The Wiki Man | 4 October 2008

One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M.

One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. Keynes in which he describes what his readers’ grandchildren should expect 100 years on. The piece is followed by 14 essays from present-day economists (four of them Nobel Laureates) discussing why Keynes got some things right and others so wrong.

To his credit, Keynes’s economic predictions seem spot on: his forecast of a compounded 2 per cent annual increase in income was optimistic for its time and so looks all the more prescient today. Yet his predictions about how we will react to our new wealth seem hopelessly wide of the mark: he believed by 2031 we would have translated surplus wealth into leisure, working no more than 16 hours a week and devoting our new-found free time to culturally enriching activities such as poetry and art. Patently this hasn’t happened yet: in fact higher-paid Westerners now work longer hours than the less well off, preferring to sacrifice leisure time for still more wealth.

Keynes’s idealistic view may be a product of his Bloomsbury background. Belonging to a cultural set where at least four hours had to be set aside each day for random sex with other self-regarding intellectuals may have caused him to overestimate the importance of leisure time. All the same, is it possible that by 2031 his anti-materialistic vision will seem less absurd than now?

To support this idea you could point to the generation of people now under 30 who, for all their faults, tend to be more questioning about consumption than the generation before.