In the first and second articles about the musings from John Maynard Keynes, we explored how they still echo several critical aspects, although they’ve evolved in the context of a 21st-century world.
Many of his reflections offer insightful predictions and hopes for the future, some of which have materialized, while others remain distant or have evolved in unexpected ways. His musings continue to provide a valuable framework for reflecting on contemporary economic challenges and opportunities in a complex, interconnected global landscape.
Rethinking Work and Leisure
Keynes’ vision of a reduced workweek hasn’t quite materialized globally; however, conversations around the restructuring of the workweek have intensified. With the rise of remote and flexible working arrangements, especially accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, society is reconsidering the traditional 40-hour workweek and exploring alternatives that offer a better work-life balance.
Shift In Social Values
Keynes’ anticipation of a shift in moral codes and social values in the light of economic ease is noteworthy. In the 21st century, society has experienced significant changes in value systems, with an increased focus on sustainability, social justice, and community well-being over mere wealth accumulation.
Pursuit of Wealth
The insatiable pursuit of wealth remains a dominant driving force in modern societies. However, a growing counter-narrative emphasizes mindfulness, conscious consumption, and pursuing a fulfilling life over material wealth. Social enterprises and impact investing are examples of this shift, aiming to achieve social impact alongside financial returns.
The Money-Motive Reassessed
Keynes’ disapproval of the love for money for its sake has found resonance in modern dialogues around capitalism and consumerism. Critics of capitalist structures often argue against an unchecked pursuit of wealth, advocating for systems that ensure equitable distribution and social welfare.
New Definitions of Success and Purpose
The 21st century has seen a redefinition of success and purpose, with increasing value placed on personal fulfillment, mental health, and well-being. There’s a growing understanding that the blind pursuit of wealth and economic gain often leads to stress, burnout, and an unfulfilling life.
The Challenge of Economic Equity
While Keynes envisions a society free from economic necessity, the reality in 2023 is that significant portions of the global population still grapple with economic hardships. Income inequality, poverty, and lack of access to resources remain pressing challenges that need addressing.
Social and Economic Changes Already Underway
Keynes was correct in noting that his predicted transformation had begun, and by 2023, the world had seen monumental changes in social and economic structures. The digital revolution, globalization, and advancements in science and technology have drastically altered how society functions, communicates, and pursues economic activity.
The Importance of Avoiding Wars and Civil Dissensions
This point remains crucial in 2023 as geopolitical tensions, civil unrest, and conflicts continue to threaten global stability and economic prosperity. Building an economically stable and secure world requires a commitment to peace, diplomacy, and international cooperation.
Population Control and Sustainability
The challenge of population growth and its impact on resources and the environment is a major concern in the 21st century. Sustainable development, responsible consumption, and population control are integral to addressing humanity’s environmental and economic challenges.
Science and Policy
The reliance on science to guide policy, especially in areas like public health, climate change, and technology, is increasingly significant. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of science-driven policy and the need for governments to invest in scientific research and development.
Rethinking Economics
Keynes’s closing note, comparing economists to dentists, underscores a call for humility and practicality in the field. The 21st century has seen economics evolve with interdisciplinary approaches, incorporating insights from psychology, sociology, and environmental science, reflecting a broader understanding of economic behavior and its impact on society and the planet.
Enjoy the third—and last—of his thoughts on the economic possibilities for our grandchildren, written in 1930.
Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
(1930)*
Adapted from John Maynard Keynes
For many ages, the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties, tasks, and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavor to spread the bread thin on the butter to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a while. Three hours a day satisfies the old Adam in most of us!
There are changes in other spheres, too, which we must expect to come. When wealth accumulation 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 that 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. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognized for what it is: somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities that one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
Of course, there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be obligated to applaud and encourage them. For we shall inquire more curiously than is safe today into the true character of this “purposiveness” with which, in varying degrees, Nature has endowed almost all of us. For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their quality or immediate effects on our environment. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus, by pushing his jam forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.
Let me remind you of the Professor in Sylvie and Bruno :
“Only the tailor, sir, with your little bill,” said a meek voice outside the door.
“Ah, well, I can soon settle his business,” the Professor said to the children, “if you’ll just wait a minute. How much is it this year, my man?” The tailor had come in while he was speaking.
“Well, it’s been a-doubling so many years, you see,” the tailor replied, a little gruffly, “I think I’d like the money now. It’s two thousand pounds, it is!”
“Oh, that’s nothing!” the Professor carelessly remarked, feeling in his pocket as if he always carried at least that amount with him. “But wouldn’t you like to wait another year and make it four thousand? Just think how rich you’d be! Why, you might be a king if you liked!”
“I don’t know as I’d care about being a king,” the man said thoughtfully. “But it dew sound a powerful sight o’ money! Well, I think I’ll wait-“
“Of course you will!” said the Professor. “There’s good sense in you, I see. Good day to you, my man!”
“Will you ever have to pay him that four thousand pounds?” Sylvie asked as the door closed on the departing creditor.
“Never, my child!” the Professor replied emphatically. “He’ll go on doubling it till he dies. You see, it’s always worthwhile waiting another year to get twice as much money!”
Perhaps it is not an accident that the race that did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions.
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the surest and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those who walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years, we must pretend to ourselves, and everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. Only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change that has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate. But, of course, it will all happen gradually, not as a catastrophe. Indeed, it has already begun. The course of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed. The critical difference will be realized when this condition has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbor is changed. It will remain reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.
Four things will govern the pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss: our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.
Meanwhile, there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our destiny, encouraging, and experimenting with the arts of life and the activities of purpose.
But, chiefly, do not let us overestimate the importance of the economic problem or sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater and more permanent significance. It should be a matter for specialists like dentists. If economists could be considered humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!
* Scanned from John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963, pp. 358-373.
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