I felt compelled today to revisit Keynes’ classic “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Here are part 1 (#1550624) and part 2 (#1550646).

It’s a little trite at this point, the supposed WEF conspiracy to eat ze bugz and take away everything we have. To steelman the (pretty innocent?) suggestion by Danish politician Ida Auken, it’s basically projecting the sharing economy forward. When she uttered these words in a 2016 article, Uber and Airbnb on the one hand and Spotify and Netflix on the other were everywhere: for plenty of people, owning music or vacation homes or DVDs or even a car made little sense.

The things you own end up owning you

Gotta move them around, maintain them, repair them. Owning (too?) many things saddles you with additional upkeep or hurling them around whenever you move houses every five years. “The ownership cult is just trauma from having nothing you can truly call your own.” (@Geeknik) was a good comment to my “The Economics of Ownership.”

Project the sharing economy outward, with technology and coordination inconveniences lowering the transaction costs for (short-term) renting out everything from tools to cars to houses, Auken’s point is kind of reasonable. In the future we will own fewer things, rent for short-term or long-term needs most things, and the reduced burden will, among other things, make us happy.

Ironically, our deprived generation (I blame the boomers, obvious; fuck ‘em all) did this thing entirely wrong. They owned (stacked, really) the things you don’t need to own — homes, cars, garages full of tools — but were happy to rent and use in a permissioned fashion the things you really want to own — food, (emergency) energy supply, and for this audience money!

So, what does life amount to when you don’t run around 9-to-5 working a (mostly) bullshit job you don’t care about?

The life of a man of leisure

Keynes outlining the problem:

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.

What to do now that capitalism, progress, have solved the economic problem and we only need to labor some three hours a day for our daily bread?

“there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.”

Our virtues and values and identities are so wrapped up in our jobs. What we ask new acquaintances isn’t what they dream of or what they’re passionate about but what job they do, what they do for a living.

= man’s LIFE PURPOSE when working for subsistence goes away:

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.

And I’m stuck with the realization that you can indeed consume the moment by working less; and you can indeed abstain from throwing dinner parties for eighteen guests and diligently cook for them. (Kolbert's example: You just saddled yourself with low-paid hospitality work for which you were remunerated, partially, in building social relationships. Nice, wonderful; rarely worth it; just bring your friends for a walk or gym session or low-effort drinking event.)

You don’t need three cars, a summer house, four extravagant vacations a year. You can live on less than what you do, less than what everyone else does. The dreamy wonderful world Keynes envisioned a century ago is mostly available to you… it’s just that you’re choosing to have quite a lot of these other gadgets and amenities that he didn’t have. AND, importantly, the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses bit... relative status goods #1550624

Fair enough, and we've talked about this at length here on ~econ: smaller houses, parts of a job, older/functional but non-approved or regulated-out-of-existence items are not available to us. I literally cannot buy that mythical, fictional house that statisticians doing hedonic-adjustments on the CPI implicitly envision. Tiny houses aside, I can't exactly buy a bare-bones home with e.g., the bathroom just outside.

AI Technological Obsolescence or a Radical Transformation of the Way We Work?

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.

With that history in mind, and every major general-purpose technology having worked out in our (“our”) favor (#1530938), we should be fine. #1486740

Why indeed, asked Lord Macaulay a century before Keynes, “is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

Well. Icarus: all our earthly knowledge of reality is that mountains, however steep and large, reach a peak; what goes up must come down. Good times come to an end. The kids grow up, strength fades, endless beautiful summer days slowly wither.

And from the point of view of before the cooperative machinery that is global trade and capitalism having worked through the “temporary phase of maladjustment,” the economic possibilities for ourselves -- let alone our grandchildren -- look dire again: The machine can do everything I can – faster, cheaper, more accurate. Then, what purpose do I have? How can I better serve my fellow man, and put food on the table? Can an equally confident modern-day Keynes state 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”?

Globally, I can be persuaded of that. But for “the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth?”

That looks much less certain.

Right after the “strenuous purposeful money-makers” line about future abundance, he states that

“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.”

I suspect he’s right.