Monday, November 22, 2004
"Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"
Arthur Cordell wites on FUTUREWORK:
"...I thought I would send
out the URL for J.M. Keynes' provocative 1930 essay on "Economic
Possibilities for our Grandchildren"
"We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the
growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one
economic period and another."Keynes, 1930
....
selected passages from this amazing 1930 essay by Keynes.
For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and
bringing difficult problems to solve. 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. But this is only a temporary phase of
maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its
economic problem. 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 to-day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in
the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate
the possibility of afar greater progress still.
.......
I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important
increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least
within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that 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.
.......
Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life,
the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think
with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary
man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to
discard within a few decades.
..............
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain
principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that
the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is
detestable, that those 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 honour 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 to every one that fair is foul and
foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and
precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For 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
which 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 realised when this condition has
become so general that the nature of one's duty to one's neighbour is
hanged. For it will remain reasonable to be economically purposive for
others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself. The pace at which
we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four
things-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.
There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. 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.
We shall be able to afford todare to assess the money-motive at its true
value. The love of money as apossession -as distinguished from the love of
money as a means to theenjoyments and realities of life -will be
recognised for what it is, a somewhatdisgusting morbidity, one of those
semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which 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.
Meanwhile there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our
destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as
the activities of purpose.
Arthur Cordell wites on FUTUREWORK:
"...I thought I would send
out the URL for J.M. Keynes' provocative 1930 essay on "Economic
Possibilities for our Grandchildren"
"We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the
growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one
economic period and another."Keynes, 1930
....
selected passages from this amazing 1930 essay by Keynes.
For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and
bringing difficult problems to solve. 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. But this is only a temporary phase of
maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its
economic problem. 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 to-day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in
the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate
the possibility of afar greater progress still.
.......
I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important
increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least
within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that 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.
.......
Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life,
the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think
with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary
man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to
discard within a few decades.
..............
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain
principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that
the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is
detestable, that those 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 honour 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 to every one that fair is foul and
foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and
precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For 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
which 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 realised when this condition has
become so general that the nature of one's duty to one's neighbour is
hanged. For it will remain reasonable to be economically purposive for
others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself. The pace at which
we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four
things-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.
There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. 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.
We shall be able to afford todare to assess the money-motive at its true
value. The love of money as apossession -as distinguished from the love of
money as a means to theenjoyments and realities of life -will be
recognised for what it is, a somewhatdisgusting morbidity, one of those
semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which 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.
Meanwhile there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our
destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as
the activities of purpose.
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