- Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no cure

I love this extract from Robert Anton Wilson’s essay The Rich Economy

I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.

The inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization, or doing-more-with-less. For instance, a modern computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less hardware than the proto-computers of the late ’40’s and ’50’s. One worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century. …

Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no “cure.” …

Unemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were technologically unemployed by Ford’s Model T. Each device that does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary.

Aristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the modern equivalent of slavery — very accurately called “wage slavery” by social critics — is in the process of being abolished by just such self-programming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned that we would have massive unemployment once the computer revolution really got moving.

It is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason Wiener’s prediction has not totally been realized yet — although we do have ever-increasing unemployment — is that big unions, the corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment as a “disease” and cannot imagine a “cure” for the nearly total unemployment that full cybernation will create.

Suppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let us regard wage-work — as most people do, in fact, regard it — as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure.

“But without working for wages we’ll all starve to death!?! Won’t we?”

Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples.

1. The National Dividend. This was invented by engineer C. H. Douglas and has been revived with some modifications by poet Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea (although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National Product for the year. …

2. The Guaranteed Annual Income. This has been urged by economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would simply establish an income level above the poverty line and guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes up the difference. …

3. The Negative Income Tax. This was first devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring them up to that standard. …

What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete. Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity—as an outlet for their creative potential.

As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, “What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?”

The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.

–Unemployment Is A Distribution Problem Not A Production Problem

In current economic thinking unemployment is usually considered to be a production problem. That is when there is not enough production going on to make use of all the available labour you end up with some people left out of the whole economic cycle. The usual response to this is to try to create more work to absorb this excess labour. This is why we are compelled to continuously increase our production so as to keep ahead of the growing pool of unemployed.

But looked at from a broader perspective unemployment is not a problem of production but rather one of distribution.

Even if output goes down a little, as it has over the last year – putting more people out of work, our enormously productive technology still goes on churning out more than enough goods for us all. So we are not looking to find work for the unemployed because we need their labour to ensure we can produce enough. We are trying to find work for them so they can earn an income to gain access to the things that would be produced whether they were working or not. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just give it to them directly rather than go through this complicated process that results in so many negative side effects? (the marginalised unemployed, environmental problems of overproduction, the lack of fulfilment in trying to consume all this stuff, resources not being used where they are really needed – ie in ending hunger and poverty in the world for a start)

When I say – wouldn’t it be simpler to just give it to them directly – I’m not advocating having one section of the community sitting idly by while the rest of us work to support them. What I’m suggesting is that if we are already producing enough, we share the “less work” around equally and all work that much less while still having the same living standard as before. Paradoxically that would be an increase in living standard because the same living standard on less work is an increase in living standard.

-UNEMPLOYMENT IS GOOD #2

In the United States steel industry between 1982 and the year 2002 production rose from 77 million tons a year to 120 million tons. At the same time the number of workers employed in the industry went from 289,000 down to 74,000.

This is not an isolated occurrence. Similar statistics can be found in most industries in all industrialised countries. The reason is not complicated – better machines and greater efficiency means an increasing ability to produce more with less labour.

Surely this is a good thing. The only question is what do we do with it. How do we best realise the great gift our technology is offering us. For example, if the  statistics for steel were more or less representational of productivity increases in all industries, that would mean we could sustain 1982 living standards on a 10 hour work week. I know it’s not as simple as that: there are many post 1982 developments that we would not want to do without and some industries have not had the productivity increases that steel production has (though some have had more). I’m just using this example to indicate the scale of what is happening.

We are not even coming close to taking full advantage of the possibilities that technology opens up. While our great productivity has resulted in large increases in living standards, it has also helped to cause two of our biggest problems. On the one hand we generate unemployment, turning the machine freed workers into the out of work. On the other hand we desperately start producing more and more stuff to create work for the unemployed to do. We have created the twin problem of unemployment and a global and personal smothering in excess stuff, when we could just be having more and more free time.

And please, not free time to drink more beer and watch more television. But free time to give our lives more meaning and transform the world.

PS. I am intending to set up a new page on this blog listing various statistics on productivity growth

-ECONOMIC GROWTH – GOING NOWHERE FASTER

As I understand it generating work so as to avoid unemployment is one of the main reasons given for the desirability of economic growth as well as for the almost pathological fear of any reduction in growth. Whether the production that constitutes that growth (or negative growth) is really needed or is even destructive seems to be given secondary importance.

I believe one of the things that keeps us in this absurd situation is that working for a living has become our means to survival even if the things that that work produces contribute nothing or are destructive to our well-being/survival. It seems that we have the technological and organisational knowhow to have a more than adequate lifestyle on much less work than we are doing now. I think one of the main reasons this does not happen is that we have elevated an abstract concept (working to earn a living) to equal if not greater importance than the actuality of working to produce the real needs for living. Once we have produced what is needed for our level of lifestyle then it is patently absurd to go on working (and producing) simply to get the means to access the things that had already been produced.

There have been various solutions put forward to solve this problem. For example, some people advocate the guaranteed minimum income as a way separating the work/income connection. While I am not against this, I believe a lot can be achieved by staying with the problem for longer. Once the absurdity of what we are doing would be seen more widely, then enormous amounts of creative energy to find solutions would be released. By absurdity I mean that we are running faster and faster to stay in the same spot or even go backwards when we could just let the machines do the running for us.

-UNEMPLOYMENT AS A POSITIVE ECONOMIC INDICATOR

Over the years whenever I’ve said “unemployment is good,” I’ve found I often need to qualify the statement. I don’t mean the suffering of those put out of work is good, or I don’t mean that lazing around doing nothing or living an unfulfilled life is good. I am talking about unemployment as an economic indicator. Usually unemployment is seen as a sign of something wrong with our economy. What I am saying is that it is a sign of an opportunity so great that it could help transform our world.

Most of the posts on this blog look at this issue from various perspectives. For me writing about it helps to develop my understanding of the question. I’m beginning to see that there is something here staring us in the face with it’s obviousness yet we remain oblivious. As the saying goes we have eyes but do not see.

- WHY “UNEMPLOYMENT IS GOOD”?

Mostly we are told that unemployment is an evil to be avoided at all costs. That our best efforts should be directed to making sure there is enough work available for all. When there is an economic downturn such as we have now, then work dries up, unemployment rises and people suffer. The usual approach to solving this problem is economic stimulus – that is; finding ways to get the economy moving. More demand for things results in more production which means more work and a lowering of unemployment.  I seriously question this way of looking at the problem. As the title of this blog suggests, I want to turn the whole idea on its head.

Just say there is an economic downturn, production goes down, there is a shortage of work and people lose jobs. At this point I would ask; is there still enough being produced to support these out of work people? Is food still being produced, are schools and hospitals still operating, are electricity and other utilities still available? The answer to this question is an obvious yes. The enormous productive capacity of our civilization means that even when less people are involved in production (ie unemployment) we can still produce plenty. In fact it’s not hard to argue that much of our production creates things that are unnecessary or even destructive. We could significantly reduce the amount of stuff we produce and still have enough, except for one small problem. Unemployment. We are caught in a double bind. Reducing production increases unemployment, even if the reduced production is desirable.

But turn the whole thing on its head and an incredible opportunity becomes apparent.

Unemployment in a society that is already producing enough is simply a potential for lower working hours. That’s why it is good. It points to the fact we have solved the age old economic problem of survival. As machines do more and more of our work there is obviously less and less work for us to do. We are being freed from work not put out of work.

Each time there is a technological advance it frees up some labour, (or as we mostly say, it puts people out of work). Generally that excess labour has been used to do things that we didn’t have time to do before – to improve our standard of living. This process has been occurring more or less continually since the Industrial Revolution began. It is a process of being able to do more and more with less and less human labour. Gradually over time it has gotten us to the point where material survival is easily taken care of.

Obviously in the early days of our technological development there were plenty of things that needed to be done and so we thrived on the extra labour and productivity that machines gave us. But now after much progress most of the essential things have been taken care of and it is increasingly difficult to find meaningful things for our excess workers to do. At this stage the option of reducing our work hours, rather than producing more comes into its own. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that reducing working hours is just another way of raising living standards. To my mind this is one of the great economic frontiers.

Some people writing on this subject speak about the four day working week, others about the four hour day. My point is that as long as we are driven to create work for employment’s sake rather than work for meeting our needs for living, then none of it will happen.

-CHANGE OF HEART

I’m interested in paradigm shift. That is in seeing with new eyes, or simply being aware of how much our world is shaped by the cultural stories and beliefs we share. Often these world views are so ingrained we are unaware that we hold them. Some paradigms work well, others not so well. Some are just downright destructive.

Many of the paradigms that are contained in our world economic outlook are seriously questionable. Here are a few of them;

 There is not enough to go around (scarcity) so we must compete for what there is. Most economic texbooks state this as the basic premise of economics. The industrial and technological revolutions have made this scarcity a thing of the past, yet we still persist in acting as if there is not enough.

 Increasing production is good, decreasing production is bad. A corollary of this is that recession is bad. At the present time we constantly hear that world consumption and production have gone down, therefore we are in recession (which is bad) and we need to get out of it as fast as possible. Looking at this paradigm through new eyes, it is obvious that we are producing enough to satisfy our needs. If there is a possibility to cut  back on production and still meet our needs this is cause for celebration not hand wringing.

 The phrase ‘the bottom line’ is an accounting derived expression meaning the basic underlying truth or determining factor. In our world there is a paradigm that the bottom line (availability of money) is the bottom line, rather than being things like truth and goodness, or even from an economic perspective, that we have a technologically created abundance which enables everybody to be materially well looked after.

 There is the paradigm of consumerism that advertising so persavisely promotes. You won’t be happy unless you have more things. Brian Swimme goes into this in more detail in a very good essay titled ‘How do our kids get so caught up in consumerism’.

 One of the most powerful and least recognized economic paradigms is; money is a reality, rather than it is an abstract concept we have invented, as a tool to help us distribute the fruits of our labour. It is not a hard and fast reality, so if it has shortcomings it can be reinvented or even dispensed with to suit our needs. What often happens is that we have to detrimentally adjust our lives and the well-being of our world to fit in with the structure of money. I am reminded of the saying; ‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money’. Alan Watts’ essay Wealth Versus Money looks at this subject in a refreshing way.

 And of course what the title of this blog refers to. Unemployment is bad, versus unemployment is good. “Unemployment is good” does not mean that the suffering of individuals put out of work is good, but rather that if we can reduce the total amount of work needed to supply our living needs, then surely that is a good thing. This could release enormous amounts of time to do things that could contribute to a flowering of our civilisation – things such as the ending of poverty and hunger in the world.

-AM I AN UNREALISTIC IDEALIST?

When I read all the gloomy articles about our current economic situation, an analogy comes to mind of a well-to-do man who insists on sleeping in the garden shed because he believes he can’t afford to live in his comfortable house. I mean it isn’t as if we’ve suddenly lost our ability to grow food and build houses.

Sometimes the bleeding obvious is the hardest thing to see.

What I’m talking about is uncommonly obvious, common sense and very big. The fact that our technological genius gives us the ability to look after humanity’s material needs with relative ease makes much of our economic thinking obsolete. Something is definitely out of kilter. Either we have lost sight of what of all this buying, selling and producing is for, or our methodology of going about it is seriously flawed.

I believe one of the most important things to be done in solving this problem is to see the simplicity of it’s solution. By simplicity I don’t mean that some complex actions wouldn’t need to be taken to unravel our current way of operating and set-up something new. What I mean is that by putting aside outdated economic paradigms and looking through the eyes of our civilisation and its amazing technological abilities, it is quite simple to see we are potentially at the very threshold of an economic utopia. Once that is seen on a large enough scale the energy to develop appropriate solutions will naturally be there. In fact I believe this is so big, that once seen it would unleash enormous amounts of creative energy and will to cooperate with each other on a scale never seen before.
Am I an unrealistic idealist? Maybe… but why not go for the best possible of all worlds, especially if it is so available.

Some will dispute all this, saying, most people aspire to a life with high levels of consumption that must be struggled for in the marketplace. I would counter that with several points. First, we have a technology that would allow us to have a comfortable survival on much less work than we currently do – perhaps on a two or three day working week. If people were given the choice between vastly more leisure time or more consumption, I think most would go for more leisure.
Second, we need to closely look at what really makes us happy. While there is a widespread belief in our world that more things equals more happiness, most of those who have gone deeply into this have found that is not the case. A simpler life with time to appreciate the world around us is where lasting happiness can be found, while more things offer superficial satisfaction followed by an addict’s desire for more.
And most important is that it is unacceptable to be living in a world where so many live in poverty, struggling even to find food for the day, when we have the ability to end the worst of it with relative ease.

-THE POWER OF WORKING TOGETHER

Have you ever contemplated the act of walking? Walking is such a natural part of being human that most of the time we barely notice we’re doing it. You don’t have to tell yourself to  lift one leg and then to move it forward and place it back on the ground; and you don’t have to concentrate on continually maintaining your balance. All you do is think; “I want to be over there,” and your legs do the rest, operating on automatic pilot so to speak.

As well as walking there are thousands of other essential living skills that we possess. A person needs to know how to eat, how to breath and how to speak. To  a lesser degree we must also be able to count, read, build houses, drive cars and operate automatic bank tellers. All these skills and myriads of others are the basis of our civilisation. If we hadn’t learnt them we would probably still be living in trees eating bananas.

Of all of these life skills one of the most fundamental is the ability to cooperate with others. Barely a day passes that a person won’t have to use their expertise in this area. Suppose you have to move a fallen tree trunk. But it proves to be too heavy to carry on your own. So you find someone to help. You lift one end while they lift the other. That’s cooperation. It makes an otherwise impossible job achievable,

Some jobs can be done quite easily by one person on their own, wile others need the effort of two or even more people. There are some very large jobs that can only be done when thousands of people cooperate together,

Take road building for example. To build a road you need designers and planners to assess where it will go and how much traffic it will have to carry. You need surveyors to transfer the plans onto the actual land. You need organisers, excavators, labourers and even humble flagmen. You need suppliers of gravel as well as manufacturers of road-making equipment. And that’s just the start – because while all those people are occupied with building roads, they don’t have the time to look after their other needs. So to get a road built you also need people who will produce food, build houses and supply transport for the workers who are directly involved in road building. This is cooperation on the large scale. Each person concentrates on one part of the job, while that part is coordinated with all of the others.

You wouldn’t think that the flagman you see directing traffic on some roadworks and a farmer growing grain hundreds of kilometers away were cooperating with each other. But they are. The farmer needs that road to get his produce to market and the flagman needs to eat. But it goes far beyond the farmer and the flagman. When you come down to it just about every person in the world is cooperating in some way other with everyone else. Sometimes the links are obvious and direct as when two people carry a load together. Sometimes they are more hidden such as those between the farmer and the flagman, or even between the farmer and the person who cleans the factory where the farmers toothbrush was made.

We are all connected. Our world is enveloped by a vast network of cooperation. If someone so much as uses a ballpoint pen or helps out a neighbour then they are instantly part of  that network.

It’s like a human body – a maze of interconnected parts. Each separate part of our bodies has a function that only it can perform, yet at the same time that part depends on all the others for its existence. A lung can’t survive without the rest of the body. Neither would there be any point to it surviving. Its whole reason for existing is to act in concert with all of the other organs. Similarly a tailor or a teacher or a flagman could not exist without the support of the rest of society. If nothing else they would soon starve.

One thing that fascinates me is the relationship between the concept of cooperation and that of specialisation. Because when you look at them they are really just two different words describing the same thing.

Consider sunglasses for example. In order to make a pair of sunglasses the effort of many specialists is required. From the rigger who drills for the oil that the plastic will eventually made from, to the chemist who concocts its molecular formulas, not to mention the operator of the glasses making machinery, the manufacturer of that machinery and the supervising staff of the sunglasses company. One could continue on listing the people involved, but the point is that this list is of exactly the same kind as the list of people taking part on road building. Both describe a group of people who have divided a job up between them so as to make that job easier to do. Whether one says that a flagman and road engineer are specialising in different parts of a job, or that they are cooperating with each other to get that job done, are really just two different ways of saying the same thing..

Our modern industrial world is founded on specialisation (and thus on cooperation). As Henry Ford discovered when he invented the production line, specialisation is an extremely efficient way to get things done. Imagine if you had to make your own sunglasses. It could take months or even years – if you could do it at all. Yet when a number of people get together pooling their skills to make those glasses, each individual pair can be made in a matter of minutes. Specialisation enables us to have things like sunglasses without needing to over-exert ourselves.

Sunglasses of course are just a token example. Of much greater significance are all those other wonders of modern civilisation that specialisation has given us; things such as cars, telephones, ballpoint pens, roads and heart transplants. By dividing a job into small parts, great achievements are made. It’s the power of small actions, multitudes of small actions all working together.

I remember a story that was told to me as a child to illustrate the concept of eternity. The story goes that there is a large mountain made of rock. Once every thousand years a small bird flies to the top of this mountain to sharpen its beak on the rock. Each time this happens a few grains of sand are worn off the peak. The story goes that when the action of the bird’s beak wears the mountain down to nothing then one day in eternity can be said to have passed. As well as helping to convey the idea of eternity this story also illustrates the power of small actions. A bird’s beak rubbing on a rock is on its own fairly insignificant, but when combined with many other similar actions it literally has the power to move mountains.

Of course there is the problem of time. As people living in the twenty-first with relatively short lifespans and continuous day to day needs, we don’t have time to wait around for eternity to move our mountains. Specialisation/cooperation allows us to overcome this problem and reap the benefits of that power more or less immediately. With our large populations, our tremendous organisational abilities and our bounteous technology we are able to simultaneously direct many people’s effort onto the one job. So instead of all those small actions being stretched out over eternity, they can be compressed into virtually one moment. When we work together like this it puts an immense power at our disposal. It is the power to make a pair of sunglasses in minutes rather than months. It is the power to put a person on the moon, the power to end world poverty. It is also the power to rape the earth and blow up whole cities.

There is no doubt that specialisation – and therefore cooperation – is at the heart of western economic success. But there is a contradiction here. If you ask an economist to tell you about some of the basic principles of economics, most of them will very quickly get around to the subject of competition. Competition they will tell you, makes the economic world go round – it is one of the great driving forces behind our economic prosperity. But how can that be? Aren’t competition and cooperation opposites of each other? Cooperation is when people are working together, while competition is when they are working against each other. How is it that the two can coexist as central operating principles in the same world? Isn’t it a case of united we stand, divided we fall?

In modern economics competition is seen as an evolutionary force – like Darwin’s theory of evolution – a case of the survival of the fittest.

Say you and I were both manufacturers of sunglasses. We would be in competition with each other. And say that one day you came up with a new method of producing glasses which enabled you to make  a better quality, cheaper pair than me. Soon everybody would start buying their glasses from you; and unless I improved mine, I would quickly go out of business. So the end result of competition is that everybody gets better sunglasses (or better whatever the product happens to be) – and the lot of humankind improves. Of course the weaker party (me in this case) goes through a lot of trauma; but this just drives them to do even better next time. Sportspeople use competition like this as a motivational force. The desire to win spurs them on to better performances. And if they don’t win then that only makes them try that much harder the next time

The problem as I see it is that economics is not sport. It deals with providing the necessities of life and thus, while there is no reason why it shouldn’t be fun, it is not a game. There may be some justification for competition when there is not enough to go around. If say there is a shortage of food and therefore someone is going to go hungry, then I will do what I can to make sure that someone is not me. But if there is an abundance of food, or even a potential abundance of food, then it is absurd to be competing for it. It would be wasting energy and resources that could be used somewhere else. That absurdity is reflected in the fact that these days most of the competition in food production is in who is going to produce the food rather than who is going to eat it.

Specialisation/ cooperation has helped to bring us into an age of abundance in which the idea of competition in anything but game-playing is totally obsolete.

But there are many people who enjoy competition. The adrenalin thrill of the battle and the even greater thrill of winning is almost addictive. But cooperation can be just as enjoyable if not more so. Cooperation is aligned with the deepest most powerful part of ourselves. It is thus potentially one of the most fulfilling pastimes possible.

So in many ways, to create an economic utopia we need to rediscover the joy of cooperation. It’s not so much a need to start cooperating, because as we have seen, through specialisation we are already doing that. All we need to do is to start finding fulfilment in what we are already doing.

Maybe it’s the very simplicity of the solution that makes it so difficult to achieve.

-WOULD KEYNES GRANDCHILDREN PLEASE STAND UP!

“I wish I would have drunk more champagne”
last words of JM Keynes

Nelson Bolles, former priest and author of what colour is your parachute, once said that while he has been with many people at the moment of their death he has yet to hear one person say, “I wish I would have done more work.” Keynes’ parting words reflect a similar sentiment – in the final analysis  quality of life is far more important than facts figures and how much money one has accumulated – though even on his deathbed Keynes manages to say it with his usual dry wit.

If one reads his essay Economic possibilities for our Grandchildren, it is very clear that this was not just some last minute death-bed revelation on Keynes’ part, but that he was well aware of this philosophy in the prime of his life.

Many’s the time during research and readings in the field of alternative economics that I have come across references to this essay. “Remarkable”, I’ve always thought, “here is one of the best known and influential mainsteam economists of all time putting ideas that we in the field of  “new economics” take for granted – things that would make Your average mainstream economist (if there is such a thing) blanche with horror.

Take this often quoted extract for example;

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 semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

The essay, as its title suggests looks at where economics will be 100 years into the future. As it was written in 1930 we are looking somewhere around the year 2030.

For a person as deeply involved in their vocation as Keynes was in economics, looking that far into the future can be a liberating experience. It allows them to dispense with the day to day cares of their discipline and take a broader viewpoint and, like Keynes has in this essay come to some remarkable conclusions.
The basic gist of the work is that due to the massive accumulation of capital and the rapid advancement of technology, somewhere in the not too distant future the economic problem will be finally solved.

…the economic problem is not-if we look into the future-the permanent problem of the human race.

Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because-if, instead of looking into the future, we look into the past-we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race-not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.

Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature-with all our impulses and deepest instincts-for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.

With the economic problem out of the way, Keynes says that humanity will come face to face with its major challenge.

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.

Keynes discusses this post economic problem in some detail. Most people he says, cherish the idea of dispensing with work and taking up lives of leisure. But Keynes believes that if it this actually did happen, they would find the reality is not as they expected. People must have something to occupy themselves with – to direct their energies towards. At the moment, he says, work fulfils this function. But when the economic problem is no more … it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

One way of solving this problem is to share around the ever reducing amount of work. Keynes suggests  a 15 hour working week – three hours work a day being more than enough to satisfy …the old Adam in most of us!

Keynes feels that the process towards this economic utopia would be a gradual one. That … there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed but he warns that until this time arrives we must put up with our economic system and its corrupt practices of avarice, usury and the love of money, for only they, he says can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

This essay was written in 1930 it is now almost eighty years later – approaching the end of his 100 year time frame – and as far as grandchildren go, if Keynes has any they would have been born by now. So how does his vision stack up. Are we well on the path to economic abundance for all, or are there circumstances that he could not have foretold, and do we put his essay into the same category as some of those ‘visionary’ Victorian inventions such as the mechanical hat tipper.

I believe he had a realistic vision as since this time there has been an accelerating development of technology and labour saving machines. But I think that he underestimated how strongly the economic system that he helped construct would bind us to outmoded concepts of economic scarcity thus preventing us from living this vision.

What is perhaps most valuable in this essay is that Keynes makes the distinction between two different types of work. There is work that is done to allow for our physical survival and there is work that is done simply for the sake of having a fulfilling life. He makes the very important point that economics really only need concern itself with the first type ( work for survival). So as technology advances, work for survival becomes less and less important and thus economics becomes less and less important. Then fulfilment in life rather than accumulation of money takes its rightful place as the bottom line.