Keynes In the long run, we'll live to 300 and work

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES'S contention that "in the long-run, we're all dead", is hard to dispute. Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard, raised hackles recently by suggesting that Keynes's seeming indifference to the welfare of future generations had something to do with the fact that he was childless and gay. As it happens, Keynes wasn't at all unconcerned withthe long run and was actually making a point about the danger of economic theorems that encouraged governments to believe that short-run economic interventions, such as goosing the money supply during a downturn, are futile. Keynes's keen interest in futurity is on full display in his famous essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren", in which the economic conditions of the long run is probed with great insight.

As Ezra Klein points out, Keynes was impressively prescient about the extent of future economic growth, but less so when considering how we would respond to plenitude. Keynes saw the possibility that we would simply consume more, but he speculated hopefully that we would use our wealth to enjoy meaningful leisure, and that

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 recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

That is to say, in the long run, before they're dead, our grandchildren will be gentlepersons of leisure disgusted by the work of getting and spending. Alas, we are not.

Keynes's mistake, according to Mr Klein, is that he failed to see that

Humanity’s true nature evolved around the economic problem and, with the economic problem solved, it has simply applied itself to a simulacrum of the economic problem.

In the United States, the economic problem that organizes many of our lives is not that we don’t have enough. It’s that we don’t have quite as much as those who have more. That’s an economic problem that, almost by definition, can never be solved.

Another way to put this is that scarcity is a relative notion, and thus can never be overcome. It's a good point, though I have different complaints with Keynes's forecast.

First, Keynes is too myopic about the definition of "the long run". That the living ever dwell at the frontier of time seems to encourage a fallacious sense that the hour is getting late. That the end is nigh is deep in the DNA of Christian Western culture. Friedrich Hegel and Francis Fukuyama spotted the end of history just ahead of them. "Latter Day Saints" hoard potable water and canned goods in their cellars. Environmentalists tout a sort-of pagan eschatology. Yet, for all we know, this is the morning of humanity, and the modern era of economic growth was but a light breakfast. Suppose that in 50 years a great breakthrough extends the average lifespan by hundreds of years. Our grandchildren will look upon the present age of so-called abundance as the end of the original human era, during which a terrible and absolute scarcity of time prevailed. It's really not at all clear that even the richest of us is that much less poor than our hunter-gatherer forebears. If the hour is early, it may be that we are poorly prepared to understand what it would even mean to solve "the economic problem", the problem of scarcity.

My second complaint is that Keynes's assumption about the superiority of leisured pursuits is dogmatic rather than reasoned. Though Keynes saw quite clearly that the English aristocratic class seldom made the best use of its leisure, it's hard not to see his bias against commerce and consumption as a vestige of aristocratic ideology about the inherent degradation of market activity. The idealisation of bohemian artistic and intellectual life, and the dogma of its superiority over the bourgeois commercial life, that prevailed among Keynes' Bloomsbury friends, and prevails still among artists and intellectuals, is a remarkably sturdy remnant of our feudal legacy. No doubt the persistence of economic striving has more than a little to do with humanity's deep-seated anxieties about relative position, as Mr Klein suggests. Perhaps if we felt no need to keep up with the Joneses and Mendozas and Patels, it would not be the case that so many of us sincerely like working,like earning, like buying, and find a great deal of meaning in it. Perhaps if we had no positional impulse, we'd find luxurious stretches of leisure time less intolerably enervating. Perhaps. It seems simpler and less question-begging to say that we keep on working long hours and buying lots of stuff because, whatever the ultimate cause, we take less satisfaction in the occupations of non-commercial leisure.

Culled from The Econimist