84, 289 measuring value creation, 289–95 pool of qualified workers, 347–50 venture capital-backed startups, 275, 282–84 Y Combinator program for VC-funded companies, 286–87 education/training creating, sharing, and embedding into tools, 323–32, 334–36 as investment in other’s children, 320–21 for jobs, 303, 304, 321 lagging behind technology, 335–36 learning by doing, 337–41, 345–50 on-demand education, 341–45 Open Cloud Academy at Rackspace, 350 play element, 340–41 and social capital, 345–50 efficiency wages, 197 efficient market hypothesis, 259–61 “Eight Principles of Open Government Data” (Malamud, Lessig, and O’Reilly), 130–31 electric cars, safety-related load of, 66–67 Eliot, T.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

Underlying this loss of hope is a new economic reality where it’s not just the poor who are missing out on economic gains. Much of the middle class is also feeling squeezed. Instead of technology allowing for a fifteen-hour work week, as Keynes predicted when he penned his 1930s essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” vast numbers of people are working longer, in jobs they rightly fear will soon be gone. Trapped—wondering how they will provide for their families and basic needs when the other shoe drops. At the same time, we are seeing a massive rise in inequality: in the United States, the top 5 percent of the population now holds more than two-thirds of the wealth, while the remaining 95 percent of the population fights for their share of the other third.1 Just three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—account for more wealth than 50 percent of the population.

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Introduction: The End of Inflation “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) Technology is deflationary. That is not conjecture. It is the nature of technology. And because technology underpins more and more of the world around us, it means that we are entering into an age of deflation unlike any the world has ever seen.

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This race to the bottom on currencies only serves to further push up global asset prices. And the endless game of reducing the value of currencies relative to others only serves as a short-term panacea, because asset prices will rise far more quickly than jobs can be created—and pay rates increased—to keep pace with the asset price rise. As the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

While most economists today would look at an era of nearly free goods and services with a sense of foreboding, a few earlier economists expressed a guarded enthusiasm over the prospect. Keynes, the venerable twentieth-century economist whose economic theories still hold considerable weight, penned a small essay in 1930 entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which appeared as millions of Americans were beginning to sense that the sudden economic downturn of 1929 was in fact the beginning of a long plunge to the bottom. Keynes observed that new technologies were advancing productivity and reducing the cost of goods and services at an unprecedented rate.

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George, 242 The Descent of Man (Darwin), 63 Deutsche Telekom, 54, 101, 198 Dini, Erico, 97 DIY culture, 90, 94–95, 99–100 Dobb, Maurice, 40 Doctorow, Cory, 95 dominance of social media, 201 see also Facebook; Friendster; Myspace; Twitter driverless vehicle(s), 126, 230–231 Drucker, Peter, 264 Duffy, John, 137 eBay becoming an online monopoly, 201–205 cuts out the middlemen, 232 and free currency, 262 as a profit-seeking enterprise, 252 ecological footprint, 107, 274–276, 284, 286, 302 Econofly, 145 economic need for greener/cleaner energy, 10 “Economic Policy for the Information Economy” (Summers and DeLong), 7–9 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 6–7 The Economist, 5, 77–78, 121–122, 251, 259, 265 economy of abundance, 297–303 and a biosphere lifestyle, 297–303 circular, idea of a, 236–237 and the sustainable cornucopia, 273–296 education, higher. see massive open online courses (MOOCs) edX, 115–116 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 179 electricity importance of, 51–53 liberates women, 285 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), 142, 293–294 electromagnetic spectrum, 148, 165, 167, 185, 189–190 electronic healthcare records, 13, 130, 244 Elkington, John, 264 The Empathetic Civilization (Hegel), 301 employment, new kinds of, 266–269 Enclosure Movement, 17, 31, 169 The End of Work (Rifkin), 121–122 energy adaptive computing, 85 Commons, 205–206 cooperatives, 215–217 costs at data centers, 84–86 and economics, 10–11 and fossil fuel(s). see fossil fuel(s) free, 81–84 and Germany. see Germany infrastructure is vulnerable to climate change, 290 IT. see Cleanweb Movement use, proactive rather than reactive, 143 Energy Watch Group, 83–84 entrepreneurialism, strengthened by Protestant theologians, 59 entropy, definition of, 10 Entropy: A New World View (Rifkin), 100 environmentalist(s), 170–172, 187–188 Environmental Movement, 173, 182, 185 era of transparency, 75–77 Etsy, 91, 262 European Bioinformatics Institute, 86 European Commission, 11, 76–77 European enclosures, and birth of the market economy, 29–38 exponential curves, 79– 81 “extreme productivity,” 3, 70–73 ExxonMobil, 49, 54 the Fab Lab, 70, 94–95, 310 Facebook becoming an online monopoly, 201–205 changes the concept of privacy, 76 as communication, 151, 234, 248, 250, 302 exploiting the Commons for commercial ends, 199–200, 310 and freedom, 226 and GM’s decision to yank ads from, 251 as a podium for activism, 189 revenue and market share, 201 and the “Social Energy App,” 147 and Spotify, 145 and Yerdle, 237 and Zuckerberg, 145 Farber, Amy, 241–242 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 147–151, 194, 198–199 Ferris, Cameron, 246 fertility rate, falling, 285 Filabot, 96 “fit-lifters,” 127 Flickr, 180, 234, 250 forager/hunter society(ies), 298–302 Ford, Henry, 52–54, 71, 98, 105, 123, 308 Fortune 500 companies, 22, 114, 175, 310 fossil fuel(s) costs of, 69, 87, 91, 140, 142 and cyberattacks, 294 location of, 22–23 reliance on, 54, 194–195 stalwart supporters of, 86–87 versus renewables, 69–72, 81–87, 216–217, 267, 283 see also oil “free” energy, 81–84 as a marketing device, 5 in price and free from scarcity, 273 Free Culture Movement, 173–188, 202 Freecycle Network (TFN), 236 “free-riders dilemma,” 156, 258 Free Software Foundation, 174–175 Free Software Movement, 100, 170, 174–179 free wi-fi, 147–149 feudal commons, 16–17, 29–32, 36–37, 58–61, 132, 155–156, 167, 269 Foundation on Economic Trends (FOET), 165–167, 182 Friendster, 200, 204 Frischmann, Brett M., 193–194 Frydman, Gilles, 242 Gaia hypothesis, 184 Gandhi, Mahatma, 104–108 Gates, Bill, 171, 174 GDP, 17, 20–22, 54, 74, 123, 129, 240, 266 General Electric (GE), 13, 14, 54, 73–74, 165, 210, 234 General Motors, 53, 54, 228–230 General Public Licenses (GPL), 94, 175–176 Germany and cooperatives, 213–216 flood in, 287 and Google, 201 and renewable energy, 82–83, 101, 141, 253, 257 and 3D printing, 101–102 Gershenfeld, Neil, 94 Gillespie, Tarleton, 203 Girsky, Stephen, 228–229 globalization versus reopening the global commons, 187–192 GM, teams up with RelayRides, 228–229 GNU operating system, 174–176 God of oil. see Hall, Andy Google cashes in on selling Big Data, 199–200 and control of the U.S. media market, 54 and driverless vehicles, 230 energy usage, 85 favors free Wi-Fi connection, 148 market share and revenue generated by, 201 as natural monopoly, 202–205 Ngram Viewer, 18 primary revenue stream is weakening, 251 as tracking tool, 245 Gore, Al, 219 Gorenflo, Neal, 238 Gou, Terry, 124 “The Governing of the Commons” (Ostrom), 158–162 Gram Power, 103–104 Green Button initiative, 146 Great Chain of Being, 30, 58–59, 61 Great Recession, 20, 122–129, 233, 255–262, 281–282 green feed-in tariff(s), 139, 206 Guardian, 104, 116 guilds by trade, 36–37 Gutenberg, Johannes, 35–37 hacker(s) connotations of the term, 93 and cyberterrorists, 291–292 and environmentalist(s), 170–172, 187–188 and the Free Culture Movement, 173–174 and the Makers Movement, 99–104 and 3D printing, 95 Hall, Andy, 87 Hansen, James, 287 Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Layard), 277 Haque, Umair, 253 Hardin, Garrett, 155–159 Hazen, Paul, 213 healthcare, 13, 74, 130, 240–247 hedonistic treadmill, 276 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 279, 301 Heilbroner, Robert, 5, 105 Herr, Bill, 129 higher education. see massive open online courses (MOOCs) The High Price of Materialism (Kasser), 277 high-tech Armageddon. see cyber attacks/cyberterrorism Hoch, Dan, 243–244 Hotelling, Harold, 136–137, 150, 206–211 how best to judge economic success, 20–21 Hoyt, Robert, 58 human race empathetic sensibility of, 278–286, 301 and Enlightenment, 60–65 and human nature through a capitalist lens, 57–65 liberating the, 7, 70 and ostracism, 163 rethinking salvation, 58–59 what makes us happy, 276–285 Hume, David, 62, 308 hybrid economy. see capitalism; Collaborative Commons IBM, 13, 14, 80, 130, 234, 250 infofacture vs. manufacture, 90 Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Frischmann), 193–194 Integrated Transportation Provider Services (ITPS), 228 Intel, 79, 148 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), 195–196 the Internet of Everything, 14, 73 the Internet generation, 132, 145, 179, 226, 230 the Internet of Things (IoT), 11–16, 65 and Big Data. see Big Data and the chief productivity officer (CPO), 15 as a double-edged sword, 78, 267 and healthcare. see healthcare made up of, 11, 14–15 and near zero marginal cost society, 73–78 negatives associated with, 14 obstacles that slowed the deployment of, 74 and smart cities. see smart cities as source of employment, 267–268 and use of sensors, 11–13, 73–74, 143, 219, 230 Internet of Things European Research Cluster, 11 infrastructure, requirements of, 14 Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, 292 Jakubowski, Marcin, 102–103 James, William, 279–280 Jennings, Ken, 130 Jobs, Steve, 305, 308 Jumpstart Our Business Start Ups Act, 257 Kaku, Michio, 79 Kasser, Tim, 277 Keynes, John Maynard, 5–7, 105, 268 Khoshnevis, Dr.

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Many, though not all, of the old guard in the commercial arena can’t imagine how economic life would proceed in a world where most goods and services are nearly free, profit is defunct, property is meaningless, and the market is superfluous. What then? Some are just beginning to ask that question. They might find some solace in the fact that several of the great architects of modern economic thinking glimpsed the problem long ago. John Maynard Keynes, Robert Heilbroner, and Wassily Leontief, to name a few, pondered the critical contradiction that drove capitalism forward. They wondered whether, in the distant future, new technologies might so boost productivity and lower prices as to create the coming state of affairs. Oskar Lange, a University of Chicago professor of the early twentieth century, captured a sense of the conundrum underlying a mature capitalism in which the search for new technological innovations to advance productivity and cheapen prices put the system at war with itself.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

Neoliberalism is among the leading reasons why today even the most advantaged people are burning the midnight oil working on projects that deliver minimal value for society. Sure, executing a reorganization or an M&A deal improves “efficiency.” But for whom? In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes, the architect of Keynesian economics, speculated that productivity growth might enable humanity to someday work fifteen hours a week.23 Keynes was correct about productivity growth: since 1948, productivity has tripled.24 But Keynes did not anticipate neoliberalism: American workers today work just 10 percent fewer hours than we did in 1950, and hours have not decreased at all since neoliberalism took hold in the 1970s.25 Productivity gains are not translating into much-higher wages either: while productivity grew 62 percent between 1920 and 1979, hourly pay only increased 17.5 percent. 26 In Old Europe, leisure was a symbol of status.

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(And How to Fix It) (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2019). 22. Jay Greene, “Bill Gates Acknowledges an Affair with an Employee, Which Microsoft Investigated,” Washington Post, May 17, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/17/bill-gates-affair-investigation/. 23. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–373. 24. Willem Roper, “Working More for Less: How Wages in America Have Stagnated,” World Economic Forum, November 10, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/. 25.

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More than the rest of the social sciences, economics is dominated by white men, who leverage their collective power to assert that their contributions are superior to those in other fields like history, psychology, and sociology.3 Since its founding in 1958, the Kennedy School had been led by white men. And since a white male economist was selected as dean in 2004, it has been led by white male economists.4 One of those white male economists decided to host a meeting on Chetty’s research in 2018. I’ll call him John, after John Maynard Keynes, the economist. This John has dedicated his career to the issue of American poverty and welfare. He’s a nationally recognized expert on the topic, and his books have helped to shape national policy. Perhaps due to his perceived status on the topic, John was dominating the conversation in the faculty lounge.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

The Head world is generally a secular one, with little feel for the mysteries of life, which is why so many of us today seek a substitute for it in everything from yoga and meditation to the green movement. Yet it is striking what a disappointing failure humanism has been. It has been an effective critic of religion but has provided no convincing alternative set of ideas on how to live well. John Maynard Keynes, writing about a world in which economic necessity has been largely overcome in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” sees a return to religious principles. “I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue… We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.

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By the 1930s the proportion of the adult male population in professional occupations remained below 10 percent in all rich countries. The cognitive class was too small to have significant political or cultural influence. The world was still largely ruled by tradition, religious belief, and the “practical men” who, according to John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1936, “believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, but are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes was a member of the loose grouping of English intellectuals and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group whose avant-garde ideas and ways of life—“they lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles,” as Dorothy Parker is said to have put it—had almost no impact on British society in the 1930s.

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My American grandfather eagerly signed up for one of the new economics courses at Cambridge, England, just before the First World War, only to be told that his proposed tutor at Trinity College was away for the year. Trinity suggested an alternative young economist at King’s but warned that he was not “sound”; his name was John Maynard Keynes. My grandfather decided to study law instead. Chapter Three Cognitive Ability and the Meritocracy Puzzle To equate IQ with human virtue or wisdom or character or a whole variety of other of the most important measures of a value of a person is ridiculous. IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable things that inferior chip speed will not enable.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

Kelly, Kevin, “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online.” Wired, May 22, 2009. At http://archive.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all. Kelly, Thomas, “Sunk Costs, Rationality, and Acting for the Sake of the Past.” Noûs, 38.1 (2004): 60–85. Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930). In John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. Norton, 1963. Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy. Harvard Business School Press, 2005. Klein, Naomi, No Logo. Fourth Estate, 2010. Kleiner, Morris M., “Reforming Occupational Licensing Policies.” Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2015-1.

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; Baker, Bloom, and Davis, “Policy Uncertainty Is Choking Recovery.” 25.Gulen and Ion, “Policy Uncertainty and Corporate Investment.” 26.See, for example, Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, and Scarpetta, “Cross-Country Differences in Productivity.” 27.Greenstone, List, and Syverson, “The Effects of Environmental Regulation.” 28.Golec, Hegde, and Vernon, “Pharmaceutical R&D Spending and Threats of Price Regulation” shows how R&D spending in a highly innovative sector such as pharmaceuticals gets distorted by price regulations. 29.See, for example, Atkinson and Garner, “Regulation as Industrial Policy”; Gerard and Lave, “Implementing Technology-Forcing Policies.” 30.See, for example, Prieger, “Regulatory Delay and the Timing of Product Innovation.” 31.This section draws on Erixon, “Biofuels Reform in the European Union”; Erixon, “The Rising Trend.” 32.Dabla-Norris et al., “The New Normal.” 33.Acemoglu, Aghion, and Zilibotti, “Distance to Frontier, Selection, and Economic Growth.” 34.Ranasinghe, “Impact of Policy Distortions”; Gabler and Poschke, “Experimentation by Firms, Distortions, and Aggregate Productivity”; Da-Rocha, Mendes Tavares, and Restuccia, “Policy Distortions and Aggregate Productivity with Endogenous Establishment-Level Productivity”; Bhattacharya, Guner, and Ventura, “Distortions, Endogenous Managerial Skills and Productivity Differences”; Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, and Scarpetta, “Cross-Country Differences in Productivity”; Restuccia and Rogerson, “Policy Distortions and Aggregate Productivity.” 35.Gabler and Poschke, “Experimentation by Firms, Distortions, and Aggregate Productivity.” 36.See for example Bhattacharya, Guner, and Ventura, “Distortions, Endogenous Managerial Skills and Productivity Differences.” 8 Capitalism and Robots 1.The Economist, “Coming to an Office Near You.” 2.Gapper and Waters, “Google Chief Warns of IT Threat.” 3.Matulka, “Timeline: The History of the Electric Car.” 4.Deffree, “Karl Benz Drives the First Automobile.” 5.Krugman, “The Big Meh.” 6.ATA, “New ATA Report Shows Growing Shortage of Qualified Truck Drivers.” 7.Akst, “What Can We Learn from Past Anxiety over Automation?” 8.Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” 9.Life Magazine, “Parking Consultants and Surfboarding Instructors May Keep the Economy Going.” 10.Kahn and Wiener, The Year 2000. 11.Akst, “What Can We Learn from Past Anxiety over Automation?” 12.Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, “The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights.” 13.Tracy, “Why Some of Google’s Coolest Projects Flop Badly.” 14.Tracy, “Why Some of Google’s Coolest Projects Flop Badly.” 15.Polymath Consulting, “A Brief History of Payments.” 16.Byrnes, “Technology Repaints the Payment Landscape.” 17.Mainelli and Milne, “The Impact and Potential of Blockchain,” 4. 18.Mainelli and Milne, “The Impact and Potential of Blockchain,” 5. 19.Simmons, “George Foster: Are Startups Really Job Engines?”

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The basic plot, if you will allow a simplification, in much of the intellectual history of the world centers around the battle between new discoveries and old dogma, and the former tends to win over the latter – not immediately, not in the short run, perhaps not even in the medium term, but in the long run new discoveries often do win. However, in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes noted, we are all dead. Political romanticism better suits a historian of ideas than a scholar of contemporary politics and economics. The judgment about the Danes in 1066 and All That, the humorous version of English history, does not apply to economic policy: you cannot be both “right and very romantic.”14 Innovation delayed is innovation denied.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

It’s important to be clear that the Depression was the result of a massive failure of the financial system and not due to the automation of work that was proceeding apace in the nation’s factories. Still, the potential threat to jobs that automation also posed had certainly been noted. John Maynard Keynes, most famously, diagnosed in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” what he called a “new disease” in the world’s largest economies. He called it “technological unemployment” and explained that it was “due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”

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And it can let you keep your job, while making it a better one. Whatever Happened to the Fifteen-Hour Workweek? If you were reading this book half a century ago, you might be very surprised to find us referring to augmentation as something that would help you retain your work, not be rid of it. In 1928, John Maynard Keynes penned an essay he titled “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” which argued that decades of productivity and technology improvements would leave those progeny with a new kind of problem: figuring out what to do with their vast leisure time. He wrote: “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won.”9 Keynes expected that by now we’d all be working about fifteen hours per week.

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Maddy Myers, “Google Glass: Inspired by Terminator,” Slice of MIT, May 30, 2013, https://slice.mit.edu/2013/05/30/google-glass-inspired-by-terminator/. 7. David Scott, remarks at the opening of the Computer Museum, June 10, 1982, transcript accessed October 29, 2015, http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/ech/agc_scott.pdf. 8. David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 9. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963), 358–73. 10. David H. Autor, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth,” prepared for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s economic policy symposium on “Reevaluating Labor Market Dynamics,” September 3, 2014, http://economics.mit.edu/files/9835. 11.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

Buddha says: “None of the world is good.” I am fond of my hut… But even if I wanted to renounce the world, I wouldn’t be able to afford a hut in California. as old as John Maynard Keynes: Keynes extended the prediction—much, much talked about ever since—in an essay notably published in 1930, just after the stock market crash of 1929: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, October 11 and 18, 1930. “You can see the computer age”: This line first appeared in Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” review of Manufacturing Matters by Stephen S.

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Nichol answers, “But I don’t want to live in a spaceship.” He looked genuinely surprised. In his line of work, he’d never met anyone who didn’t want to live in a spaceship. * * * — That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled. In 1987, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Robert Solow famously commented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This has been, even more so, the experience of most of those living in the developed world in the decades since—rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies – all the traditional touchstones of science fiction – in order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism. Neoliberalism, as secure as it may seem today, contains no guarantee of future survival. Like every social system we have ever known, it will not last forever. Our task now is to invent what happens next. Notes INTRODUCTION 1.John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963); George Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Dery, ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’, in Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970). 2.For exemplars of this stance, see Franco Berardi, After the Future (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011); T.

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, Organization, 2013, at sagepub.com. 58.Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 115–17; Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, p. 76. 59.Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, p. 133. 60.Hunnicutt, Work Without End, p. 1. 61.Ibid., p. 155. 62.Ibid., pp. 147–9. 63.Paul Lafargue, ‘The Right to Be Lazy’, in Bernard Marszalek, ed., The Right to Be Lazy: Essays by Paul Lafargue (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), p. 34. 64.John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963); Hunnicutt, Work Without End, p. 155. 65.Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 820. 66.Hunnicutt, Work Without End, Chapter 7. 67.A handful of EU countries – most notably France – have reduced the working week to as little as thirty-five hours, but the overall trend has been to maintain a forty-hour working week.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

In the professions, though, our general view is that this (often nostalgic) preference for the old ways of working will be too high a price to pay, especially if the quality of service is demonstrably lower than that provided by a machine. 7.3. Technological unemployment? In 1930, speculating about ‘the economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, John Maynard Keynes introduced the concept of ‘technological unemployment’.23 The basic idea is simple—that new technologies might put people out of work. The question to which we now turn is whether there will be technological unemployment in the professions in the very long term. The short answer is, ‘there will’.

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David Musson has been an ongoing source of encouragement and of wise counsel; and we are grateful also at OUP to Kim Behrens, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Phil Henderson, and Clare Kennedy for their enthusiasm and professionalism. Thank you also to Jeff New for his superb copy-editing. The epigraph by John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), © The Royal Economic Society, published by Cambridge University Press, is reproduced with permission. Alan Susskind reviewed the entire manuscript. His observations and his ongoing support were very much appreciated. At the same time, Werner Susskind merits special mention for keeping us fully supplied with relevant articles from the BMJ.

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Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot. John Stuart Mill The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes Contents List of Boxes and Figure Introduction PART I. CHANGE 1. The Grand Bargain 1.1 Everyday conceptions 1.2 The scope of the professions 1.3 Historical context 1.4 The bargain explained 1.5 Theories of the professions 1.6 Four central questions 1.7 Disconcerting problems 1.8 A new mindset 1.9 Some common biases 2.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

,” New Left Review, no. 87, S2, May–June 2014. 6 Emre Tiftik et al., “Global Debt Monitor: Sustainability Matters,” Institute of International Finance, January 13, 2020, quoted in John Plender, “The Seeds of the Next Debt Crisis,” Financial Times, March 3, 2020. 7 Data on economic growth rates from World Bank, World Development Indicators, last updated April 2020. 8 Dan McCrum, “Lex in Depth: The Case against Share Buybacks,” Financial Times, January 29, 2019. 9 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 1932; The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Harcourt, 1964 [1936], pp. 320–6; 374–7. See Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution, Verso, 2017. 10 Keynes, General Theory, 376.

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See Robert Atkinson and John Wu, “False Alarmism: Technological Disruption and the US Labor Market, 1850–2015,” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 2017, itif.org. 19 Wassily Leontief, “Technological Advance, Economic Growth, and the Distribution of Income,” Population and Development Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1983, p. 404. 20 Keynes had a similar reaction to his own discovery that no mechanism in capitalist economies automatically generates full employment. See his “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 1932; and William Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society, George Allen & Unwin, 1944, esp. pp. 21–3. 21 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, Penguin Classics, 1976 [1867], pp. 492–508. 22 Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs: America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, pp. 305–7.

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For an analysis of the demographic aspects of these arguments, see Melinda Cooper, “Secular Stagnation: Fear of a Non-Reproductive Future,” Postmodern Culture, vol. 27, no. 1, 2016. 11 Larry Summers, “Demand Side Secular Stagnation,” American Economic Review, vol. 105, no. 5, 2015, p. 64. 12 Keynes, General Theory, p. 324. 13 Keynes, “Economic Possibilities,” pp. 368–9. 14 Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, Revisiting Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, MIT Press, 2008. See also Mike Beggs, “Keynes’s Jetpack,” Jacobin, April 17, 2012; Robert Chernomas, “Keynes on Post-Scarcity Society,” Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 18, no. 4, 1984; James Crotty, Keynes against Capitalism, Taylor & Francis, 2019. 15 Robinson admonished the “bastard Keynesians” for inverting the rank order of Keynes’s commitments, ventriloquizing Keynes to argue, absurdly, that “if capitalism is incompatible with plenty, plenty ought to be sacrificed to keep capitalism going.”

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

Although, as will soon become evident, I am by no means qualified to opine on what is essentially a matter for economists,19 I suspect that the issue is too important to leave entirely to them. The issue of technological unemployment was brought to the fore in a famous article, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” by John Maynard Keynes. He wrote the article in 1930, when the Great Depression had created mass unemployment in Britain, but the topic has a much longer history. Aristotle, in Book I of his Politics, presents the main point quite clearly: For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others . . . if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.

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We need a plausible destination in order to plan a transition—that is, we need a plausible picture of a desirable future economy where most of what we currently call work is done by machines. One rapidly emerging picture is that of an economy where far fewer people work because work is unnecessary. Keynes envisaged just such a future in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” He described the high unemployment afflicting Great Britain in 1930 as a “temporary phase of maladjustment” caused by an “increase of technical efficiency” that took place “faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption.” He did not, however, imagine that in the long run—after a century of further technological advances—there would be a return to full employment: Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

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See intelligent agent agent program, 48 “AI Researchers on AI Risk” (Alexander), 153 Alciné, Jacky, 60 Alexander, Scott, 146, 153, 169–70 algorithms, 33–34 Bayesian networks and, 275–77 Bayesian updating, 283, 284 bias and, 128–30 chess-playing, 62–63 coding of, 34 completeness theorem and, 51–52 computer hardware and, 34–35 content selection, 8–9, 105 deep learning, 58–59, 288–93 dynamic programming, 54–55 examples of common, 33–34 exponential complexity of problems and, 38–39 halting problem and, 37–38 lookahead search, 47, 49–50, 260–61 propositional logic and, 268–70 reinforcement learning, 55–57, 105 subroutines within, 34 supervised learning, 58–59, 285–93 Alibaba, 250 AlphaGo, 6, 46–48, 49–50, 55, 91, 92, 206–7, 209–10, 261, 265, 285 AlphaZero, 47, 48 altruism, 24, 227–29 altruistic AI, 173–75 Amazon, 106, 119, 250 Echo, 64–65 “Picking Challenge” to accelerate robot development, 73–74 Analytical Engine, 40 ants, 25 Aoun, Joseph, 123 Apple HomePod, 64–65 “Architecture of Complexity, The” (Simon), 265 Aristotle, 20–21, 39–40, 50, 52, 53, 114, 245 Armstrong, Stuart, 221 Arnauld, Antoine, 21–22 Arrow, Kenneth, 223 artificial intelligence (AI), 1–12 agent (See intelligent agent) agent programs, 48–59 beneficial, principles for (See beneficial AI) benefits to humans of, 98–102 as biggest event in human history, 1–4 conceptual breakthroughs required for (See conceptual breakthroughs required for superintelligent AI) decision making on global scale, capability for, 75–76 deep learning and, 6 domestic robots and, 73–74 general-purpose, 46–48, 100, 136 global scale, capability to sense and make decisions on, 74–76 goals and, 41–42, 48–53, 136–42, 165–69 governance of, 249–53 health advances and, 101 history of, 4–6, 40–42 human preferences and (See human preferences) imagining what superintelligent machines could do, 93–96 intelligence, defining, 39–61 intelligent personal assistants and, 67–71 limits of superintelligence, 96–98 living standard increases and, 98–100 logic and, 39–40 media and public perception of advances in, 62–64 misuses of (See misuses of AI) mobile phones and, 64–65 multiplier effect of, 99 objectives and, 11–12, 43, 48–61, 136–42, 165–69 overly intelligent AI, 132–44 pace of scientific progress in creating, 6–9 predicting arrival of superintelligent AI, 76–78 reading capabilities and, 74–75 risk posed by (See risk posed by AI) scale and, 94–96 scaling up sensory inputs and capacity for action, 94–95 self-driving cars and, 65–67, 181–82, 247 sensing on global scale, capability to, 75 smart homes and, 71–72 softbots and, 64 speech recognition capabilities and, 74–75 standard model of, 9–11, 13, 48–61, 247 Turing test and, 40–41 tutoring by, 100–101 virtual reality authoring by, 101 World Wide Web and, 64 “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030” (One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence), 149, 150 Asimov, Isaac, 141 assistance games, 192–203 learning preferences exactly in long run, 200–202 off-switch game, 196–200 paperclip game, 194–96 prohibitions and, 202–3 uncertainty about human objectives, 200–202 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 250 assumption failure, 186–87 Atkinson, Robert, 158 Atlas humanoid robot, 73 autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), 110–13 autonomy loss problem, 255–56 Autor, David, 116 Avengers: Infinity War (film), 224 “avoid putting in human goals” argument, 165–69 axiomatic basis for utility theory, 23–24 axioms, 185 Babbage, Charles, 40, 132–33 backgammon, 55 Baidu, 250 Baldwin, James, 18 Baldwin effect, 18–20 Banks, Iain, 164 bank tellers, 117–18 Bayes, Thomas, 54 Bayesian logic, 54 Bayesian networks, 54, 275–77 Bayesian rationality, 54 Bayesian updating, 283, 284 Bayes theorem, 54 behavior, learning preferences from, 190–92 behavior modification, 104–7 belief state, 282–83 beneficial AI, 171–210, 247–49 caution regarding development of, reasons for, 179 data available for learning about human preferences, 180–81 economic incentives for, 179–80 evil behavior and, 179 learning to predict human preferences, 176–77 moral dilemmas and, 178 objective of AI is to maximize realization of human preferences, 173–75 principles for, 172–79 proofs for (See proofs for beneficial AI) uncertainty as to what human preferences are, 175–76 values, defining, 177–78 Bentham, Jeremy, 24, 219 Berg, Paul, 182 Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks (BRETT), 73 Bernoulli, Daniel, 22–23 “Bill Gates Fears AI, but AI Researchers Know Better” (Popular Science), 152 blackmail, 104–5 blinking reflex, 57 blockchain, 161 board games, 45 Boole, George, 268 Boolean (propositional) logic, 51, 268–70 bootstrapping process, 81–82 Boston Dynamics, 73 Bostrom, Nick, 102, 144, 145, 150, 166, 167, 183, 253 brains, 16, 17–18 reward system and, 17–18 Summit machine, compared, 34 BRETT (Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks), 73 Brin, Sergey, 81 Brooks, Rodney, 168 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 117 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, 253–54 Butler, Samuel, 133–34, 159 “can’t we just . . .” responses to risks posed by AI, 160–69 “. . . avoid putting in human goals,” 165–69 “. . . merge with machines,” 163–65 “. . . put it in a box,” 161–63 “. . . switch it off,” 160–61 “. . . work in human-machine teams,” 163 Cardano, Gerolamo, 21 caring professions, 122 Chace, Calum, 113 changes in human preferences over time, 240–45 Changing Places (Lodge), 121 checkers program, 55, 261 chess programs, 62–63 Chollet, François, 293 chunking, 295 circuits, 291–92 CNN, 108 CODE (Collaborative Operations in Denied Environments), 112 combinatorial complexity, 258 common operational picture, 69 compensation effects, 114–17 completeness theorem (Gödel’s), 51–52 complexity of problems, 38–39 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) seismic monitoring, 279–80 computer programming, 119 computers, 32–61 algorithms and (See algorithms) complexity of problems and, 38–39 halting problem and, 37–38 hardware, 34–35 intelligent (See artificial intelligence) limits of computation, 36–39 software limitations, 37 special-purpose devices, building, 35–36 universality and, 32 computer science, 33 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), 40–41, 149 conceptual breakthroughs required for superintelligent AI, 78–93 actions, discovering, 87–90 cumulative learning of concepts and theories, 82–87 language/common sense problem, 79–82 mental activity, managing, 90–92 consciousness, 16–17 consequentialism, 217–19 content selection algorithms, 8–9, 105 content shortcomings, of intelligent personal assistants, 67–68 control theory, 10, 44–45, 54, 176 convolutional neural networks, 47 cost function to evaluate solutions, and goals, 48 Credibility Coalition, 109 CRISPR-Cas9, 156 cumulative learning of concepts and theories, 82–87 cybersecurity, 186–87 Daily Telegraph, 77 decision making on global scale, 75–76 decoherence, 36 Deep Blue, 62, 261 deep convolutional network, 288–90 deep dreaming images, 291 deepfakes, 105–6 deep learning, 6, 58–59, 86–87, 288–93 DeepMind, 90 AlphaGo, 6, 46–48, 49–50, 55, 91, 92, 206–7, 209–10, 261, 265, 285 AlphaZero, 47, 48 DQN system, 55–56 deflection arguments, 154–59 “research can’t be controlled” arguments, 154–56 silence regarding risks of AI, 158–59 tribalism, 150, 159–60 whataboutery, 156–57 Delilah (blackmail bot), 105 denial of risk posed by AI, 146–54 “it’s complicated” argument, 147–48 “it’s impossible” argument, 149–50 “it’s too soon to worry about it” argument, 150–52 Luddism accusation and, 153–54 “we’re the experts” argument, 152–54 deontological ethics, 217 dexterity problem, robots, 73–74 Dickinson, Michael, 190 Dickmanns, Ernst, 65 DigitalGlobe, 75 domestic robots, 73–74 dopamine, 17, 205–6 Dota 2, 56 DQN system, 55–56 Dune (Herbert), 135 dynamic programming algorithms, 54–55 E. coli, 14–15 eBay, 106 ECHO (first smart home), 71 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 113–14, 120–21 The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism (Chace), 113 Economist, The, 145 Edgeworth, Francis, 238 Eisenhower, Dwight, 249 electrical action potentials, 15 Eliza (first chatbot), 67 Elmo (shogi program), 47 Elster, Jon, 242 Elysium (film), 127 emergency braking, 57 enfeeblement of humans problem, 254–55 envy, 229–31 Epicurus, 219 equilibrium solutions, 30–31, 195–96 Erewhon (Butler), 133–34, 159 Etzioni, Oren, 152, 157 eugenics movement, 155–56 expected value rule, 22–23 experience, learning from, 285–95 experiencing self, and preferences, 238–40 explanation-based learning, 294–95 Facebook, 108, 250 Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Goodman), 85 fact-checking, 108–9, 110 factcheck.org, 108 fear of death (as an instrumental goal), 140–42 feature engineering, 84–85 Fermat, Pierre de, 185 Fermat’s Last Theorem, 185 Ferranti Mark I, 34 Fifth Generation project, 271 firewalling AI systems, 161–63 first-order logic, 51, 270–72 probabilistic languages and, 277–80 propositional logic distinguished, 270 Ford, Martin, 113 Forster, E.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

But it highlights a key question relevant to the future of work in the Robot Age, namely why do people currently work as much as they do? And whatever the reasons, are they bound to continue in this way in the future? Interestingly, although he envisaged a rather different route to this end state, Keynes had a similar vision to Marx. In an essay entitled “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” published in 1931, Keynes suggested that in a hundred years’ time the standard of living would be between four and eight times as high as it was then.6 This, he claimed, would be enough to end the economic problem, that is to say, shortage, and to replace it with abundance. Hence the question of what to do with our time.

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Minsky, M. (1967) Finite and Infinite Machines, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Mokyr, J. (1990) The Lever of Riches, New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, I. (2010) Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Pecchi, L. and Piga, G. (2008) Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Penrose, R. (1989) The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penrose, R. (1994) Shadows of the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, London: Allen Lane.

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M. (1931) Essays in Persuasion, London: Macmillan. 7 There is an interesting collection of essays on Keynes edited by Pecchi, L. and Piga, G. (2008) Grandchildren: Revisiting Keynes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 8 See Freeman, R. B. (2008) “Why Do We Work More than Keynes Expected?” in Pecchi and Piga, pp. 135–42. 9 J. E. Stiglitz (2010) “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in L. Pecchi and G. Piga (2008), pp. 41–85. 10 Mokyr, J., Vickers, C. and Ziebarth, N. L. (2015) The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: Is this Time Different?, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 29 (Summer 2015). pp. 31–50. 11 Stiglitz (2010), op. cit. 12 Keynes (1931). 13 See Clark, A. and Oswald, A.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Cockshott and Cottrell, ‘Economic Planning, Computers and Labor Values,’ p. 7 26. P. Cockshott, A. Cottrell and H. Dieterich, Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union, Lulu.com, 2010, pp. 1–20 27. A. Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (London, 1994), p. 1 28. J. M. Keynes, ‘The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, in J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York, 1963), pp. 358–73 29. D. Thompson, ‘The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years: Part II’, The Atlantic, 20 June 2012 30. http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001134 31. D. Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, 1997), p. 48 32.

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‘Done, for you big boy,’ writes one Barclays employee to another as they manipulate LIBOR, the rate at which banks lend to each other, the most important interest rate on the planet.10 We should listen carefully to the tone in these emails – the irony, the dishonesty, the repeated use of smileys, slang and manic punctuation. It is evidence of systemic self-deception. At the heart of the finance system, which is itself the heart of the neoliberal world, they knew it didn’t work. John Maynard Keynes once called money ‘a link between the present and the future’.11 He meant that what we do with money today is a signal of how we think things are going to change in years to come. What we did with money in the run-up to 2008 was to massively expand its volume: the global money supply rose from $25 trillion to $70 trillion in the seven years before the crash – incomparably faster than growth in the real economy.

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From Varga’s recalcitrant works committees in Budapest to the Russian workers who insisted on self-control, or the Fiat workers in Milan who even tried to produce cars without the help of managers, this problem – workers control vs planning – would hit the socialist leaders as a total surprise. If these early attempts at socialism failed, it is worth remembering that capitalist attempts at stabilization also failed. The peace deal of 1919 condemned Germany’s recovery to stall under the stranglehold of reparations. ‘In continental Europe,’ wrote a distraught John Maynard Keynes, shortly after storming out of the British delegation at Versailles, ‘the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or “labour troubles”; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.’24 With hindsight, we can see 1917–21 as a near-terminal social crisis, but as an economic crisis it was not inevitable; it was the result of poor policy decisions.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 1 Jan 2009

The great economists of the past saw economics and ethics as inextricably entwined; one example of this is their emphasis on the limits of economic prosperity in bringing about broader improvements in the human condition, and hence the relative insignificance they attached to economic prosperity alone. Adam Smith was dismissive of economic success as an end in itself: ‘if the trappings of wealth are viewed philosophically, they will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling’.6 John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, shared similar concerns. In ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, Keynes described the ‘love of money as a possession’ as ‘one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease’.7 Keynes accurately predicted British average income per head in the early 21st century, and went on to anticipate the problems of affluenza, and the renewed importance of an ethical framework once society ceases to be focused solely on economic growth.8 In all this, he was remarkably prescient: the essay was written in 1930.

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Since there is no true number to be found, the search for one often becomes desperate, searching in ways which will definitely lead to numbers, regardless of their relevance. It is reminiscent of the drunkard who searched for his wallet under the street light, not because he lost it there, but because that was the only place he could see. Or as John Maynard Keynes possibly commented: ‘I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.’58 Second, the values that emerge from economic theory provide too flimsy a platform for policy advice. The idea that value-free economic advice is possible is another myth, but chasing it has left economics with minimalist values which are too denuded of ethical content to support practical conclusions.

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Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are usually distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. (John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory) What economists don’t admit Economics shapes our lives in countless ways. Each chapter of this book has illustrated this in a practical context. In the process we have uncovered some common themes in the way orthodox economists think. Considered in isolation they might seem only of academic interest, but as previous chapters and Keynes’ remarks suggest, they should interest all of us.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

Clark and Claudia Senik, “Will GDP Growth Increase Happinenss in Developing Countries?,” Paris School of Economics, Working Paper no. 2010-43, March 2011. 50. John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren: Essays in Persuasion (originally published 1930) (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 358–73. The discussion here draws upon my reflections on that essay: “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, ed. G. Piga and L. Pecchi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 41–87. See also the other essays in that volume. 51.

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In the last chapter, we observed the enormous decline in the wage share in this recession; the decline amounted to more than a half trillion dollars a year.5 That’s an amount much greater than the value of the stimulus package passed by Congress. That stimulus package was estimated to reduce unemployment by 2 to 2½ percentage points. Taking money away from workers has, of course, just the opposite effect. Since the time of the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, governments have understood that when there is a shortfall of demand—when unemployment is high—they need to take action to increase either public or private spending. The 1 percent has worked hard to restrain government spending. Private consumption is encouraged through tax cuts, and that was the strategy undertaken by President Bush, with three large tax cuts in eight years.

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David Kessler, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration who led the U.S. government charge against the cigarette companies, points out that producers of fast foods, snacks, and other products do quite similar things (even if it isn’t precisely addiction), through their fine understanding of how smells and tastes stimulate the brain and create cravings. See Kessler, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (New York: Rodale Books, 2009). 17. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936), p. 383. 18. See George Soros, The Soros Lectures: At the Central European University (New York: Public Affairs, 2010). 19. See in particular the report The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report of the bipartisan National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, which concluded that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause” (p. xxvi).

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
by George A. Akerlof , Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller
Published 21 Sep 2015

Desmond describes the difficulties of those who get evicted, with a court record that makes it difficult to rent again. Even if these numbers are too high for some unknown reason, they still make the point: many families get thrown out of their homes and it will be difficult for them to find another. 12. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 358–73. 13. Eight times: ibid., p. 365. For the growth of US per capita income we used Angus Maddison’s calculations for 1930 to 2000 (“US Real Per Capita GDP from 1870–2001,” September 24, 2012, accessed December 1, 2014, http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2012/09/us-real-per-capita-gdp-from-18702001.html).

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Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street. New York: Penguin, 2009. Kessler, Glen. “Revisiting the Cost of the Bush Tax Cuts.” Washington Post, May 10, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/revisiting-the-cost-of-the-bush-tax-cuts/2011/05/09/AFxTFtbG_blog.html. Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion, pp. 358–73. London: Macmillan, 1931. —. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964. Knowledge@Wharton. “Goldman Sachs and Abacus 2007-AC1: A Look beyond the Numbers.” April 28, 2010. Accessed March 15, 2015. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/goldman-sachs-and-abacus-2007-ac1-a-look-beyond-the-numbers/.

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Some even go over the edge: into bankruptcy; or eviction. Another Perspective Another assay poses for us the Suze Orman puzzle in a different perspective. Most of us think that if our income went up more than fivefold we would be on easy street. Our financial problems would be over. Indeed, that is exactly what John Maynard Keynes, one of the most astute economists of all time, thought would be the case when he looked forward from 1930. In an essay, which was little noticed when published, Keynes projected what life would be like “for our grandchildren,” in 2030: one hundred years thence.12 In one respect he almost hit a bull’s-eye.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Clearly to the paladins of progress, this upcoming economic revolution is either not good enough to be a reason to look forward to the future or — as is most likely — impossible to dismiss as the threat that it is. So better to just not mention it at all. And yet automation needn’t have developed this way. The great twentieth century economist, John Maynard Keynes, saw progress as an inevitable path towards greater leisure rather than mere consumption. So much that he saw no need for future generations to work more than a few hours each week and this merely to satisfy a basic instinct to do any work. In the seminal 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, he wrote: For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented.

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Another earlier study by McKinsey also offered similar figures: Chui, M., Manyika, J., Miremadi, M., “Where machines could replace humans —and where they can’t (yet)”, McKinsey Quarterly, Jul. 2016, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/where-machines-could-replace-humans-and-where-they-cant-yet 30 Keynes, J.M, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, in Essays in Persuasion (Harcourt Brace, 1932) 31 Data from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA) show Mexico produced 4.1 million vehicles in 2018, only behind China, the US, Japan, India, and Germany. http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2018-statistics/ 32 Bregman, R., Utopia For Realists (Bloomsbury, 2017), Ch 4. 33 Haagh, L. and Rohregger, B., “Universal basic income policies and their potential for addressing health inequities”, World Health Organization, 2019, http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/404387/20190606-h1015-ubi-policies-en.pdf 34 Lansley, S. and Reed, H., “Basic Income for All: From Desirability to Feasibility”, Compass, 2019, http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/basic-income-for-all-from-desirability-to-feasibility/ 35 Stirling, A. and Arnold, S.

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And yet global GDP per capita doubled in the quarter century after 1950 (the last post-war year with reliable global data), a pace that has not been exceeded in any comparable period since.10 The success of these policies is testament to the brilliance and far-sightedness of their main architect, the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Not only did the global economy grow at its fastest pace ever, but it was also at its most stable. Virtually no banking crises took place while the Bretton Woods system was in place and there was also a decline in the number of external debt crises (Figure 5.1). But aside from a few marginal attempts at re-regulating the financial system like the Frank-Dodd Act (now partly rolled back by the Trump administration), it has been business as usual for the global economy since 2008–2009.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Levasseur, “The Concentration of Industry, and Machinery in the United States,” Publications of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 193 (1897): 178–197. 16.Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 1051. 17.Quoted in Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 117–118. 18.Ibid., 50. 19.Ibid., 55. 20.John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–373. 21.John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the Wheeling Stadium,” in John F. Kennedy: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 721. 22.Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 14.

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The uncontrolled acceleration of progress, its author wrote, had left society chronically unprepared to deal with the consequences.19 But the Depression did not entirely extinguish the Wildean dream of a machine paradise. In some ways, it rendered the utopian vision of progress more vivid, more necessary. The more we saw machines as our foes, the more we yearned for them to be our friends. “We are being afflicted,” wrote the great British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, “with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment.” The ability of machines to take over jobs had outpaced the economy’s ability to create valuable new work for people to do.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

Keen, S. (2001) Debunking Economics: The naked emperor of the social sciences, London: Zed Books. — (2009) ‘A pluralist approach to microeconomics’, in J. Reardon (ed.), The Handbook of Pluralist Economics Education, London: Routledge, pp. 120–49. Keynes, J. M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan. — (1963 [1931]) ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton. Klamer, A., D. McCloskey and R. M. Solow (1988) The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klamer, A., D. McCloskey and S. Ziliak (2010) The Economic Conversation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism, Toronto: Knopf Canada.

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All economists can do is give advice on how to achieve society’s goals as efficiently as possible. The science of economics is value free. 14 2.1 The inherent tension with macroeconomics As we mentioned the first seminal book in economics, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, it behoves us to mention another, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Published in 1936 during the Great Depression, it attempted to explain how unemployment could persist, and what ameliorating actions governments could take. In the process of ­doing this, Keynes became the founding father of macroeconomics.

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This illustrates a key point ignored by the efficient market hypothesis – that what something is worth depends not just on its fundamental value, but also on what everyone expects everyone else will be willing to pay for it. The inherent uncertainty over the future of the economy interacts with uncertainty about other people’s expectations about the likely actions of other investors! John Maynard Keynes summarized this famously using a beauty contest analogy. He compared the difficulty of predicting asset prices to the difficulty of winning a newspaper competition asking contestants to pick (from a list of 100 female photographs), not the prettiest faces, but the six faces that would be the most chosen by other entrants as the prettiest.

Men Without Work
by Nicholas Eberstadt
Published 4 Sep 2016

Not generally appreciated, however, is that the land of “the overworked American” is also home to an unusually large and rapidly growing contingent of “underworked Americans”: relatively young men who spend absolutely no time at a job and are not acting to alter that situation. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously speculated about life in the future in his “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”12 Those grandchildren would most likely be living right about now. In that essay, he dared to predict that the workweek would be much shorter and income levels would be much higher for these future generations. Keynes was correct in the gist of his prophecies: throughout Europe and the rest of the West, income levels are far higher today than when his argument was first published, and the workweek is appreciably shorter (abeit not yet as short as he boldly suggested it might come to be).

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

What distinguished the eighteenth-century advances was not only the increase in the extent of the market (emphasized by Allen), but also the development of science, which enabled sustained increases. 25.Keynes, in his famous essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (in Essays in Persuasion [London: MacMillan, 1931], 321–2) explored the implications of the enormous increases in productivity. See also Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, eds. Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 41–87. 26.As we’ll explain in greater detail below, because of exclusionary labor market practices and discrimination, especially against women and people of color, large groups within society did not share in this progress. 27.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. 28.There were similar responses in Europe, in some cases earlier than in the US, in some cases later.

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Markets play an invaluable role in any well-functioning economy and yet they often fail to produce fair and efficient outcomes, producing too much of some things (pollution) and too little of others (basic research). And as the 2008 financial crisis showed, markets on their own are not stable. More than 80 years ago, John Maynard Keynes explained why market economies often have persistent unemployment and taught us how government could maintain the economy at or near full employment. If there are large discrepancies between the social returns of an activity—the benefit to society—and the private returns to the same activity—the benefit to an individual or company—markets alone will not do the job.

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Net neutrality’s detractors like to claim that the market will sort out this kind of issue: if consumers aren’t getting what they want, they’ll switch to another internet provider that streams Netflix reliably at fast speeds. But with only three major national internet providers, customers have limited choice; indeed, in many parts of the country, consumers who want broadband internet have only one choice.18 Even if in the long run there would be entrants offering more reliable internet service, as John Maynard Keynes said in another context, in the long run, we’re all dead: Netflix wouldn’t be able to wait. The knowledge that the internet providers have such market power puts a damper on innovation in the entire industry. The result is more inequality, less innovation, and slower growth.19 Government Failure We’ve explained why collective action is needed.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

But imagining that a new technology that can make someone more productive will ultimately mean they have to do less work is a classic mistake. The reality, demonstrated again and again throughout history, is that new technologies mean humans end up doing nearly the same number of hours of work but in a different way. Famously, John Maynard Keynes proposed in a 1931 essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” that thanks to automation, by 2028 everyone would be working about three hours a day. Clearly, that didn’t happen. If you exclude vacations but assume a person gets weekends off, Americans actually average about six and a half hours a day of paid work.

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See management systems Jassy, Andy, 222 Jentoft, Leif, 217–18 jidoka, 227 Jobs, Steve, 284 Johnson, Samaria “Sam,” 180–81 Jones, Doug, 244–46, 249 “just-in-time” manufacturing, 227 Kaczar, Ray, 134–38 kaizen (“lean manufacturing”), 207, 221, 223, 224, 226–32, 239 kanban, 227 Kanigel, Robert, The One Best Way, 94 Kashani, Ali, 265 Kensington (container ship), 55 Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” 211–12 Kindred (robotics company), 246 kitchens, Lillian Gilbreth’s redesign of, 104–5 Kiva Systems, 248; Amazon warehouses and, 164–69, 173; Bezosism and, 201, 211–14; management systems and, 227–31; robotic warehousing and, 178, 181–83, 191–92 Koch, E. F., 131 Koolhaas, Rem, 79, 122 Kozmo, 165, 169 Kristofferson, Kris, 109 Kushner, Jared, 9 labor and employment: at Amazon, 3, 15, 160–62, 171–76, 194–95, 209–11, 219–20 (See also Bezosism); automation and, 76, 103, 177–79, 241–50; cyborgs, modern workers as, 15, 42, 219; delivery drivers, 271–81; deskilling, 102, 214–15, 217; harbor pilots, 36–37, 47, 49, 50, 54–55, 58–61, 63, 65; management systems and worker empowerment, 227–28, 229–30, 232; physical fitness demanded of Amazon workers, 171–76, 197–98, 200, 202, 235–37; robot delivery machines, maintenance and monitoring of, 268–69; self-driving trucks and, 141, 147, 148–51, 155–57; shipping crews, 27–30, 33–34, 42; at sortation centers in “middle mile,” 256, 259, 260–61; stack ranking (rank and yank), 204; strikes and striking, 33, 71, 88, 98, 277; technology and, 105, 211–12; turnover, 111, 113, 204, 210, 214, 216, 237, 245, 280; upskilling, 220; work intensification, surveillance, and automation, 113, 157, 174–75, 203, 211–14, 231–32, 234–35.

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jobs of middle managers: Christopher Mims, “Data Is the New Middle Manager,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/data-is-the-new-middle-manager-1429478017. force for good or ill: Ben Thompson, “The China Cultural Clash,” Stratechery, July 25, 2020, https://stratechery.com/2019/the-china-cultural-clash. John Maynard Keynes: Elizabeth Kolbert, “No Time,” The New Yorker, May 19, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/26/no-time. six and a half hours a day: Derek Thompson, “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” The Atlantic, February 24, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441.

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

But everything that suffers wants to live, that it may grow ripe and merry and passionate, passionate for remoter, higher, brighter things. “I want heirs,” thus speaks everything that suffers, “I want children, I do not want myself.” (Nietzsche 2003b: 331) Brown finds similar sentiments in Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which describes the “purposive” man who seeks a “spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time … For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam to-day” (Keynes 1972: 370). There are shades of Benjamin in Keynes’s observation—which Brown cites (Brown 1959: 286)—that the financial corollary of the promise of immortality is the principle of compound interest (Keynes 1972: 371).

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Brown finds a Dionysian “witches’ brew” in the eroticism of de Sade and the politics of Hitler, but he also discerns it in the Romantic reaction to both; indeed, he finds here “the entry of Dionysus into consciousness” (Brown 1959: 176). So where might its entry into economy be? Brown attributes to Keynes the correct diagnosis of the “crisis of our time.” The text he uses is Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” published in the same year (1930) as “Auri Sacra Fames.” Keynes deplores the fact that “we have been expressly evolved by nature” for the sole purpose of solving the economic problem, that is to say, with tackling scarcity. He asks rhetorically what would happen to us were that problem to be solved: “There is no country and no people who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without a dread” (Keynes 1972).

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See also true prices just wage, 343 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 34, 81, 83, 86, 227; and the transcendental apperception X, 82 Karatani, Kojin, 8, 12, 80–87, 245; on association, 84; on the base and superstructure, 84; on capital, state and nation, 84; on Kant, 81; on LETS, 84–87, 345; on the parallax view, 80–81, 205; on phenomenon versus noumenon, 82; and Simmel, 27–8, 320; Transcritique, 80; on the transcendental apperception X, 82; on the transcendental illusion, 82 Kaufmann, Walter, 140 Kay, John, 366, 369 Keynes, John Maynard, 8, 12, 20n, 22, 45, 50, 66, 108n24, 178–79, 296; “Auri Sacra Fames,” 155; on austerity, 130; on compound interest, 153; on convention, 119, 120; on deflation, 318; on demand management, 68, 75, 178; “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” 153, 155; The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 178, 229; on Gesell, 349; on inflation, 318; on Knapp, 103, 104; on the liquidity premium, 125, 347, 349; on Marx, 59; in Minsky, 117, 119; on money, 125; on money of account, 8, 109–10, 297; on the paradox of thrift, 347; “Social Consequences of Changes in the Value of Money,” 318; A Treatise on Money, 104, 112 Keynesianism, 74–75, 117, 125, 192, 208, 265; privatized, 76 Kierkegaard, Søren, 228n20 Kiva, 316, 358, 380 Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro, 92n Klossowski, Pierre, 172n; on living coin (la monnaie vivante), 194, 203–4, 388 Knapp, Georg Friedrich, 12, 20n, 102–4, 105–6, 108, 121, 255; definition of money, 103 Knorr Cetina, Karin, 230, 233n, 293 Kocherlakota, Narayana, R, 309n Kojève, Alexandre, 172n Krämer, Jörg, 206 Krippner, Greta, 10–11, 280, 285, 289 Krugman, Paul, 127, 129, 198–99, 347; on Bitcoin, 367; on Minsky, 119–20 Kula ring, 31 La Rochelle, Drieu, 172n labor, 74, 78, 98, 129, 139, 144. 176, 192, 195, 228, 229, 239, 240, 298, 353; abstract, 248; and capital, 70, 71, 72, 232, 238, 337; and consumption, 85; crises of, 67; depersonalization of, 340; exploitation of, 67; as a fictitious commodity, 57n16, 280, 311; and money, 56, 245, 343; ownership of, 63; productivity of, 70, and value, 69, 156, 189, 191, 328, 344; vitality of, 343.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

With the Internet, research tasks that used to take days now just take minutes, or even seconds. In a thousand different ways, we have made our workplaces vastly more efficient. So the question is, Why do we still work forty hours a week. Why not fifteen?” I offer up fifteen hours in particular because of a famous prediction made by the economist John Maynard Keynes in a 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In the essay, Keynes points out that for thousands of years, up until 1700, there was no real change in humans’ standard of living. He attributed this to the lack of technical advance and the failure of capital to accumulate. He then makes the case that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a spate of technological progress and an infusion of cash came together and created the modern economy, bringing with it the magic of compounding interest and compounding economic growth.

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So the idea that technology is eliminating the need for workers seems a hard one to make. To get there, the “this time is different” assumption will need to be ironclad. We will get to that in a moment. ASSUMPTION 2: Too many jobs will be destroyed too quickly. The “jobs will be destroyed too quickly” argument is an old one as well. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes voiced it by saying, “We are being afflicted with a new disease . . . technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” In 1978, New Scientist repeated the concern: The relationship between technology and employment opportunities most commonly considered and discussed is, of course the tendency for technology to be labour-saving and thus eliminate employment opportunities—if not actual jobs.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

v=Skfw282fJak (13) The Economist, December 4, 2003 (14) Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (15) http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/ (16) http://lazooz.org/ (17) https://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity (18) http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ (19) “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf (20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5Fvk8FNOQ (21) http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf (22) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2981946/Self-driving-cars-30-cities-2017-Pilot-projects-aims-mass-roll-driverless-vehicles-safe-they.html (23) http://www.alltrucking.com/faq/truck-drivers-in-the-usa/ (24) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/bus-drivers.htm (25) http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/taxi-drivers-and-chauffeurs.htm (26) http://www.cristo-barrios.com/discografia/iamus-2/?

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As we saw in chapter 1, the word “computer” originally meant a person who does calculations, but the days when offices were filled with battalions of young (usually male) human computers are long gone. The humble PC has also removed the need for legions of (usually female) secretaries. The fear that automation would lead to mass unemployment is not new. In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” (19) Decades later, in the late 1970s, a powerful BBC Horizon documentary called Now the Chips are Down alerted a new generation to the idea (and showcased some truly appalling ties.) (20) Up to now the replacement of humans by machines has been a gradual process.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

to make a contribution, to make them feel worthwhile Many thanks to David Nordfors, PhD, founder of the International Institute of Innovation Journalism and Communication (IIIJ) and organizer of a series of top-level conferences focused on innovation and the future of work. David, who was kind enough to invite me to the meeting in Lund, Sweden, was also kind enough to share his thoughts on the future of work in a private conversation. nobody “can look forward to the age of leisure” John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” [1930], in Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, ed. Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 23. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! * * * Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

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A better approach is to reverse-engineer our thinking—that is, to find new ways to use technology to leverage the power of people to create real value from work. And rather than credit employers with giving us the “gift” of “meaningful” work, let’s agree that the meaning we gain from our work is no gift, but very much a product of our own efforts. British economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote that nobody “can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.” We more or less live in that age, at least when it comes to abundance. Let’s shake off the dread and recalibrate our priorities. The Enlightenment ideal of human advance lifting us from a life of toil into a life of purpose and meaning is at our doorstep.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

“Address at the Anniversary Convocation of the National Academy of Sciences,” October 22. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-anniversary-convocation-the-national-academy-sciences. Kerr, Ian. 2007. Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Keynes, John Maynard. 1930 [1966]. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. New York: W.W. Norton. Kiley, Michael T. 1999. “The Supply of Skilled Labor and Skill-Biased Technological Progress.” Economic Journal 109, no. 458: 708‒724. King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts. 2013. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.”

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Nevertheless, the burdens of knowledge were not seen as insurmountable by a generation becoming confident that technology could solve all problems. Humanity was wise enough to control the use of its knowledge, and if there were social costs of being so innovative, the solution was to invent even more useful things. There were lingering concerns about “technological unemployment,” a term coined by the economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 to capture the possibility that new production methods could reduce the need for human labor and contribute to mass unemployment. Keynes understood that industrial techniques would continue to improve rapidly but also argued, “This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

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Robust postwar US growth did not immediately guarantee that these technologies would benefit workers. The sharing of prosperity was contested from the day World War II came to an end. Ensuring that economic growth benefited a broad cross section of society took hard work, as we explain next. Clash over Automation and Wages Concerns about technological unemployment voiced by John Maynard Keynes, discussed in Chapter 1, were perhaps even more relevant in the decades following World War II. Machine tools continued to improve, and striking advances in numerically controlled machinery built on and perfected the ideas that dated back to Jacquard’s loom. Designed by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1804, this loom was one of the most important weaving automation devices of the nineteenth century, performing tasks that even skilled weavers found challenging.

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
by Alan B. Krueger
Published 3 Jun 2019

But I explained that a lesson of this book is that consumers demand quick and convenient service, which is why streaming platforms such as Apple, Amazon, and Spotify have been able to attract users from sites offering free pirated music, and that music is a social activity that spreads through networks. As the music industry evolves and new apps emerge, the lessons of rockonomics will help us to understand these exciting yet disruptive developments and place them in a broader context. Closing Time In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes posited that a hundred years hence, the main economic problem confronting people will be what to do with our leisure time: Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.17 Most people are not nearly as free of pressing economic concerns as Keynes had envisioned, partly because of the rise in inequality in our increasingly winner-take-all economy, and that situation is unlikely to change in the next decade when we reach Keynes’s one-hundred-year marker.

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Murre, “Temporal Distribution of Favourite Books, Movies, and Records: Differential Encoding and Re-Sampling,” Memory 15, no. 7 (2007): 755–67. 15. Seth Stephen-Davidowitz, “The Songs That Bind,” New York Times, Feb. 10, 2018. 16. From an interview with Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch on Mar. 1, 2018, in New York City. 17. See John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–73. 18. Daniel Hamermesh, Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource (London: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4. 19. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 38 (2010): 16489–93.

The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market
by Paul de Grauwe and Anna Asbury
Published 12 Mar 2017

True as all that is, it remains remarkable that after the outbreak of the digital revolution productivity growth is lower than in the previous fifty years. It is not so obvious that the digital revolution will provide us with the means to stop pollution. Growth and Saturation In  John Maynard Keynes wrote a remarkable essay entitled ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in which he argued that capitalism would be able to meet all of people’s material needs by around  (i.e. by now) due to development of productivity.  T HE U TO PIA OF SE LF - RE GUL ATIO N People would arrive at the insight that non-material needs were more important than material needs and would work only five to ten hours per week, leaving them able to fully enjoy leisure, art, and culture.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

Schumpeter, Business Cycles, Vol. 1, Philadelphia, PA: Porcupine Press 1982 [1939], p. 223); Keynes: ‘… the essential characteristic of capitalism [seems to me] the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine’ (John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire: The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 9, London: Macmillan Press Ltd 1972 [1931], p. 293). As to Marx, Chiapello, in a penetrating article, claims that he never used the concept (Eve Chiapello, ‘Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 263–96; see also Ivan Tibor Berend, ‘Capitalism’.

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, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 1–2. 13What Marx calls entgegenwirkende Ursachen in Capital, Vol. 3, in the context of the ‘law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall’ (Chs. 13ff. in the German original, Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Dritter Band, Berlin: Dietz Verlag 1966 [1894]). In fact, Collins does deal with countervailing factors, which he calls ‘escapes’, but to show that they are not or no longer effective. See below. 14John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. In: Keynes, John Maynard, Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. 1963 [1930]. 15For a different, more ‘optimistic’ view of indeterminacy see Wallerstein et al. (Does Capitalism Have a Future?, p. 4): ‘We find hope … exactly in the degree to which our future is politically underdetermined.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

A World of Technological Unemployment Ken Jennings’ crack was as neat a summary as you could hope for when it comes to dealing with one of the perceived dark sides of Artificial Intelligence. Forget leather jacket-wearing Austrian robots trying to take over the world, the real imminent threat AI systems pose relate to our jobs. The phrase ‘technological unemployment’ was first coined by a British economist named John Maynard Keynes in 1930. In a speculative essay entitled ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Keynes predicted that the world was on the brink of a revolution regarding the speed, efficiency and ‘human effort’ involved with a wide variety of industries. ‘We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come,’ Keynes wrote about the rise of labour-saving machines.

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_r=1 30 Levy, David, Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 31 Hempel, Jessi, ‘Computers that Know How You Feel Will Soon Be Everywhere’, Wired, 22 April 2015: wired.com/2015/04/computers-can-now-tell-feel-face/ Chapter 5: How AI Put Our Jobs in Jeopardy 1 Baker, Stephen, Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). 2 Keynes, John Maynard, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, 1930: econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 3 Clark, Gregory, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 4 Wong, Tessa, ‘Drone Waiters to Plug Singapore’s Service Staff Gap’, BBC News, 8 February 2015: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-31148450 5 Ford, Martin, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2015): salon.com/2015/05/10/robots_are_coming_for_your_job_amazon_mcdonalds_and_the_next_wave_of_dangerous_capitalist_disruption/ 6 Manyika, James et al.

Warnings
by Richard A. Clarke
Published 10 Apr 2017

Ozy.com, www.ozy.com/immodest-proposal/all-rise-for-chief-justice-robot/41131 (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 26. McKinsey Global Institute, referenced in Lakshmi Sandhana, “47% of U.S. Jobs under Threat from Computerization According to Oxford Study,” New Atlas, http://newatlas.com/half-of-us-jobs-computerized/29142 (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 27. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1933) in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963) referenced in Frey and Osbourne, “Future of Employment,” 3. 28. Studebaker was a leading buggy manufacturer that shifted to cars and became one of the four largest auto manufacturers in the United States. 29.

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It suggests that even lawyers, doctors, and investment managers will soon find themselves competing and losing to weak-AI software that can more rapidly assess the relevant data and make decisions with “deep, specialized, and often tacit knowledge.”25 A 2013 McKinsey Global Institute study predicts that weak AI will depose 140 million full-time knowledge workers worldwide.26 The idea is certainly not new. In 1933, John Maynard Keynes predicted widespread unemployment “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”27 Technological evolution is part and parcel of the history of humanity; the introduction of the wheel, gunpowder, the steam engine, the car, the adding machine, have all led to systemic societal transformation.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

“An Open Letter to The DAO and the Ethereum Community,” June 18, 2016, steemit.com/ethereum/@chris4210/an-open-letter-to-the-dao-and-the-ethereum-community. 36.Emin Gün Sirer, “Thoughts on The DAO Hack,” Hacking, Distributed, June 17, 2016. 37.Mike Hearn, “The Future of Money (and Everything Else),” Turing Festival 2013, August 23, 2013. 38.Anne Amnesia, “Unnecessariat,” More Crows Than Eagles, May 10, 2016, morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/. 7Automation 1.John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, Vol. 48, Issues 2–3, October 11 and 18, 1930. 2.Economic Report of the President, February 2016. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2016. 3.Tim O’Reilly, “Managing the Bots That Are Managing the Business,” MIT Sloan Management Review, May 31, 2016; Charlotte McEleny, “McCann Japan hires first artificially intelligent creative director,” The Drum, March 29, 2016. 4.Jason Mick, “Foxconn Billionaire Hints at Robotic Apple Factory, Criticizes Dead Employees,” DailyTech, June 30, 2014. 5.An advertisement for Columbia/Okura palletizing robots touts, even ahead of their “surprising affordability,” the fact that they “eliminate costly stacking-related injuries.” 6.International Labor Organization.

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Out of this unwillingness, these people have set out to devise technical systems that are more capable than we are ourselves, along any axis or dimension of evaluation you might care to mention: systems that are stronger and faster than we are; that have finer perception and greater endurance; that never, ever succumb to boredom, fatigue or disgust; and that are capable of operating without human oversight or guidance, indefinitely. We are, of course, talking about using robots and automated systems to replace human labor. The great twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes had foreseen much of this early on, coining the expression “technological unemployment” sometime around 1928.1 He saw, with almost clairvoyant perspicacity, that societies might eventually automate away the jobs much of their labor force depended on, and his insight is borne out in recent United States government estimates that an American worker making less than $20 an hour now has an 83 percent chance of losing their job to automation.2 But what Keynes concluded—that the eclipse of human labor by technical systems would necessarily compel a turn toward a full-leisure society—has not come to pass, not even remotely.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

News & World Report, February 24, 1964, http://21stcenturywiener.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Machines-Smarter-Than-Man-Interview-with-Norbert-Wiener.pdf. 20.Defense Science Board, “The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” U.S. Department of Defense, July 2012, http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/AutonomyReport.pdf. 21.John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1963), 358–373. 22.Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995), xvii. 23.John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?

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Despite Wiener’s early efforts to play a technological Paul Revere, after the automation debates of the 1950s and 1960s tailed off, fears of unemployment caused by technology would vanish from the public consciousness until sometime around 2011. Mainstream economists generally agreed on what they described as the “Luddite fallacy.” As early as 1930, John Maynard Keynes had articulated the general view on the broad impact of new technology: “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

Kahk, J., and Tarvel, E. (1997), An Economic History of the Baltic Countries (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International). Kattel, R. and Mergel, I. (2018), Estonia’s Digital Transformation: Mission Mystique and the Hiding Hand, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose Working Paper Series (IIPP WP 2018-09). Keynes, J. M. (1930), ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (1963) (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.). Koort, K. (2014), ‘The Russians of Estonia: Twenty Years After’, World Affairs, July/August. Korjus, K. (ed.) (2018), E-Residency 2.0, White Paper. Kotka, T., Alvarez del Castillo, C. I. V., and Korjus, K. (2015), ‘Estonian e-Residency: Redefining the Nation-state in the Digital Era’, Cyber Studies Programme Working Paper No. 3, University of Oxford, September.

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When a material fails, these latent properties are lost – rubber loses its elasticity, metal loses its strength – and the potential is gone. Kirkaldy’s big idea was that to understand potential fully – its limits, how it can be lost, how it can be protected – we need to collect and examine fragments of failure. The final motivation for studying extremes comes from an idea set out in 1928 by the economist John Maynard Keynes. Concerned that society was in the grip of a bout of pessimism about the economy, Keynes set out a largely optimistic long-term vision. Part of his argument was that we can get a glimpse of the future today, if we know where to look. The trick was to identify a sustained trend – a path most people are following – and look at the lives of those experiencing the extremes of that trend.

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But Glasgow unravelled, losing everything as it became Britain’s most troubled city, a dubious honour it retains today. In each of these places vast potential – whether natural, human or industrial – has somehow gone to waste, with economics often at the core of the problem. Finally, I visited three places John Maynard Keynes would have looked at if he were alive today and following his own advice on how to take a peek at the economic future. As 2020 approaches, it seems the world is again in the grip of economic pessimism. Across the globe, most countries face three trends: ageing populations, the flux caused by new technology, and a rise of inequality.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

However, the elimination of human labour by developments in production technology has also been celebrated by the ‘end of work’ authors, because it opens up the theoretical possibility of a huge expansion of free-time. There have been many versions of this core idea. We find one such version in a famous essay by John Maynard Keynes, for whom the promise of greater freedom from work seemed like a realistic and relatively imminent possibility. In his essay on the ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, first published in the 1930s, Keynes predicted that advances in production technology might reduce work time and allow the population as a whole to work less – as little as fifteen hours per week by the year 2030 (Keynes, 1932).

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K., 93 GDP, critiqued as indicator of progress, 3, 223 Generation X, 114 Genesis, Book of, 23 Gerald, a former academic, 151, 177, 178, 180, 193–4 Germany, 35-hour week in, 224 gestural type of rebellion, 214 Goffman, Erving, 192, 200, 204, 212 Goodman, Eleanor, 157 Google, offices of, 59 Gorz, André, 2, 19–20, 35–41, 43, 61, 62, 67, 74, 82, 90–1, 92, 115–16, 149–50, 151, 178, 179, 184–5, 217, 220–1 Gothenburg (Sweden), shorter working day in, 224 graduates, disillusionment of, 146 Graeber, David, 40 Granter, Edward, 112 gratifying work see satisfying work gratitude, culture of, 232 Greece: ancient, work regarded as curse, 23–4; sea turtle rescue project, 181 Green Party (UK): Basic Income policy, 226; policy on reducing working hours, 224 Gregg, Melissa, 72, 218 growth, economic, 43, 44, 236; critique of, 3–4, 6 Guinness beer, marketing of, 87 H Haiven, Max, 231 Hank, a brothel client, 55 ‘hardworking people’, reference to, 99 Harmony, a utopian society, 31 having, mode of being, 79, 166 Hayden, Anders, 39 Health and Safety Executive (UK), 148 hedonism, alternative, 116, 162–3, 168, 187 ‘Hephaestus’ company, 56–7 high-commitment work cultures, 57 hobbies, use of term, 70 Hochschild, Arlie, 52, 137; The Managed Heart, 53–4; The Outsourced Self, 67 Hodgkinson, Tom, How To Be Idle, 206 holidays, entitlement to, 139 homes, atmosphere of, 184–5 Honneth, Axel, 193 honour, 193 Horkheimer, Max, 81 humanisation of working day, 61 Humphery, Kim, 90 Hunnicutt, Benjamin, Work Without End, 82–5, 96–7 hygiene, Gorz’s definition of, 149–50 I identification with job roles, 62 identity, linked to work, 14–15, 27 idleness, morally objectionable, 83 idler: synonyms for, 189; use of term, 120 Idlers’ Alliance, 118–19, 122, 206, 207, 234 idling, concept of, 234 Illich, Ivan, 185–6 illness, 148, 196–7; has a meaning, 149; medical diagnosis of, 197; mental, 152; need for justification of, 202; non-suppression of, 150–1; repoliticisation of, 229 imagination, defending the importance of, 235–7 immaterial labour, 56 immaturity, perceived, 197–8 ‘in between jobs’, 202 inclusion, social, 161 income: alternative sources of, 161; management of, 121; to be decoupled from work, 112 indifference in work, 47–52 inner critic, 203 insecurity, 73–4 interiority, loss of, 81 International Labour Organisation (ILO), 42, 68 internships, unpaid, 81 interviews: limitations of, 121; methodology of, 118–19 intimacy of work, 52–61 Italian Autonomist movement, 1–2 J Jack, a former librarian, 122–4, 170 Jackson, Tim, 43 Jahoda, Marie, 106, 137 James, Selma, 115 Jarrett, Joanna, 199 job application forms, 76 job centres, 201 job competition, globalisation of, 42 job creation, 6 job insecurity, 6 joblessness, voluntary, in USA, 124–5 Jobseeker’s Allowance, 104, 134, 136 July, Miranda, 189 junk commodities, accumulation of, 170 K Kelley, Robin, 115 Kelvin, Peter, 199 Kerouac, Jack, 206 Kerr, Walter, The Decline of Pleasure, 173 Kettering, Charles, 85 Keynes, John Maynard, 33–5, 68, 82, 84; ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, 33 Khasnabish, Alex, 231 knowledge economy, 49, 61 L labour exchanges, regulate casual labouring, 28 labour habits, new, formation of, 29 labour market, pressure of, 80 Labour Party (UK), 5 ‘labourers without labour’, 39, 41 Lafargue, Paul, The Right To Be Lazy, 21 laptops, 72 Larry, a former social worker, 120, 131–4, 137, 175 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 204 laziness, alleged culture of, 100 Learning to Love You More project, 189 Lefkowitz, Bernard, 124–5 Lego Movie, The, 71–2 leisure: as privilege for all, 95; fear of, 111; promotes consumption, 84 leisure time, shortage of, 68 less work see working less Levitas, Ruth, 235 Lewis, Justin, 85 life plans, 210 Linder, Staffan, 173–4, 177 living in a community, 144 living with intention, 128 living with less, as empowerment, 180 living without work, 21–3, 117, 119, 141 Lodziak, Conrad, 89 looking after pets, 195 ‘looking over one’s shoulder’, 76 loss of income, personal consequences of, 109 low-wage work, 6 lowering levels of spending, 171 Lucy, a former bargain shop worker, 127, 134–8, 151, 153, 159, 167, 174–5, 177, 183, 186, 194, 195, 198, 205–6 Lynx deodorant, marketing of, 87 M Marcuse, Herbert, 8, 35; Eros and Civilisation, 34; One-Dimensional Man, 26 Marienthal, sociological research into, 106–8, 110 Markland, George L., 97 Marx, Karl, 26, 30, 46, 85, 106, 116, 125, 142, 143, 147, 148; Capital, 32, 47, 114; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 47–8; views on technology, 32, 33; views on work, 17–18, 32 material objects, connection to, 183 material wealth, desire for, 27 Matthew, a former office worker, 13, 58, 134–8, 141, 142–4, 146–7, 159, 169, 174, 177, 183, 186, 194, 201, 202, 205–6 maturity, definition of, 198 McDonald’s, 167, 213 ‘McJobs’, 114 McKenna, S., 109 McShit T-shirt, 213 Mead, George Herbert, 203 mealtimes see eating together meaningfulness in work, 63 meaningless work, 12–13, 22, 40 medication, rejection of, 150–1 Merton, Robert, 146 Mike, an interviewee, 124, 130, 165 Mills, C.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

Peter Schwartz, the father of scenario planning, provided an even more optimistic perspective in a widely read piece in Wired magazine in 1997, predicting the US economy would grow at 4 percent per year until 2020.3 Paul Krugman’s explicitly downbeat book The Age of Diminished Expectations, reprinted several times in the 1990s, was overoptimistic too, presenting a base-case forecast that the US economy would grow at just over 2 percent a year in the coming decades.4 Even Keynes would have been disappointed. In 1930, when he wrote “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he estimated that GDP would grow eightfold between 1930 and 2030.5 Based on growth to date, even excluding the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK and US economies have managed to grow by a factor of 5 and 6.4, respectively. But the problem with economic growth is not just that it has slowed down.

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Kay, John, and Mervyn King. 2020. Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future. London: Bridge Street Press. Kerr, William R., and Frédéric Robert-Nicoud. 2020. “Tech Clusters.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34 (3): 50–76. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.34.3.50. Keynes, John Maynard. 2010. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion, 321–32. London: Palgrave Macmillan. (Original work published in 1930.) Khan, Zorina. 2014. “Facts and Fables: A Long-Run Perspective on the Patent System.” Cato Unbound, September 10. https://www.cato-unbound.org/browse?searchquery=facts+and+fables. Kleiner, Morris M. 2006.

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It also lowers the natural interest rate and so squeezes monetary policy. We need reform that allows pension funds and insurers to fund innovative companies and that allows fiscal policy to provide commitment to stabilising the economy with less space for monetary policy. What do Charles Dickens, John Maynard Keynes, and Occupy Wall Street have in common? They all believe that bankers and financiers do a poor job of providing for the needs of the so-called real economy. This view is so common that some might even call it a cliché. But if we look at recent data on business investment and business finance, we see that something new is going on.

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

I could perhaps say more about what exactly I mean by the problem of utopia and how I plan to approach it. But I think it’s better we just jump right in, and we can sort out any definitional or argumentative-structural issues as they arise. * * * The renowned economist John Maynard Keynes considered the goal of material abundance in his widely influential essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”.7 Published in 1930, the essay argues that humankind is on its way to solving its “economic problem”. Keynes predicted that by 2030, accumulated savings and technical progress would increase productivity relative to his own time between fourfold and eightfold.8 Such a dramatic rise in productivity would make it possible to satisfy human needs with far less effort; and, as a consequence, the average working week would decrease to 15 hours.

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Kaplan, J., et al. 2020. “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models” (arX-iv:2001.08361). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2001.08361 Kass, L. R. 2003. “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Perfection”. The New Atlantis, 1, 9–28. Keynes, J. M. [1930] 1931. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”. In Essays in Persuasion. London: Macmillan. Killingsworth, M. A. 2021. “Experienced Well-Being Rises With Income, Even Above $75,000 per Year”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4). Klein Goldewijk, K., et al. 2017. “Anthropogenic land use estimates for the Holocene – HYDE 3.2”.

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We began yesterday by observing that simple post-scarcity utopias, which present a vision of material abundance, relaxation, and social license, have held strong appeal among immiserated hard-working folk, as evidenced by the popularity of the European medieval peasant fantasy of Cockaigne and many other tales of golden ages, gardens of delights, and island paradises. We then made the obligatory reference to the John Maynard Keynes article that predicted that a 15-hour work week would be nearly upon us by now, following a century of strong economic progress. However, while productivity has risen in line with Keynes’s projection, this has resulted in only a moderate extension of leisure hours. Greed has mostly held the line against Sloth.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley
Published 27 Dec 2008

“Cybernation,” which the authors argued resulted from “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine,” was “already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs”—in 1964, no less. Others, who put a more optimistic spin on the work-saving impact of automation (and later computers), worried about what Americans would do with all their new leisure time. John Maynard Keynes famously fretted in a 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” over how humans would spend their time in a meaningful way when work was no longer necessary. And it was true—at least at first: Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, average work hours decreased as Americans became more productive and the economy grew at a good clip.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

Accountants, many legal and medical professionals, financial analysts and stockbrokers, travel agents—in fact, a large fraction of white-collar jobs—will disappear as a result of sophisticated machine-learning programs. We face a future in which factories churn out goods with very few employees and the movement of goods is largely automated, as are many services. What’s left for humans to do? In 1930—long before the advent of computers, let alone AI—John Maynard Keynes wrote, in an essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” that as a result of improvements in productivity, society could produce all its needs with a fifteen-hour workweek. He also predicted, along with the growth of creative leisure, the end of money and wealth as a goal: We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.

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Ross, 39, 179 Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (First Law of Cybernetics), 39, 179, 180 Asilomar AI Principles, 2017, 81, 84 Asimov, Isaac, 250 astonishing corollary (natural intelligence as special case of AI), 67–70 astonishing hypothesis, 66–67 Astonishing Hypothesis (Crick), 66 AUM Conference, xxi–xxii automation, in manufacturing, 4, 154 Barry, Judith, 262 Bateson, Gregory, xx–xxi, 179, 264–65 Bateson, Mary Catherine, 264 Bayesian models, 226–28 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 118 Bostrom, Nick, xxvi, 27, 80 bounded optimality, 132 brain organoids, 245–46 Brand, Lois, xvii Brand, Stewart, xvii, xxv Bricogne, Gérard, 183 Bronowski, Jacob, 118 Brook, Peter, 213 Brooks, Rodney, 54–63 background and overview of work of, 54–55 data gathering and exploitation, computation platforms used for, 61–63 software engineering, lack of standards and failures in, 60–61 on Turing, 57, 60 on von Neumann, 57–58, 60 on Wiener, 56–57, 59–60 buffer overrun, 61 Bush, Vannevar, 163, 179–80 Cage, John, xvi causal reasoning, 17–19 cellular automaton, von Neumann’s, 57–58 Cheng, Ian, 216–18 chess, 8, 10, 119–20, 150, 184, 185 children, learning in, 222, 228–30 Chinese Room experiment, 250 Chomsky, Noam, 223, 226 Church, Alonzo, 180 Church, George M., 49, 240–53 AI safety concerns, 242–43 background and overview of work of, 240–41 conventional computers versus bio-electronic hybrids, 246–48 equal rights, 248–49 ethical rules for intelligent machines, 243–44 free will of machines, and rights, 250–51 genetic red lines, 251–52 human manipulation of humans, 244–46, 252 humans versus nonhumans and hybrids, treatment of, 249–53 non-Homo intelligences, fair and safe treatment of, 247–48 rights for nonhumans and hybrids, 249–53 science versus religion, 243–44 self-consciousness of machines, and rights, 250–51 technical barriers/red lines, malleability of, 244–46 transhumans, rights of, 252–53 clinical (subjective) method of prediction, 233, 234–35 Colloquy of Mobiles (Pask), 259 Colossus: The Forbin Project (film), 242 competence of superintelligent AGI, 85 computational theory of mind, 102–3, 129–33, 222 computer learning systems Bayesian models, 226–28 cooperative inverse-reinforcement learning (CIRL), 30–31 deep learning (See deep learning) human learning, similarities to, 11 reality blueprint, need for, 16–17 statistical, model-blind mode of current, 16–17, 19 supervised learning, 148 unsupervised learning, 225 Computer Power and Human Reason (Weizenbaum), 48–49, 248 computer virus, 61 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), 43 conflicts among hybrid superintelligences, 174–75 controllable-agent designs, 31–32 control systems beyond human control (control problem) AI designed as tool and not as conscious agent, 46–48, 51–53 arguments against AI risk (See risk posed by AI, arguments against) Ashby’s Law and, 39, 179, 180 cognitive element in, xx–xxi Dyson on, 38–39, 40 Macy conferences, xx–xxi purpose imbued in machines and, 23–25 Ramakrishnan on, 183–86 risk of superhuman intelligence, arguments against, 25–29 Russell on templates for provably beneficial AI, 29–32 Tallinn on, 93–94 Wiener’s warning about, xviii–xix, xxvi, 4–5, 11–12, 22–23, 35, 93, 104, 172 Conway, John Horton, 263 cooperative inverse-reinforcement learning (CIRL), 30–31 coordination problem, 137, 138–41 corporate/AI scenario, in relation of machine superintelligences to hybrid superintelligences, 176 corporate superintelligences, 172–74 credit-assignment function, 196–200 AI and, 196–97 humans, applied to, 197–200 Crick, Francis, 58, 66 culture in evolution, selecting for, 198–99 curiosity, and AI risk denial, 96 Cybernetic Idea, xv cybernetics, xv–xxi, 3–7, 102–4, 153–54, 178–80, 194–95, 209–10, 256–57 “Cybernetic Sculpture” exhibition (Tsai), 258, 260–61 “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition (Reichardt), 258–59 Cybernetics (Wiener), xvi, xvii, 3, 5, 7, 56 “Cyborg Manifesto, A” (Haraway), 261 data gathering and exploitation, computation platforms used for, 61–63 Dawkins, Richard, 243 Declaration of Helsinki, 252 declarative design, 166–67 Deep Blue, 8, 184 Deep Dream, 211 deep learning, 184–85 bottom-up, 224–26 Pearl on lack of transparency in, and limitations of, 15–19 reinforcement learning, 128, 184–85, 225–26 unsupervised learning, 225 visualization programs, 211–13 Wiener’s foreshadowing of, 9 Deep-Mind, 184–85, 224, 225, 262–63 Deleuze, Gilles, 256 Dennett, Daniel C., xxv, 41–53, 120, 191 AI as “helpless by themselves,” 46–48 AI as tool, not colleagues, 46–48, 51–53 background and overview of work of, 41–42 dependence on new tools and loss of ability to thrive without them, 44–46 gap between today’s AI and public’s imagination of AI, 49 humanoid embellishment of AI, 49–50 intelligent tools versus artificial conscious agents, need for, 51–52 operators of AI systems, responsibilities of, 50–51 on Turing Test, 46–47 on Weizenbaum, 48–50 on Wiener, 43–45 Descartes, René, 191, 223 Desk Set (film), 270 Deutsch, David, 113–24 on AGI risks, 121–22 background and overview of work of, 113–14 creating AGIs, 122–24 developing AI with goals under unknown constraints, 119–21 innovation in prehistoric humans, lack of, 116–19 knowledge imitation of ancestral humans, understanding inherent in, 115–16 reward/punishment of AI, 120–21 Differential Analyzer, 163, 179–80 digital fabrication, 167–69 digital signal encoding, 180 dimensionality, 165–66 distributed Thompson sampling, 198 DNA molecule, 58 “Dollie Clone Series” (Hershman Leeson), 261, 262 Doubt and Certainty in Science (Young), xviii Dragan, Anca, 134–42 adding people to AI problem definition, 137–38 background and overview of work of, 134–35 coordination problem, 137, 138–41 mathematical definition of AI, 136 value-alignment problem, 137–38, 141–42 The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Science of Complexity (Pagels), xxiii Drexler, Eric, 98 Dyson, Freeman, xxv, xxvi Dyson, George, xviii–xix, 33–40 analog and digital computation, distinguished, 35–37 background and overview of work of, 33–34 control, emergence of, 38–39 electronics, fundamental transitions in, 35 hybrid analog/digital systems, 37–38 on three laws of AI, 39–40 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 187 “Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein” (Brockman), xxii emergence, 68–69 Emissaries trilogy (Cheng), 216–17 Empty Space, The (Brook), 213 environmental risk, AI risk as, 97–98 Eratosthenes, 19 Evans, Richard, 217 Ex Machina (film), 242 expert systems, 271 extreme wealth, 202–3 fabrication, 167–69 factor analysis, 225 Feigenbaum, Edward, xxiv Feynman, Richard, xxi–xxii Fifth Generation, xxiii–xxiv The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World (Feigenbaum and McCorduck), xxiv Fodor, Jerry, 102 Ford Foundation, 202 Foresight and Understanding (Toulmin), 18–19 free will of machines, and rights, 250–51 Frege, Gottlob, 275–76 Galison, Peter, 231–39 background and overview of work of, 231–32 clinical versus objective method of prediction, 233–35 scientific objectivity, 235–39 Gates, Bill, 202 generative adversarial networks, 226 generative design, 166–67 Gershenfeld, Neil, 160–69 background and overview of work of, 160–61 boom-bust cycles in evolution of AI, 162–63 declarative design, 166–67 digital fabrication, 167–69 dimensionality problem, overcoming, 165–66 exponentially increasing amounts of date, processing of, 164–65 knowledge in AI systems, 164 scaling, and development of AI, 163–66 Ghahramani, Zoubin, 190 Gibson, William, 253 Go, 10, 150, 184–85 goal alignment.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

.… The first effects of these new mechanical combinations were to increase individual wealth, and to give a new stimulus to further inventions. 25. “dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs” Bernard Marr, “The 4 Ds of Robotization: Dull, Dirty, Dangerous and Dear,” Forbes, October 16, 2017. 26. a fifteen-hour workweek John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931; New York: Norton, 1963). 27. His life read like an epic poem Florence Ashton Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2 vols., London, 1889), 21–22. 28. Life had always been like this Tom Furniss, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 29.

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This criticism of the promise of automation, articulated by one of its early victims, holds true today. Today the promise is that robotics and algorithms will take on the “dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs” that no human wants to do. Automation should be a blessing, we are told. And have been told and told. In fact, the influential economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that improvements in machinery and, subsequently, productivity would lead us to a fifteen-hour workweek at most. If automation could be harnessed for the “common benefit,” as Booth argues, that might be a plausible outcome. Instead, it has consistently played out as Mellor has feared; labor-saving technology has accelerated the accumulation of capital among an ever-shrinking pool of elites.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day
by Craig Lambert
Published 30 Apr 2015

We are not (yet, anyway) required to devote all our nonworking hours to the essentially economic activity of consumption. At leisure, you may take a walk, play with your child, appreciate the garden, luxuriate in an erotic interlude, meditate, read a library book, marvel at the night sky, take a nap. You can even do nothing. IN 1928 JOHN Maynard Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” an essay in which he predicted that by 2028, technological progress would make economic productivity so efficient that people would work three-hour days and fifteen-hour weeks, releasing vast amounts of leisure. The main problem would be what to do with all those free hours.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

“four-day week, four-hour day”: See Nathan Schneider, “Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday,” Vice News, December 30, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.vice.com/read/who-stole-the-four-hour-workday-0000406-v21n8. See also Jon Bekken, “Arguments for a Four-Hour Day,” Libertarian Labor Review 1 (1986). might be possible within a century: See John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). Keynes believed that technological progress, combined with the rapid growth produced by compound interest, entailed that “the economic problem may be solved, or at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years.”

…

Calls for a thirty-hour week became increasingly prominent, and some of the more radical unions sought still shorter hours (the Industrial Workers of the World even went so far as to print T-shirts calling for a “four-day week, four-hour day”). Disinterested observers took these calls to be expressing a serious proposition. No less than John Maynard Keynes, writing around 1930, predicted that technological innovation would effectively eliminate long (or even moderate) human hours and labor effort for the masses, imagining that a three-hour workday might be possible within a century. Keynes and others hoped that these developments would usher in something approaching a utopia—a new world in which everyone might enjoy a form of life that, in their world, only elites could afford.

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Chapter Eight: Snowball Inequality employment and growth in a consumer economy depend: The rich will never consume sufficiently to sustain demand, no matter how rich they are. As Keynes recognized long ago, the diminishing marginal utility of consumption entails that a person’s propensity to consume her income falls as her income rises. See generally John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936). expanding private borrowing: Economic modeling formalizes these intuitive connections. Models show that inequality increases the demand for credit and that loose credit can substitute for redistribution in stimulating aggregate demand and thus supporting employment and growth.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

One group of scientists summed up the evidence like this: ‘Overall, the existing research suggests that working time reduction potentially offers a triple dividend to society: reduced unemployment, increased quality of life, and reduced environmental pressures.’32 Transitioning to a shorter working week is key to building a humane, ecological economy. * There’s nothing new about this idea. In fact, it’s not even particularly radical. In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’. He predicted that by the year 2030 technological innovation and improvements in labour productivity would free people to work only fifteen hours a week. Keynes turned out to be correct about productivity gains, but his prophecy about working hours never came true.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
by Thomas Geoghegan
Published 20 Sep 2011

When that person has 700 more hours a year, to learn an extra language, to go to Sri Lanka, or just to read, it’s that high achiever who may be best off under the European model. There is a new skepticism about GDP per capita, at least from a few economists. But we still need someone who can show us how to keep the books. Long dead now is the one who might have done it: I mean John Maynard Keynes, who wrote the haunting essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In that long-ago essay (1930), he talked of a world in which his grandchildren would not really have to work. Or not in the old way. We’d write. Read. We’d have long afternoons full of cigarettes and novels. “It was Keynes at his silliest,” or so his biographer writes.

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Denmark children in poverty elderly poor GDP per capita hours worked jobs/employment percent of adults holding an associate degree percent of adults self-employed purchasing power ratios/disparities unemployment rates for college graduates Despres, Leon Dewey, John Diamond, Jared Disney The Disposable American (Uchitelle) Le Divorce (Johnson) DIY (Berlin think tank) Dutschke, Rudi Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) East Asia Economic Policy Institute’s State of Working America[Shouldn’t there be more here? The tables?] “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes) The Economist The Education of Henry Adams education system (Germany) apprenticeships college tuitions college-attendance rates Dual Track system high school graduates/postgrads and reading law students learning mastery and skill political identity/education study of topics over a lifetime education system (U.S.)

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success
by Dietrich Vollrath
Published 6 Jan 2020

Productivity and U.S. Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jorgenson, D. W., M. S. Ho, and J. D. Samuels. 2013. Economic Growth in the Information Age. Technical report. Boston: NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Summer Institute. Keynes, J. M. 1931. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Essays in Persuasion. London: McMillan. Kimball, M. S., J. G. Fernald, and S. Basu. 2006. “Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?” American Economic Review 96 (5): 1418–48. Klenow, P. J., and A. Rodriguez-Clare. 1997. “The Neo-Classical Revival in Growth Economics: Has It Gone Too Far?”

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If you recall from the work on human capital, there was also a persistent drag on growth from the decline in hours worked per employee over time. The average workweek, which was around seventy hours during the 1800s, fell to less than forty hours per week in the twentieth century and has continued to drop during the twenty-first. John Maynard Keynes, back in 1930, famously speculated about the possibilities of a fifteen-hour workweek as our demand for material goods reached satiation. This decline would represent another success, coming about as a result of a choice to “buy” ourselves shorter workweeks in response to productivity growth.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kershaw, David, and Jerilyn Fair. 1976. The New Jersey Income-Â�Maintenance Experiment, vol. 1: Operations, Surveys, and Administration. New York: Academic Press. Keynes, John Maynard. 1930aâ•›/â•›1972. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion, The Collected Writings, vol. 9: 321–332. London: Macmillan, for the Royal Economic Society. —Â�—Â�—. 1930bâ•›/â•›1981. “The Question of High Wages.” In Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies, The Collected Writings, vol. 20, 2–16. London: Macmillan, for the Royal Economic Society.

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But, as mentioned above, strong doubts have emerged as to the possibility and desirability of sustained growth in rich countries and about its ability to provide a solution to unemployment. A basic income offers an alternative solution that does not rely on an insane rush to keep pace with productivity growth. The time Â�will come, John Maynard Keynes wrote, when growth Â�will no longer be the path to follow, when “our discovery of means of economizing the use of Â�labour” Â�will be “outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” Â� And then “we Â�shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there Â� 57 is still to be done to be as widely shared as posÂ�siÂ�ble.”

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“OrÂ�gaÂ�nized Â�labor feared any likely increase in cheap Â�labor stimulated by the removal of work disincentives,” as Desmond King writes.24 It is also evident in the reservations expressed by Michel Jalmain, a national secretary of the CFDT (the French DemoÂ�cratic Confederation of Â�Labor, one of France’s main labor unions), that a basic income would amount to subsidizing, at the community’s expense, firms that offer precarious and poorly-Â�paid jobs.25 And it is analogous to what John Maynard Keynes saw as the main reason for the British trade Â�unions’ opposition to universal child benefits: “I believe that the trade Â�union movement is actively hostile on the express ground that it fears such allowances would be what I wish them to be, namely, an alternative to higher wages. It would be much better that a man with heavy Â�family burdens to support should receive assistance out of taxation, which is thrown on profits generally, than that an attempt should be made to raise wages paid by his employer to a disproportionate level.”26 This fear is more serious.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
by David Christian
Published 21 May 2018

He warned that the stationary state should be chosen deliberately and on good terms before it was forced on a reluctant humanity on much poorer terms. “I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.” Many others have recognized that economic growth is not the same as a good life. In 1930, in an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that within a century, productivity would be high enough to guarantee the necessities of life to everyone. At that point, he hoped, people would stop working so hard and think more about how they lived. In March 1968, just before he was assassinated, Robert Kennedy described the limitations of an economy devoted to never-ending growth in gross national product: The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage ….

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
by Brigid Schulte
Published 11 Mar 2014

“And now, the focus is on what you can do in forty-five minutes over lunch,” she said. “Keen Footwear even pioneered the idea of taking a ten- to fifteen-minute Instant Recess. They want people to go outside and do something they love. Or just move.”30 * * * Life in the early twenty-first century wasn’t supposed to be so busy. The economist John Maynard Keynes, in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicted a fifteen-hour week by 2030, an end to the human struggle to survive, and time to enjoy “the hour and the day virtuously and well.” In the 1950s, some prominent thinkers predicted that the post–World War II boom in productivity and the ever-rising incomes and standards of living for Americans and the industrialized world could only mean that we were entering a new age of unprecedented leisure.

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Hammer, Leslie Hanley, Caroline Hansen, Orval Happy Endings (TV show) Harding, Hillary Hartman, David Hartman, Heidi Harvard Business Review Harvard Business School Harvard University Haskins, Greg Hawkes, Kirsten Hays, Sharon: The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood Hazda women Head Start Health and Human Services, Department of health care; costs; ER heart disease heart rate Heckman, James Heidegger, Martin helicopter parenting Henderson, Karla Heritage Foundation Herr, Jane Leber Hewlett, Sylvia Ann Heyck-Merlin, Maia Hicks, Kathleen Hochschild, Arlie: The Second Shift holidays Holt, Luther Emmett Hölzel, Britta homeschooling homework homosexuality hormones; stress hotels; labor Hot Mommas Project housework; breadwinner-homemaker stereotype; Danish; gay couples and; gender equity issues; men and; women and housing prices Hout, Michael Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer; Mother Nature; Mothers and Others Hsee, Christopher Huizinga, Johan Hunnicutt, Ben hunting-and-gathering societies hurricanes Hypertherm hypothalamus Iacocca, Lee IBM Iceland ideal mother ideal worker; breadwinner-homemaker stereotype; dumping the; evidence against; parental leave and; “separate spheres theory”; staying power of; stereotype; stress; wage gap immigrants immune system; effect of stress on Implicit Association Test India industrialization infertility inflammation information; overload Institute for Social Research, Hague integration intensive mothering; ambivalence and; Danish; fear and; guilt and; mommy wars International Association for Time Use Research; Paris conference Internet iPhone Ireland Issa, Darrell Italy Jacobs, Jerry: The Time Divide Japan Javitz, Jacob Jensen, Elisabeth Møller Johansson, Thomas: New Swedish Father Joly, Hubert Judaism Jump Associates Kaibel, Howard Kappaz, George Keefer, Catherine Kelly, Erin Kennedy, Eden: Let’s PANIC About Babies! Kennedy, Robert F. Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” Kitch, Travis Klingberg, Torkel: The Overflowing Brain Kossek, Ellen Ernst; CEO of Me Kounios, John Koushede, Søren Koushede, Vibeke Kramer, Steven Philip Kuehl, Sheila !Kung women labor: see work Lafkin, Elly Lanham Act Last, Jonathan V.: What to Expect When No One’s Expecting latch-key children laundry lawyers; men as; telework; women as Learning Channel leisure; busyness and; class; Danish; do one thing; industry; lessons; men and; of 1950s; of 1960s; play; rise of; TV and; vacation; women and; see also specific types of leisure Leisure Trends Lerner, Sharon Lessing, Doris Levo League Listservs Little Eagles Day Care London Business School Lopez, P.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Though there have clearly been episodes when workers have suffered hardships as technology has advanced, fears over end-of-work scenarios have always been overblown, as has the idea that we would all give up work and live a life of fulfillment and leisure. In the 1930 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes famously declared that mechanization was progressing at a rate greater than at any other time in history. Our discovery of ways to replace people with machines, he suggested, was outrunning the pace at which new uses for labor could be found—which he held would lead to widespread technological unemployment.

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Henderson, 2017, comment on “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics, by E. Brynjolfsson, D. Rock and C. Syverson,” National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/chapters/c14020.pdf. 91. J. M. Keynes, [1930] 2010, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 321–32. 92. V. A. Ramey and N. Francis, 2009, “A Century of Work and Leisure,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1 (2): 189–224. 93. W. A. Sundstrom, 2006, “Hours and Working Conditions,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition Online, ed.

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Given that people report much lower levels of enjoyment associated with such activities, this seems reasonable. See J. Robinson and G. Godbey, 2010, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press.) 97. Keynes, [1930] 2010, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” 322. 98. R. L. Heilbroner, 1966, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” New York Review of Books, March 17, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/03/17/where-do-we-go-from-here/. 99. D. H. Autor, 2015, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (3): 8. 100.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

But the market for these permits is already a thriving one, with an estimated value of trade in 2007 at $64 billion. 17. They are named, ‘Marx the Prophet’, ‘Marx the Economist’, ‘Marx the Sociologist’ and ‘Marx the Teacher’. 18. Over time – in his grandchildren’s generation, as Keynes put in a famous article titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ (though he himself had no children) – living standards in countries like Britain will have risen sufficiently that not much new investment would be needed. At such a point, he envisaged, the focus of policy should be switched to reducing working hours and increasing consumption, mainly by redistributing income to poorer groups, which spend larger proportions of their incomes than the richer ones. 19.

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To be fair, other schools too focus on particular issues, but the Schumpeterian school exhibits a narrower focus than most. The Keynesian School One-sentence summary: What is good for individuals may not be good for the whole economy. Born in the same year as Schumpeter and sharing the honour of having a whole school named after him is John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). In terms of intellectual influence, there is no comparison between the two. Keynes was arguably the most important economist of the twentieth century. He redefined the subject by inventing the field of macroeconomics – the branch of economics that analyses the whole economy as an entity that is different from the sum total of its parts.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

In times of recession, he wrote in 1931, saving was evil: ‘Whenever you save five shillings, you put a man out of work for a day.’ He urged ‘patriotic housewives’ instead to ‘go to the wonderful sales’ and indulge themselves.32 Governments, too, needed to spend, not cut. Yet Keynes himself was not an unqualified hedonist. Unlike his teacher Marshall, he did not believe that needs were insatiable. In ‘The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, published in 1930, he envisaged a future where absolute needs would be fulfilled and everyone devoted their energies to non-material purposes. ‘We shall honour . . . the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.’

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See also: Mark Aguiar & Erik Hurst, ‘Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades’, Working Paper no. 06-2: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2006; although their numbers for leisure are inflated by treating childcare as leisure (rather than as unpaid work). 23. For this and other reasons why Keynes was wrong, see Lorenzo Pecchi & Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 24. ‘An Apology for Idlers’, in: Cornhill Magazine, 36 (July 1877), repr. in The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson (1895 edn), 73; emphasis in original. 25. This applies to Thorstein Veblen as well, whose theory of the idle rich ignored the hard-working Rockefellers and more thrifty members of the elite.

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The one good thing Huizinga had to say for consumer culture was reserved for film, where the happy ending had at least preserved a ‘solemn and popular moral order’.31 Eventually, consumption emerged stronger from this mid-life crisis. Consumers came to be seen not as the cause of the problem but as its cure. To some degree, this process can be summarized as the triumph of John Maynard Keynes, who justified public spending and condemned an older glorification of thrift. Keynes’s General Theory of 1936 followed a string of more popular pieces that asked contemporaries to turn their morals upside down. In times of recession, he wrote in 1931, saving was evil: ‘Whenever you save five shillings, you put a man out of work for a day.’

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

Fitz The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself, Peter Fleming Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, Corey Pein Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work, Eva Paus On economics An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Capital, Karl Marx “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (essay), John Maynard Keynes The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S. Hacker Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty The Economics of Inequality, Thomas Piketty Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design, Alvin E.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

Both Democratic and Republican: Cooper, The War against Regulation: From Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush; Institute of Medicine. Devens Enterprise Commission: Bump, Official Audit Report: Devens Enterprise Commission. “Devens Enterprise Zone”: “Blockbuster Project Proof of Devons Lure.” The Sun (Lowell). “Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren”: Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930).” especially among prime-aged men: Gulliford, “Research Indicates That Men Are More Likely to Suffer Adverse Health Consequences as a Result of Being Unemployed Than Women.” five hours of television: Krantz-Kent, “Television, Capturing America’s Attention at Prime Time and Beyond.”

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“Nearly 50 Million Americans Have Filed for Unemployment—Here’s What’s Really Happening.” Forbes, July 9, 2020. www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/07/09/nearly-50-million-americans-have-filed-for-unemployment-heres-whats-really-happening. Kelsey, Robert J. Packaging in Today’s Society. 3rd ed. Lancaster, PA: Technomic, 1989. Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932. Khouri, Andrew. “As New Apartments Flood Downtown L.A., Landlords Offer Sweet Deals.” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2016. www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-downtown-apartments-20160719-snap-story.html. “King’s Landing Dubrovnik: Game of Thrones Filming Locations in Dubrovnik, Croatia.”

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The resources available to the nonworking will be limited, but they will have food, medical care, and abundant access to the internet. They also won’t have to go out—essentially ever—and so they’ll be safe from contagious illness. At first thought, this scenario may seem attractive. The great economist John Maynard Keynes certainly thought so eighty years ago when he wrote his classic essay “Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren.” But the data say otherwise. Joblessness, especially among prime-aged men, is associated with misery, suicide, and divorce. The problem is not so much material deprivation as social isolation and a sense of worthlessness.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

And finally, there’s the best of all plausible worlds—amazing machines, more than enough stuff that our new, optimal social democracy divides fairly, more or less Earth as on Star Trek or in the redemptive finale of WALL-E. In 1930—just after the word robot was invented, just as Aldous Huxley was imagining the dystopia of Brave New World and just before H. G. Wells depicted the utopia of The Shape of Things to Come—their friend John Maynard Keynes saw the economic future.*1 “We are being afflicted with a new disease,” he wrote in a speculative essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” a disease of which “readers will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

Keynes had given him a benchmark for measuring the degree to which Britain, over what the Annales school of French historians call the longue durée, was having it so good. In his celebrated Essays in Persuasion (which Macmillan surely read when they first appeared in 193116), Keynes published a lecture he had given in Madrid the previous year when the Depression was biting hard and pessimism was spreading all around. He called it ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’. In it he scanned the horizon a hundred years hence and made a prediction that would probably have struck his early-Thirties readers as wildly optimistic. Assuming ‘no important wars and no important increase in population’, Keynes wrote, ‘I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today’.17 In the spring of 2009, Iain de Weymarn, Economic Assistant to the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, calculated that by 2008, measured by the growth in productivity, the UK had seen a six-fold increase ‘bang in the middle of Keynes’ range’.18 Had Macmillan in the spring of 1960 asked the Bank of England or the Treasury to make a similar calculation for him of progress so far on Keynes’s prediction (after one total war and an increase in population from about 45 million to 53 million19) it would have shown the UK well on the way to reaching the economic trajectory required for the lower end of Keynes’s prediction to be met by 2030 (see table; Iain de Weymarn’s calculations are at 2003 prices).20 The rise in living standards in the 1950s had been considerable and electorally advantageous to the Conservatives.

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W. 218 Butler, David 331, 487 Butler, Rab and 1944 Education Act 452–3, 467 and 1963 Blackpool conference speech 451–2 and the 1964 Election 471, 489–90 always the bridesmaid 155–6, 401–9, 412–16, 432–3, 435 appointed Foreign Secretary 431 attitude to the EEC 79–81, 83, 116 appointed one of Douglas-Home’s nuclear deputies 445 and the British Empire 178 and the Cuban missile crisis 275–6 designated ‘minister-for-the-bunker’ 6 EEC-excluded steering committee member 333–4 ‘first gravedigger’ 228 and Hailsham 398–9 and Harold Macmillan 252, 361, 396, 400–401 and immigration controls 213, 215–17 leaking of Macmillan’s ‘massacre’ 157–61 and the Leyland contract 446–7 potential deputy prime minister 155 and replacement for Skybolt 312 talk with Menzies 118 Butler Report (2004) 247 Butler, Robin 425 Butlin, Wendy 302 Caccia, Harold 67, 278 Caine, Michael 240 Cairncross, Alec 140, 142, 151–3, 442 Calder Hall 355 Callaghan, James 126, 137, 335, 444 Cameron, David 435 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 236, 295, 297–9, 302–3, 468 Canada 74, 105, 107, 190, 261, 286 cannabis 462 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter) 426 Carmichael, Ian 25 Carousel (musical) 458–9 Carpenter, Humphrey 29 Carson, Rachel 11–12 Carswell, John 451 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 320, 329 ‘Case for Reform, The’ (Furse) 192 Case, Simon 242 Castle, Barbara 365–6, 369 Castro, Fidel 247, 250, 254, 264, 282 Castro, Raúl 250 Catholic Church 2–3, 463–5 Caulcott, Tom 155–6, 158–9 Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge 358 Central African Federation 160–61, 179, 184, 188–92, 205–6, 214, 252 Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) 357–8 Central Government War Book 275 Central Government War HQ (alternative), Cotswolds 223–5, 229, 272, 274–6, 292, 297–8, 445 Challenge of Affluence, The (Offer) 500 Chamberlain, Joseph 377 Chandos, Lord see Lyttelton, Oliver Chapelcross, Dumfriesshire 355 Charles, Prince of Wales 210 Charlton, Michael 120, 325–6 Charter Films 26 Charteris, Martin 178, 408, 410, 414 Château de Champs, Paris 113–14 Checkpoint Charlie (Berlin) 232, 237–8 China 53, 61, 188, 231, 471 Chipped White Cups of Dover, The (Young) 18, 149 Chisholm, Janet 243 Chisholm of Owlpen, Baroness 388, 393 chronology 503–10 Church of England 463–4 Churchill, Randolph 399, 404, 411, 432–3 Churchill, Sir Winston and British place at the ‘top table’ 239 criticism of 409 and de Gaulle 60, 322, 325 determination of 43 and Europe 64, 73–4 last great imperialist 183 and nuclear power 357 plan for a nuclear shelter 4, 6, 9 rhetorical skills of 308–9 and the secret services 475 and ‘three interlocking circles’ notion 13, 36, 84, 94 CIA 50, 242–3, 250–52, 258 Civil Defence Corps 296 Civil Defence Staff College 291 Clark, Kenneth 106 Clarke, Otto 125, 146–8, 165 Clarke, Peter 424 Clay, Lucius 237 Cline, Ray 252 ‘Cliveden set’ 369, 375 CLOUD DRAGON (exercise) 22 Cockburn, Claud 369 Cockcroft, John 354, 358, 360 Cold War and Africa 205, 211 and Alec Home 410 anxiety about 3–4, 9, 13 beginning of 63 and the Berlin crisis (1958–62) 5, 13, 223–4, 226, 228–33, 236–41 consequences of thermonuclear bombardment 295 constant need for intelligence during 247 and the Cuban missile crisis see Cuban missile crisis dynamics of 40, 242 and EEC 96 emergency planning during 223–4 ever-pressing perspective of 183–4 in flux 300 and George Blake 246 ‘hawks, doves and and owls’ 234 and NATO Treaty 76 and Oleg Penkovsky 242–3 and the Profumo affair 363 and the Radcliffe Report 364 realities of 42 Collins, Canon John 298, 303 Colombey-les-Deux-Églises 44 Colonial Office 196–7, 200, 207, 213, 217 ‘Comforts of Stagnation, The’ (Shanks) 21–2 Commissariat au Plan 144–5 Committee of One Hundred 301 Common Market see European Economic Community (EEC) Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) 215, 217 communism 40, 44, 84, 203–4, 231, 300 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848) 11 comprehensive education 466–7, 480 Concorde 128 Congo 197, 208, 211 Conservative Party and 1964 general election 479–80, 485–6 advantage to of rising living standards 130 damage of 1961 deflationary measures 140–41 and the EEC 94, 106, 119 European question created permanent tension in 80 and fight for the Tory leadership 411–13, 432 gloomy prospects of 338 and Harold Wilson 24 humour about 27–8 Labour bidding to outdo 128 and Macmillan 102–3, 397, 399 and the Orpington disaster 157 policy on Polaris 483–4 and the Profumo affair 369 Cook, Peter 30–31, 35 Cooper, Chester 256 Cooper, Matthew 465 Cotton, Bill Jr 457–8 Court, Bert 2–3 Cousins, Frank 14, 491 Couve de Murville, Maurice 111–13, 325–6, 330 Cowdrey, Colin 417 Cowell, Gervase 290 Cowley, Steve 359 Cradock, Percy 230, 233, 252 cricket 182, 320, 417 Cripps, Stafford 144, 148, 151 Crocker, Walter 192 Croft, Eric 459 Croham, Lord see Allen, Douglas Cromer, Lord 142 Crosland, Anthony 424, 466, 500 Cross, Kenneth ‘Bing’ 272 Crossman, Richard and Harold Macmillan 306 and Harold Wilson 337, 420, 423–4 and prime ministerial government 449 and the Profumo affair 365–6, 369, 383 Shadow Minister for Education and Science 420–21 Crown Agents 195 Cuban missile crisis (1962) accelerated work on missile sites 270–71 beginnings of 221–7, 233, 239, 241–3, 247, 274 and Harold Macmillan 122–3 Kennedy’s first actions 254–5 and Khrushchev 163, 247–51, 253–4 most analysed superpower confrontation 248 peering over the rim of the abyss 11, 13, 119 and Ralph Schoenman 305 ramifications of 267, 275–90, 307 removing the rockets 258–61 retrospect 295, 299, 301–2, 318–20, 363, 375 and trade embargo 445–6 US Navy blockade 255–7 Cunningham, Charles 474 Cunningham, Knox 407 Cyprus 201, 460 Dad’s Army (BBC TV) 297 Dahrendorf, Ralf 479 Dalyell, Kathleen (née Wheatley) 31–2 Dalyell, Tam 31, 344, 362, 421–2 Daniel, Glyn 4 Daniels, Morgan 29–30 Davenport-Hines, Richard 385 Davie, Grace 463 Davies, Hunter 318 Day, Robin 165 de Courcel, Geoffroy 113–14, 321 de Gaulle, Charles and the 2nd Berlin crisis 229–30, 237 and HM Queen Elizabeth 470 and the Profumo affair 367, 376 a ‘certain idea’ of Britain 495 and the Cuban missile crisis 251, 279 ‘curmudgeon of Rambouillet’ 65–6 and the demise of Skybolt 309 and a Europe des patries 96–7 and French indicative planning 144 hypothetical meeting with LBJ 447 and indicative planning model 498 and Macmillan 57–64, 70, 103–9, 111–15, 119–20, 323–5 obstacle to Britain in Europe 43–57, 84–8, 90, 128 sense of personal destiny 326–32 ‘state is the coldest of monsters’ 221 and the UK Polaris deal 312–13, 315–16, 322 UK welcome in EEC 100 vetoing of UK entry to EEC 39, 81, 100–101, 319–22, 342, 468, 482 de Gaulle, Philippe 322 de Weymarn, Iain 129 de Zulueta, Marie-Lou 255, 312 de Zulueta, Philip and the Cuban missile crisis 255, 279 De Gaulle and Macmillan 62–3, 106, 113–14, 120, 251, 322–7 Macmillan and Kennedy 308, 311–12, 314–15, 394 Macmillan’s foreign affairs Private Secretary 52 Debré, Michel 62 Deedes, Bill 161, 396 Defence of the Realm, The (Andrew) 374 Defence White Paper (1957) 296–7 Deighton, Len 240–41 Dell, Edmund 126, 151, 339, 443 Deltic diesel locomotives 177 Denning, Lord 363–8, 370, 372–5, 384–93 Denning Report (1963) 3, 366–8, 372–5, 387, 390–92 Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) 473–4 developed vetting see positive vetting Devonshire courses 192–5 Devonshire, Duke of 253 Diet of Worms (1521) 219 Dilhorne, Lord 161, 255, 378, 400–401, 405–7 Direct Action Committee (CND offshoot) 298 Disarmers, The (Driver) 297 Disraeli, Benjamin 139, 343 Dixon, Pierson 103–5, 110, 115–16, 120, 314–16 Dobrynin, Anatoly 261 Doll, Richard 460–61 Dolphin, Giles 305 Donaldson, Roger 289 Donoughue, Bernard 490 Douglas, Mary 21–2 Douglas-Home, Charles 423 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec and the 2nd Berlin crisis 236 and the 1964 election 449–50, 471, 477, 483–4, 486, 490 appointed alternative nuclear decision-taker 272–6 and the Cuban missile crisis 248–9, 256, 278, 284, 288 and Edward Heath 490 and the EEC 333–4, 482 and Enoch Powell 149–50, 376–7, 439 first actions as PM 430–31, 435, 440 foreign affairs achievements of 444–6 and Harold Wilson 418–19, 427, 429 hereditary Scottish aristocrat 24 and Iain Macleod 197, 201, 434–5 influence of That Was the Week That Was 32 introduction of drug abuse legislation 462 last months of 358 and leadership succession 128, 319, 401–2, 404–9, 413–17, 419 and Macmillan 109, 116, 172, 381, 397 and the MI5/SIS working party 376 new Cabinet duty 163 and the Peerage Act (1963) 166, 363 and Polaris 308 and Reginald Maudling 444 resignation as PM 493 and the Robbins Report 452 rush to decolonize 180, 185 and UK’s economic performance 151 Dounreay Fast Reactor 170, 355 Dow, Christopher 148–9 Dr Strangelove (film) 9, 289–90, 295 Driver, Christopher 297–9, 460 drug abuse 462–3 Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act (1964) 462 Dulles, Foster 283 Ealing Comedies 27 East Africa Railways and Harbours Company 195 East Germany 226–7, 230–32, 236–8, 242, 246–7 East–West summit (1960) 38, 71 Eccles, David 126, 172, 466 École Militaire 50 ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ (Keynes) 129 Eden, Anthony 100, 126, 162–3, 283 Edgecombe, John 366 Edinburgh, Duke of 430 Education Act (1944) 402, 454–7, 498 Edwards, Ronald ‘Buster’ 351 Egypt 184, 203 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 54, 204, 227, 309 Eleven Minutes Late (Engel) 350 Elizabeth II, Queen appointment of Archbishop of Canterbury 464 appointment of Harold Wilson 494 and changing UK influence in the world 469–70 and the Commonwealth 102 exemplary constitutional monarchy of 499 and Harold Macmillan 117, 127–8, 255, 376, 393–5 ramifications of Macmillan’s resignation 406–16 and Selwyn Lloyd 430 Third World War redoubt of 8 Élysée Palace 50 Emergency Powers (Defence) Bill (1963) 288 Empire’s Last Officers, The (BBC Radio 4) 209 Encounter (magazine) 20–22, 31 Engel, Matthew 343, 350 ‘England, Whose England?’

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TNA, PRO, CAB 128/36, CC (62) 63, item 4. 5. Lord Keynes, ‘Overseas Financial Policy in Stage III’, 3 April 1945, circulated to the War Cabinet on 15 May by Sir John Anderson, Chancellor of the Exchequer, as WP (45) 301, TNA, PRO, CAB 66/65. 6. Austin Robinson, ‘A Personal View’, in Milo Keynes (ed.), Essays on John Maynard Keynes (Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 20. 7. Quoted in David Hubback, ‘Sir Richard Clarke, 1910–1975: A Most Unusual Civil Servant’, Public Policy and Administration, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring, 1988), p. 19. 8. TNA, PRO, T 267/7, R. W. B. Clarke, ‘Foreword’, to Treasury Historical Memorandum no. 5, ‘The Government and Wages, 1945–1960’, July 1962, p. 1. 9.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Post–World War II Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for Eastern Europe Today, ed. Rudiger Dornbusch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity; Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal”; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1930). By 2014, a Standard and Poor’s report concluded that income inequality impedes economic growth and destabilizes the social fabric, a fact that Henry Ford had long ago acknowledged with his five-dollar day. See “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” S&P Capital IQ, Global Credit Portal Report, August 5, 2014, https://www.globalcreditportal.com/ratingsdirect/renderArticle.do?

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

“Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering,” The New York Times, February 15. Kenny, Charles. (2013). “What the Web Didn’t Deliver,” Bloomberg Business Week, June 20, pp. 10–11. Kesslar-Harris, Alice. (1982). Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York/Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Keynes, John Maynard. (1931). “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion. London: MacMillan, pp. 358–74. Khan, B. Zorina, and Sokoloff, Kenneth L. (2004). “Institutions and Technological Innovation During Early Economic Growth: Evidence from the Great Inventors of the United States, 1790–1930,” NBER Working Paper 10966. Kidwell, Claudia B. (1979).

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By 1920, this had declined to eight hours per day for six days and by 1940 the same number of hours for five days per week. The standard forty-hour full-time work week has remained surprisingly stable during the postwar period, seven decades of stability after such radical change in the century before 1940.12 The rapid decline in working hours led John Maynard Keynes in 1931 to make a famous prediction that turned out to be quite wrong—that society would be so productive that each worker would only need to work for fifteen hours per week: For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented.