John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

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How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. It was exactly this prospect that the economist John Maynard Keynes conjured up in a little essay published in 1930 called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Its thesis was very simple. As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they would have to work hardly at all.

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ALSO BY ROBERT SKIDELSKY Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009) John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2004) John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946 (2000) 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal 2001 Lionel Gelber Prize The World After Communism: A Polemic for our Times (1995) Interests and Obsessions: Historical Essays (1993) John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 (1992) John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920 (1983) Oswald Mosley (1975) English Progressive Schools (1969) Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931 (1967) ALSO BY EDWARD SKIDELSKY Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (2009) Copyright © 2012 Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Production Editor: Yvonne E.

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Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 188–9. 4. A. W. Plumptre, quoted in Skidelsky, Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, p. 237. 5. For a discussion of growth rates in the USA, Europe and the rest of the world, see Fabrizio Zilibotti, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren 75 Years After: A Global Perspective,” in Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga (eds.) Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 27–39. 6. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 325. 7. Wenchao Jin et al., Poverty and Inequality in the UK (London: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2011). 8. The Week, July 16, 2011. 9.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Antoin Murphy, “Money in an Economy Without Banks – the Case of Ireland,” The Manchester School (March 1978), pp. 44-45. 9. Donal Buckley, “How six-month bank strike rocked the nation,” Independent (December 29, 1999). 10. Umair Haque, op. cit. 11. Roger Bootle, “Why the economy needs to stress creation over distribution,” The Telegraph (October 17, 2009). 12. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in: John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York, 1963), pp. 358-373. 13. Alfred Kleinknecht, Ro Naastepad, and Servaas Storm, “Overdaad schaadt: meer management, minder productiviteitsgroei,” ESB (September 8, 2006). 14. See: Tony Schwartz and Christine Poratz, “Why You Hate Work,” The New York Times (May 30, 2014). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html?

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BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970) 2 A 15-Hour Workweek Had you asked the greatest economist of the 20th century what the biggest challenge of the 21st would be, he wouldn’t have had to think twice. Leisure. In the summer of 1930, just as the Great Depression was gathering momentum, the British economist John Maynard Keynes gave a curious lecture in Madrid. He had already bounced some novel ideas off a few of his students at Cambridge and decided to reveal them publicly in a brief talk titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”1 In other words, for us. At the time of his visit, Madrid was a mess. Unemployment was spiraling out of control, fascism was gaining ground, and the Soviet Union was actively recruiting supporters.

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This specifically concerns young adults in North America, but the same trend is visible in other developed countries. 30. Quoted in: Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Bloomberg Businessweek (April 14, 2011). http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm 31. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), Essays in Persuasion. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 32. Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (2005). Also see my last (Dutch) book, De geschiedenis van de vooruitgang (2013), in which I discuss Jacoby’s distinction between the two forms of utopian thought. 33.

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Arthur Burns, “Progress Towards Economic Stability,” American Economic Review 50, no. 3 (March 1960): 1–19. 22. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 220. 23. Keynes, Economic Consequences, 235–236. 15. The Neoliberal Turn 1. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 22. 2. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” reprinted in John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9, Essays in Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 328. 3. Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things.… Their number is negligible and they are stupid.41 In 1930, as the Great Depression started, John Maynard Keynes distracted an audience one evening with a talk on “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Suppose the problems of managing the economy to maintain full employment; of providing incentives for technological discovery, development, and deployment; of providing incentives for savings and investment; and of keeping people confident that society was working, in the sense that equals were not being treated too unequally and that unequals were not being treated too equally, could be solved.

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The twentieth century’s important moments were set in motion by this creative destruction and the corresponding shaking and fracturing. Here are two moments I see as important. Both come from about the long twentieth century’s midpoint: The first moment occurred in 1930 when John Maynard Keynes gave his speech “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (quoted in Chapter 7), in which he concluded that economic problems were not humanity’s most “permanent problem,” but that instead, once our economic problems were solved, the real difficulty would be “how to use… freedom from pressing economic cares… to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

They have caused market economists to respond to their deft criticisms and improve the classical model that Adam Smith created. Today the neoclassical market framework is stronger than ever before, and its applications are ubiquitous. In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an optimistic essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." After lambasting his disciples who predicted never-ending depression and permanent stagnation, Keynes foresaw a bright future. Goods and services would become so abundant and cheap that leisure would be the greatest challenge. What productive things can be done in one's spare time?

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productivity theory. Yale Professor Irving Fi Cambridge professor Alfred Marshall 1947) created the first p (1842-1924) helped transform eco- and developed the qu£ T H E G E N E R A L T H E O R Y OF E M P L O Y M E N T I N T E R E S T A N D M O N E Y JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES MACMILLAN AND CO.. LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET. LONDON 1936 John Maynard Keynes ( 1 8 8 3 - 1 9 4 6 ) , B r i t i s h e c o n o m i s t and s t a t e s m a n , published his influential General Theory in 1936: "I believe myself to be writing a book which will largely revolutionise the way the world thinks about economic problems."

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Essays in Persuasion. New York: W.W. Norton. . 1963 [1930]. Essays in Biography. New York: W.W. Norton. . 1971. Activities 1906-1914: India and Cambridge. The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 15. London: Macmillan. . 1973a [1936]. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. . 1973b. The General Theory and After, Part I, Preparation. The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 13, ed. by Donald Moggridge. London: Macmillan. Klamer, Arjo, and David Colander. 1990. The Making of an Economist. Boulder, CO: Westview. Knight, Frank H. 1959. "Review of Ricardian Economics."

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

, Economic Outlook No. 99, 1 June 2016, oecd.org, accessed 5 June 2016. 7Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? London: Zed Books, 2001, p. xiii. 8Darren K. Carlson, Americans Weigh In on Evolution vs. Creationism in Schools, 2005, gallup.com, accessed 8 June 2016. 9John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, 1930, econ.yale.edu. 1. Credit Power 1Michael Hudsen, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, New York: Nation Books, 2016. 2Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 3Sir Mervyn King in an interview with Martin Wolf, ‘Lunch with the FT’, Financial Times, 14 June 2013, ft.com, accessed 6 June 2016.

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Published in John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, The Royal Economic Society, 1972, p. 335. 15Eric Platt and Jo Rennison, ‘US Stock Funds Suffer $11bn Outflows – Redemptions Since the Beginning of the Year Top $60bn’, Financial Times, 6 May 2016, ft.com, accessed 6 June 2016. 16Hoisington Investment Management Company, Quarterly Review and Outlook: First Quarter 2016, hoisingtonmgt.com, accessed 6 June 2016. 17Transcript of Eric Holder to the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘Attorney General Eric Holder on “Too Big to Jail”’, American Banker, 6 March 2013, americanbanker.com, accessed 3 October 2013. 18Wolfgang Münchau, ‘Europe Is Ignoring the Scale of Bank Losses’, Financial Times, 23 June 2013, ft.com, accessed 17 September 2013. 5. Class Interests and the Moulding of Schools of Economic Thought 1This chapter is based on the paper What Are the Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren? drafted in collaboration with Dr Geoff Tily. It was delivered in Cambridge on 16 November 2015 by the author as one of the events organised by King’s College’s Politics Society to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the completion of the stonework of King’s College Chapel. 2Mervyn King speech, ‘Twenty Years of Inflation Targeting’, Stamp Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, 9 October 2012. 3P.

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As evidence of this arrogance, Professor Steve Keen in Debunking Economics cites the words of Ben Bernanke, governor of the US Federal Reserve at the time of the crisis: ‘the recent financial crisis was more a failure of economic engineering and economic management than of what I have called economic science.’7 The ‘economic scientists’ of the profession (and many on the Left) have also systematically ignored or downplayed the monetary theory and policies of the genius that was John Maynard Keynes – theory and policies that could have averted the 2007–09 crisis. Instead ‘Keynesian’ policies are derided as ‘taxing and spending’, even while Keynes’s primary concern was with monetary policy (the management of the currency, the money supply and interest rates). He was concerned with prevention of crises, not cure.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies – ‘Meeting the Challenges of the Financial Crisis’; www.frbsf.org/our-district/press/presidents-speeches/yellen-speeches/2009/april/yellen-minsky-meltdown-central-bankers/ 23.  Ibid. 24.  Allen, Irving Fisher, p. 9. 6 – John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? 1.    John Maynard Keynes, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 129. 2.    Ibid. 3.    John Maynard Keynes, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton, p. 373. 4.    John Maynard Keynes, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. XII, Economic Articles and Correspondence: Investment and Editorial, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 109. 5.    

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Torsten Persson, Singapore: World Scientific, pp. 61–126 Keynes, John Maynard, 1924, ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, Economic Journal, 34(135), pp. 311–72 ________, 1931, ‘The Pure Theory of Money: A Reply to Dr Hayek’, Economica, 34, pp. 387–97 ________, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan ________, 1937, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51(2), pp. 209–23 ________, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton ________, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press King, John E., 2013, David Ricardo, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Krugman, Paul, 1998, ‘The Hangover Theory’, Slate, 4 December; www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1998/12/the_hangover_theory.html Lucas, Robert E., Jr., 1988, ‘On the Mechanics of Economic Development’, Journal of Monetary Economics, 22(1), pp. 3–42 Marshall, Alfred, 1890, Principles of Economics, vol.

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Fisher was at the vanguard of modern economics, essentially inspiring the leading central bankers who were at the helm when the entire banking system was on the brink of collapse. There is no doubt his thinking continues to remain relevant today. 6 John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? Few questions have been as prominent since the banking crash: should the British and European governments have cut public spending and adopted austere policies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis? In another parallel to the 1929 crash, this was also the question debated in Britain in the 1930s, which launched the Keynesian revolution in economics. John Maynard Keynes advocated government spending in a sharp break with neoclassical economics that eschewed the active use of fiscal policy in response to a downturn.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies – ‘Meeting the Challenges of the Financial Crisis’; www.frbsf.org/our-district/press/presidents-speeches/yellen-speeches/2009/april/yellen-minsky-meltdown-central-bankers/ 23. Ibid. 24. Allen, Irving Fisher, p. 9. Chapter 6 – John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? 1. John Maynard Keynes, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 129. 2. Ibid. 3. John Maynard Keynes, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton, p. 373. 4. John Maynard Keynes, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. XII, Economic Articles and Correspondence: Investment and Editorial, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 109. 5.

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Torsten Persson, Singapore: World Scientific, pp. 61–126 Keynes, John Maynard, 1924, ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, Economic Journal, 34(135), pp. 311–72 ———, 1931, ‘The Pure Theory of Money: A Reply to Dr Hayek’, Economica, 34, pp. 387–97 ———, 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Palgrave Macmillan ———, 1937, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51(2), pp. 209–23 ———, 1963 [1931], ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton ———, 1971–89, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press King, John E., 2013, David Ricardo, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Krugman, Paul, 1998, ‘The Hangover Theory’, Slate, 4 December; www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1998/12/the_hangover_theory.html Lucas, Robert E., Jr., 1988, ‘On the Mechanics of Economic Development’, Journal of Monetary Economics, 22(1), pp. 3–42 Marshall, Alfred, 1890, Principles of Economics, vol.

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Fisher was at the vanguard of modern economics, essentially inspiring the leading central bankers who were at the helm when the entire banking system was on the brink of collapse. There is no doubt his thinking continues to remain relevant today. CHAPTER 6 John Maynard Keynes: To Invest or Not to Invest? Few questions have been as prominent since the banking crash: should the British and European governments have cut public spending and adopted austere policies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis? In another parallel to the 1929 crash, this was also the question debated in Britain in the 1930s, which launched the Keynesian revolution in economics. John Maynard Keynes advocated government spending in a sharp break with neoclassical economics that eschewed the active use of fiscal policy in response to a downturn.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

Macfarlane, 5 June 1945, reproduced in the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XXV II, 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1923)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (IV) Tract on Monetary Reform. London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1930a)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (V) A Treatise on Money: The Pure Theory of Money. London: Macmillan. 442 Bi bl io g r a p h y Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1930b)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (VI) A Treatise on Money: The Applied Theory of Money. London: Macmillan.

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M. (1978), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (IX) Essays in Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1979), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXIX) The General Theory and After: A Supplement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1980a), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXV) Activities 1940–1944: Shaping the Post-War World, The Clearing Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1980b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXVII) Activities 1940–1946, Shaping the Post-War World: Employment and Commodities.

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London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1973a (1936)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (VII) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1973b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XIII) The General Theory and After, Part I: Preparation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1973c), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XIV) The General Theory and After, Part II: Defence and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Harrod, Roy (1958). ‘The Possibility of Economic Satiety’, in Problems of US Economic Development, Vol. 1, New York: Washington Committee for Economic Development. Hirsch, Fred (1976). Social Limits to Growth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keynes, John Maynard (2015 [1930]). ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), The Essential Keynes, Penguin Classics. Marshall, Alfred (1890). Principles of Economics, London: Macmillan. McConnell, Campbell, Brue, Stanley and Flynn, Sean (2009). Macroeconomics, New York: McGraw-Hill. Menger, Carl (2007 [1871]). Principles of Economics, Online: Mises Institute.

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‘Economics and Knowledge’, Economica, New Series, Vol. 4 (13): 33–54. Jevons, W. Stanley (1987 [1871]). The Theory of Political Economy, London: Macmillan. Kaldor, Nicholas (1939). ‘Welfare Proposition of Economics and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility’, The Economic Journal, Vol. 49 (195): 549–52. Keynes, John Maynard (2015 [1930]). ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), The Essential Keynes, Penguin Classics. Layard, Richard (2005). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, London: Penguin. Locke, John (1764 [1689]). Two Treatises of Government, London: A. Millar et al. Marx, Karl (1887 [1867]). Capital, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

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I have taken advantage of writing the book to repair omissions from the much shorter lectures, and also to reconsider some of the things I said, following comments and criticisms the lectures received. In what way am I qualified to talk about these matters? My first degree was in history; my Ph.D was in politics. I was always interested in the economic aspects of history and politics, but when I decided to write about the great economist John Maynard Keynes, I quickly realised that it was not enough to have a nodding acquaintance with economics. So I studied the subject seriously, wrote three volumes on Keynes, and ended up with a chair in political economy in the economics department of Warwick University. These personal facts have a bearing on what follows, in two related ways.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. 3 There’s a chilling account of it in his book The Ascent of Money, chap. 6. 4 www.fsa.gov.uk/pubs/other/turner_review.pdf. 5 Posner, A Failure of Capitalism, xii. 6 Quoted by Gillian Tett in Fool’s Gold, p. 97. 7 Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” op cit. 8 Paul Krugman, “Out of the Shadows,” The New York Times, June 18, 2009 9 Financial Times, June 12, 2009 10 You can, amazingly, listen to this meeting in its entirety at The New York Times’s website. 11 “The Reckoning,” The New York Times, October 3, 2008. 12 Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, “The End of the Financial World as We Know It,” The New York Times, January 4, 2009. 13 Testimony to the House financial services committee. 4 February 2009. 14 Richard Posner, A Failure of Capitalism, p. 268. 15 “AIG Trail Leads to London Casino,” The Daily Telegraph, October 18, 2008. 16 Quoted by Richard Bitner in Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance, p. 117. 17 Ibid., p. 112. 18 Charles R. Morris, Trillion Dollar Meltdown, p. 77. CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BILL 1 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” From Essays in Persuasion. Volume IX of the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, pp. 324 et seq. 2 Meena Thiruvengadam, U.S. Bailouts So Far Total $2.98 Trillion, Official Says The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2009. 3 www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/big-bailouts-bigger-bucks. 4 Interview with Bloomberg Television, 20 January 2009.

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Almost everyone in the West lives a quality and length of life which would have been the envy of a pharaoh or a Roman emperor and which most of our ancestors, and most of the populations of the rest of the world, would swap for their own prospects in an eye blink. It’s an amazing state of affairs—and one which, broadly speaking, was predicted by the greatest economist who ever lived, John Maynard Keynes, in an essay he wrote in 1930, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” He was writing in the immediate aftermath of the great Crash (which incidentally, in his capacity as an investor, cost him a packet), but he wasn’t pessimistic; indeed, he thought the general contemporary climate of pessimism was overdone. Britain had got steadily richer for decades and was going to continue to do so.

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., 81–82 Deutsche Bank, 36, 77, 83, 227 diversification, 146–48, 177 dividends, 101, 147–48 Doctorow, E. L., 64 Dorgan, Byron, 188 dot-com bust, 3, 104–7, 109, 142, 175 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 152 Drake, Sir Francis, 214 Dunfermline Building Society, 40 Dutch tulip bubble, 47, 104, 136 Ebbers, Bernie, 105 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 213–15 economics, economy, economists: booms in, 2–4, 14, 16, 23, 81, 108–9, 214, 216 contractions in, 170–71, 222–23 crises in, 4–6, 9–12, 16, 23–24, 39–40, 57, 73, 76–79, 142, 150–52, 160–62, 164–67, 170–72, 175–76, 182–83, 185–87, 189, 191–96, 199, 201–2, 205–7, 211, 213, 215–21, 223, 225–28, 230–31 ignorance of, 5–6, 23 liberalism in, 136 rationalism in, 136–38 Economist, The, 3, 170, 193, 202–3 education, 4–5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 198, 200, 217, 222 efficient portfolio, 149 Elizabeth I, Queen of Great Britain, 214 Ellis, William Webb, 201 employment, employees, 8, 28, 40, 51, 171, 179, 203–4, 217 banks and, 206, 229 economic contractions and, 222–23 Enron and, 106, 226 and financial vs. industrial interests, 197–98 free-market capitalism and, 15–17, 19 housing and, 86, 88–89, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 126–27, 131, 163 interest rates and, 102, 172–73, 221 Marxist analysis of, 15–16 paying the bill and, 221–23 Enron: collapse of, 105–7, 175, 226, 231 derivatives and, 56, 105–6, 185 equality, inequality, 15–17, 21, 164 in free-market capitalism, 15–16, 23 in mortgage market, 99–101 equity, 27–31, 34–37, 41–42, 55, 190 leverage and, 35, 41, 60 negative, 28–29, 42 return on (ROE), 36–37 selling of, 58–59 Europe, European Union, 177, 180, 191 banks of, 8, 35–36, 40, 51, 77, 83, 92, 120, 227 comparisons between U.S. and, 17 contracting economies in, 222–23 housing in, 40, 83–84, 91–95, 110 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 68–70 Exxon, 67–70, 121 Failure of Capitalism, A (Posner), 174 fair value theory, 147–48 Fannie Mae, 39, 95, 99–100, 113, 124 Federal Reserve (Fed), 40, 102, 142, 173–74, 183, 189 Ferguson, Niall, 177 FICO scores, 123–24 films, film industry, 1–2, 198–99 finance, financial industry: favored treatment of, 19–21 gap between world of general public and, 5–6 industrial interests vs., 196–99 power of, 164 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 180–82, 194–95, 201 Financial Times, 193, 227 Flanders, Stephanie, 37 Florida, 10, 59, 83, 115 Fooled by Randomness (Taleb), 53 Fool’s Gold (Tett), 121 foreclosure rescue, 129–31 Fortis, 36, 40 Fortune, 105 4:15 report, 152 France, French, 36, 156, 229 housing in, 92–94 Nazi occupation of, 138–39 Freddie Mac, 39, 95, 99–100, 113, 124 Friedman, Thomas, 208 front running, 192 Fuld, Richard, 204, 206 funny smells, 169–73, 208, 211 and banking-and-credit crisis, 194, 201 credit crunch and, 169, 171–72 Galway’s water and, 169–71 Greenspan and, 173, 176 regulation and, 169, 192, 201, 211 futures, 46–47, 49n, 184 how they work, 47, 51–52 losing money on, 51–52, 54 Galway, 169–71 Garn–St.

Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Chapter 5 • John Maynard Keynes117 Further reading Paul Davidson, John Maynard Keynes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Dudley Dillard, The Economics of John Maynard Keynes (Prentice-Hall, 1948). J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). J.M. Keynes, A Treatise on Money (1930). J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). J.M. Keynes, How to Pay for the War (1940). J.M. Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1980). Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga (eds), Revisiting Keynes (MIT Press, 2008). Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 3 vols (Macmillan, 1992–2000). Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: the return of the master (Penguin, 2009).

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James Becker, Alfred Marshall in Retrospect, New York University, Department of Economics (1991). Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890). Alfred Marshall, The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry (1907). Alfred Marshall, Money, Credit, and Commerce (1923). CHAPTER 5 John Maynard Keynes – the rise, fall, rise … and fall 91 92 The Great Economists ‘This ‘long run’ is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.’ John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1923 Of the ten economists in this book, none has enjoyed such a posthumous revival of interest in their work as Keynes. In the wake of the global financial crisis which began in 2007–8, politicians, central bankers, financial analysts and journalists have all blown the dust off the cover of their copies of his major work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to revisit his lessons from the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and the publishers’ rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 Cover design by Dan Mogford Typeset in 10.5pt New Caledonia by 3 Print edition printed and bound in Great Britain by Henry Ling Ltd, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, Dorset NOTE THAT ANY PAGE CROSS REFERENCES REFER TO THE PRINT EDITION Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi About the author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Chapter 1 Adam Smith – the ‘founding father’ of economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2 David Ricardo – from immigrant to gentleman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Chapter 3 Karl Marx – the fallen hero? . . . . . . . . 49 Chapter 4 Alfred Marshall – microeconomics arrives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Chapter 5 John Maynard Keynes – the rise, fall, rise … and fall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Chapter 6 Friedrich Hayek – the archetypal libertarian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Chapter 7 Milton Friedman – father of monetarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Chapter 8 Paul Samuelson – the neoclassical synthesist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Chapter 9 Gary Becker – economics in the real world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Chapter 10 Daniel Kahneman – economic psychologist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 v Acknowledgements I would like to thank my family, friends and professional colleagues who have helped and supported me in the writing of this book.

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

., p. 26. 28Camplin, The Rise of the Plutocrats, p. 60. 29Saemy Japhet, Recollections from my Business Life, London, 1931, p. 114. 30DNB, ‘Ernest Cassel’. 31Cassis, City Bankers, p. 7. 32Niall Ferguson, ‘Political Risk and the International Bond Market between the 1848 Revolution and the Outbreak of the First World War’, Economic History Review, vol. 59, no. 1 (2006), pp. 70–112, at pp. 72, 91, 98. 33Alexander D. Noyes, The War Period of American Finance, 1908–1925, New York, 1926, p. 51. 34Ibid., p. 54. 35W. R. Lawson, British War Finance, 1914–1915, London, 1915, p. 6. 36Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, p. 284. 37Hartley Withers, War and Lombard Street, London, 1915, p. 1. 38Noyes, The War Period, p. 57. 39Ronald Knox, Patrick Shaw Stewart, London, 1920, pp. 99–100. 40Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, p. 290. 41Ibid. 42Knox, Shaw Stewart, p. 100. 43B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 601–3. 44Bernard Mallet, British Budgets, 1887–88 to 1912–13, London, 1913, p. vii.

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., p. 168. 40John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, 2 vols, London, 1930, vol. 2, p. 149. Chapter 10: Bretton Woods 1Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, London, 2009, p. 81. 2Lionel Robbins quoted in Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, London, 1951, p. 576. 3Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Money Talks: Fifty Years of International Finance, London, 1968, p. 316. 4Harrod, John Maynard Keynes, p. 536. 5Stanley W. Black, A Levite among the Priests: Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System, Boulder, CO, 1991, pp. 39, 44. Bernstein’s comments were derived from a series of interviews he gave in Washington in November 1983. 6David Rees, Henry Dexter White: A Study in Paradox, London, 1973, p. 137. 7Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, Princeton, 1996, p. 93. 8Clarke, Keynes, pp. 88–9. 9Paul Davidson, John Maynard Keynes, Basingstoke, 2007, p. 149. 10Philip Coggan, Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order, London, 2011, p. 100. 11Clarke, Keynes, p. 88. 12Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar, Oxford, 2011, p. 47. 13DNB, ‘Robert Boothby’. 14Robert Boothby, Goods or Gold?

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Shaw, George Bernard, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, London, 1929 (1st edn 1928). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, London, 1905. Simon, William E., A Time for Truth, New York, 1978. Sisson, C. H., The Case of Walter Bagehot, London, 1972. Skidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946, London, 2000. Skidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920, London, 1983. Slivinski, Stephen, Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government, Nashville, 2006. Sloan, Alfred, My Life with General Motors, London, 1986 (1st edn 1963). Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London, 2007 (1st edn 1776).

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 17(4): 607–635. Keynes, John Maynard 1978. Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, John Maynard 1937. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 21, World Crises and Policies in Britain and America, reprinted 2012. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, John Maynard 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, reprinted 2007. London: Macmillan. Keynes, John Maynard 1930. ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’. Essays in Persuasion. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Keynes, John Maynard 1926.

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With labour productivity continually rising, there is only one escape from this ‘productivity trap’, namely to reap the rewards in terms of reduced hours worked per employee – or in other words to share the available work amongst the workforce. So it’s perhaps not surprising to find that proposals to shorten the working week are enjoying something of a revival in recent years. In fact, the idea has a strong pedigree. In an essay entitled ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, published in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes foresaw a time when productivity gains would allow us all to work less and spend more time with our family, our friends and our community.13 Since the time Keynes was writing, societies have indeed taken some of the labour productivity gains achieved through technology in the form of increased leisure time.

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As early as 1848, John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of classical economics, reflected on the advantages of a ‘stationary state of population and capital’. He insisted that there would be ‘as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress’ within such a state.2 Keynes’ essay ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ also foresaw a time when the ‘economic problem’ would be solved and we would ‘prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes’. Like Mill, Keynes saw this change as broadly positive in the sense that we would ‘once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful’.3 In the language of this book, Keynes and Mill were both essentially saying that prosperity without growth is not just possible but desirable.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

We hope this book will contribute to that debate. 2 The Future of Work Robert Skidelsky A society, wrote Jan Patočka, is decadent if it encourages a decadent life, ‘a life addicted to what is inhuman by its very nature’.1 It is in this spirit that I want to explore the impact of technology on the human condition, and especially on work. Is technology making the human race redundant materially and spiritually—both as producers of wealth and producers of meaning? For an optimistic answer to this question, let me turn to John Maynard Keynes. In his 1930 essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Keynes thought that technological progress would produce so much extra wealth that in about 100 years or even less, we would be able to reduce working hours to just 15 a week, or 3 a day. This process, he warned, was unlikely be smooth. 1 Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 97.

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London: Oneworld. Gorz, A. (1985). Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work. London: Pluto Press. Jensen, C., & Meckling, W. (1976). Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Capital Structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3, 305–360. Keynes, J. (1930). Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. In J. Keynes (Ed.), Essays in Persuasion (pp. 358–373). London: Norton. Layton, E. (1962). Veblen and the Engineers. American Quarterly, 14(1), 64–72. Marx, K. (1977). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mokyr, J., Vickers, C., & Zierbarth, N. (2015).

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Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Graeber, D. (2013). On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. Strike! Magazine. Retrieved August 2, 2019, from https://strikemag.org/ bullshit-jobs/ Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. London: Allen Lane. Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930). In Essays in Persuasion. New York: Harcourt Brace. Sahlins, M. (1972/2017). Stone Age Economics. Reprint. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge Classics. Sirota, D. (2006, June 26). Mr Obama Goes to Washington. Nation. Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

“Our society measures personal worth”: Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009). “For the first time since his creation”: John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930; repr., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). “This prediction is not so much”: Karl Widerquist, “John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” Dissent, Winter 2006. “By the late 1950s”: Schor, The Overworked American. “when we reach the point”: “Prof. Huxley Predicts 2-Day Working Week,” New York Times, November 17, 1930.

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At that point, efficient production became not just a goal but a necessity, in order to support the war effort. After World War I ended in 1918, there was a reconsideration of labor and productivity among economists. If anything, the allure of the American Dream grew stronger. Not even the Great Depression dimmed the optimism of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His famous essay from 1930, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicted that the Depression was a blip on the financial radar screen, temporary and soon forgotten. Keynes predicted that by 2030, people would work only fifteen hours a week and that would be enough to keep everyone fed, clothed, and housed.

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“Leisure held the first place”: Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class, ch. 3, “Conspicuous Consumption,” p. 74. “harried leisure class”: Staffan B. Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). “The average consumer”: Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). “When people are paid more”: Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” 493–517. “When I was a kid”: Graeme Maxton, interview with the author, July 11, 2018. A survey of golfers in 2015: Michael Roddy, “A Round of Golf Takes Too Long to Play, Survey Finds,” Reuters, April 27, 2015.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Feb. 2001 Keynes, J. M. ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill’, in Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. ‘The Economy Bill (Sept. 19, 1931)’, in Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. ‘Einstein’, in The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 28: Social, Political and Literary Writings, Macmillan, London, 1982 Keynes, J. M. Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York, 1963 Keynes, J. M. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan, London, 1936 Keynes, J.

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And that history should cover not just the obvious episodes – the Great Depression, the inflation of the 1970s – but also those many occasions during which nations tried to live beyond their means, pretending that it would all turn out all right on the night when, in reality, both economic and political disaster threatened. Only by studying these events can economists really claim to have anything useful to say about the challenges we face today and, doubtless, will face tomorrow. ECONOMIC CHALLENGES FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN In 1930, Keynes published a short essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’.11 Even as the world economy was heading into depression, Keynes was confident that, in decades to come, incomes would rise rapidly: It is common to hear people say how the epoch of enormous economic progress … is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down …; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement … I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us.

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(i) government bonds (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) government borrowing borrower of last resort (i) heavy (i) international (i) and low interest rates (i), (ii) and the New Deal (i) to offset private saving (i) relative to national income (i), (ii) rising (i) see also credit: queues government debt and central banks (i) eurozone crisis (i) excessive (i), (ii) France (i) and inflation (i) and national incomes (i), (ii), (iii) and quantitative easing (QE) (i) governments and central bank bailouts (i) and credit queues (i) mistrust (i), (ii), (iii) social spending (i) spending (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) spending increases (i), (ii) Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (i) Great Depression (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and the UK (i), (ii) Great Railroad Strike (i) Greece (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and the euro (i) and political extremism (i), (ii) Greenback Party (i) Greenspan, Alan (i) growth forecasting (i) global (i) start of the 21st century (i) targeting (i) Hamada Marine Bridge (i) Hayek, Friedrich (i), (ii) HBOS (i) health spending (i) Helmsley, Leona (i) high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) (i) home bias (i), (ii) Hong Kong (i), (ii) Hoover administration (i) housing markets (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) foreign buyers (i), (ii) see also mortgage-backed securities; subprime HSBC (i), (ii) Hundred Years War (i) Hungary (i) hyperinflation (i), (ii) Iceland (i) Illinois (i), (ii) illusions and asset prices (i) illusory prosperity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and investment philosophy (i) public sector (i) IMF (i), (ii) import tariffs (i) income inequalities (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) income, national (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Germany (i) Japan (i) UK (i), (ii) US (i) incomes, per capita (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Argentina (i) China (i) France (i), (ii) Germany (i), (ii), (iii) India (i), (ii) Indonesia (i) Japan (i) Korea (i) Malaysia (i) UK (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) US (i), (ii) India (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Indonesia (i), (ii), (iii) industrial relations (i) Industrial Revolution (i) IndyMac (i) inflation and ageing populations (i) Argentina (i) and commodity prices (i) deflation (i), (ii) excessive (i), (ii) housing market (i) and the New Deal (i) and stagnation (i) targeting (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) UK (i) US (i) infrastructure projects (i) innovations, financial (i), (ii), (iii) interest rates and asset prices (i) credit queue jumping (i), (ii) expected future (i) falls (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) inflation versus GDP targeting (i) Libor (i) and monetary and fiscal policies (i) persistently low (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and stimulus (i) subsidizing (i) UK (i), (ii), (iii) US (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) intergenerational divide (i), (ii), (iii) see also ageing populations International Monetary Fund (IMF) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) international/domestic conflict (i) investment demand for financial services (i) and income inequality (i) international (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) private investors (i) Ireland (i), (ii) Israeli–Palestinian conflict (i) Italy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) ageing populations (i) Japan (i) ageing populations (i) attempted reforms (i) debt repayment (i) exports (i) government borrowing (i) government debt (i) liquidity trap (i) living standards (i) national income (i) and quantitative easing (QE) (i) stockpile of assets (i) and trust (i) unreliable estimates (i) Jay Cooke and Company (i) Jerusalem trip (i) Jews, attitudes towards (i), (ii), (iii) jobs (i) see also labour; unemployment Kahneman, D. (i) Kalecki, Michael (i) Das Kapital(Marx) (i) Keynes, John Maynard (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ (i) Essays in Persuasion (i) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (i), (ii) on the Gold Standard (i) How to Pay for the War (i) Keynes Plan (i) Keynesian policies (i) on the Snowden budget (i) King, Mervyn (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Knetsch, J. L. (i) Knickerbocker Trust Company (i) Korea (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Krugman, Paul (i), (ii), (iii) labour market (i), (ii) productivity (i) Landes, David (i) Latin American debt crisis (i) Layard, Richard (i), (ii) Lehman Brothers (i), (ii) Leveson inquiry (i) Libor (i) life expectancy (i) liquidity (i), (ii) liquidity trap (i) Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) (i) Little Dorrit (Dickens) (i) living standards (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) belief in ever rising (i), (ii) China (i) Indonesia (i) Japan (i) Korea (i) late 19th century (i), (ii) Malaysia (i) post-Second World War (i) US (i), (ii) loan-to-value ratios, mortgage (i) Long Depression (i) loss aversion (i) lotteries (i) Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) (i) macroeconomic policies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Japan (i) macroprudential rules (i) Madoff, Bernie (i) Mahathir Mohamad (i), (ii) Malaysia (i), (ii), (iii) Malthus, Thomas (i) Manchester United (i) Marr, Wilhelm (i) Marx, Karl (i), (ii) Mary Poppins (i) May Report (i) Megawati Sukarnoputri (i) Mellon, Andrew (i), (ii) Mexico (i) Mieno, Yasushi (i) miners (i) Mississippi (i) mistrust creditors and debtors (i) cross-border (i) endemic (i) governments (i), (ii) of money (i) and political extremism (i) monetarism (i) monetary policy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) a new monetary framework (i) see also Gold Standard; interest rates; quantitative easing (QE) Monetary Policy Committee (i) monetary unions (i) see also eurozone moral hazard (i) mortgage-backed securities (i), (ii), (iii) mortgages (i), (ii) Napoleon Bonaparte (i) Napoleon III (i) National Bank of North America (i) national incomes (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Germany (i) Japan (i) UK (i), (ii), (iii) US (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) National Lottery (i) nationalism (i) the Netherlands (i) New Deal (i) ‘new economy’ of the 1990s (i) New Order (Indonesia) (i) New Zealand (i) Nicholson, Viv (i) Nigeria (i) Northern Rock (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Norway (i) Occupy movement (i), (ii) Office for Budget Responsibility (i) Oliver Twist (Dickens) (i) Osborne, George (i) Overend, Gurney and Co.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

The “7.53 billion people” is the global population in 2017, also from the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?page=2. Joseph Stiglitz does this calculation as well, when thinking about John Maynard Keynes and his prophecies. See Joseph Stiglitz, “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economics Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 20.  John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 4. 21.  Charlotte Curtis, “Machines vs.

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., World Inequality Report (Creative Commons, 2018), p. 9. 52.  Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 360. 53.  Ibid., p. 373. 54.  Ibid., p. 367. 55.  Joseph Stiglitz, “Towards a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economics Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 56.  In my view, the economic problem is already shifting away from the traditional growth problem of making the pie bigger for everyone, and toward the distribution problem of making sure that everyone gets a decent slice.

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The Turk. New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2002. Stiglitz, Joseph. “Inequality and Economic Growth.” Political Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2016): 134–55. ________. “Towards a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economics Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Summers, Lawrence. “The 2013 Martin Feldstein Lecture: Economic Possibilities for Our Children.” NBER Reporter 4 (2013). Susskind, Daniel. “Automation and Demand.” Oxford University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series No. 845 (2018). ________.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

In fact, I did get better at racing through my to-do list, only to find that greater volumes of work magically started to appear. (Actually, it’s not magic; it’s simple psychology, plus capitalism. More on that later.) None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”

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it is “possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do”: David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2015), 3. “what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water’ ”: Allen, Getting Things Done, 11. “For the first time since his creation”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), downloaded from www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. “Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this”: Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013), 2. “The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency”: Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 4. 1.

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Cathleen Kaveny, “Billable Hours and Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life,” Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 33 (2001): 173–220. “The ‘purposive’ man…is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), downloaded from www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. “[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of, ‘Well, there it is,’ ”: Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 341. that quotation from the bestselling Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, trans.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

The labor movement used to demand shorter hours rather than higher wages. People expected the future to look like the cartoon The Jetsons, whose protagonist works two hours per week, and they actually worried about what people would do after being liberated from work. In the essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a few generations, 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.8 And In a discussion from 1956, the Marxist philosopher Max Horkheimer begins by casually remarking to his comrade Theodor Adorno that “nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings.”9 Work and Meaning Getting past wage labor economically also means getting past it socially, and this entails deep changes in our priorities and our way of life.

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., p. 61. 3Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition” in Capital, Volume I, Marxists.org, 1873. 4Karl Marx, “The Trinity Formula” in Capital Volume III, Marxists. org, 1894. 5Ibid. 6Ibid. 7Karl Marx, “Part 1” in Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marxists.org, 1875. 8John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” Essays in Persuasion, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010, pp. 358–73. 9Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, New York and London: Verso Books, 2011, pp. 30–31. 10Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb, “Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment,” Economic Journal 124: 575, 2014, pp. 149–66. 11Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb, “Identity and Wellbeing: How Retiring Makes the Unemployed Happier,” VoxEU.org, 2012. 12Ibid. 13Zeynep Tufekci, “Failing the Third Machine Age: When Robots Come for Grandma,” Medium.com, 2014. 14Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1990. 15André Gorz, Strategy for Labor, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967. 16Ibid., p. 6. 17Ibid., pp. 7–8. 18Robert J. van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs, “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” Theory and Society 15: 5, 1986, pp. 635–55. 19Ibid., p. 637. 20Ibid., p. 645. 21Ibid., p. 646. 22André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, New York and London: Verso Books, 1989, p. 169. 23Van der Veen and Van Parijs, “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” p. 646. 24Corey Robin, “Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years,” CoreyRobin.com, 2013. 25Pamela Chelin, “Rebecca Black Fighting Ark Music Factory over ‘Friday,’” Cnn.com, 2011. 26Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, New York: Tor Books, 2003. 27Ibid., p. 10. 28Aaron Halfaker et al., “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s Reaction to Sudden Popularity Is Causing Its Decline,” American Behavioral Scientist 57: 5, May 2013, p. 683. 29Tom McKay, “Bitcoin vs.

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Even in the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor supported a law to reduce the work week to thirty hours. But after World War II, for a variety of reasons, work reduction gradually disappeared from labor’s agenda. The forty-hour (or more) week was taken for granted, and the question became merely how well it would be compensated. This would have surprised the economist John Maynard Keynes, who speculated in the 1930s that people in our time would work as little as fifteen hours per week. That would mean working less than a third of the forty-hour work week that is still widely considered to be the standard. And yet productivity since Keynes’s time has more than tripled, so it would have been possible to take that growth in the form of free time for the masses.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

On the upside, everyone will enjoy free Wi-Fi and limitless entertainment.23 Other plausible futures are even grimmer: climate mayhem, financial collapse, a surveillance state. A strong case can be made that any of these futures is likelier than a middle-class renaissance. Yet it’s too soon to throw in the towel. In the darkest days of the Great Depression, with Hitler rising in Germany, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Reading it now, in the lifetime of those grandchildren, I’m surprised not only by how hopeful Keynes was but also by how prescient. Keynes predicted that, barring all-out war, “the standard of life in progressive countries … will be between four and eight times as high as it is today,” and he was right, even with an all-out war.

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See also Alaska model cap-and-dividend system, 105–107 carbon taxing and, 115 from co-owned wealth, 3–4, 86 from electromagnetic spectrum, 145 Europe, plans in, 129–130 from intellectual property rights, 144 offshoots and, 75 perceptual advantage of, 77 potential dividends and co-owned wealth, 139–146 practical application of, 87–89 sources of money for, 93–94 for sustaining middle class, 75–76 universal dividend systems, 73–74 wind energy dividends in Oregon, 128 Dobbs, Lou, 86–87, 125 Dole, Bob, 79 E Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 81 Earth Day, 134 “The Economic Equivalent of War” (Barnes), 34–35 Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Keynes), 135–136 Economic stimulus package, 37 The Economist on robots, 26 Education, 21, 24–25 80/20 rule, 30–31 Eldredge, Niles, 120 El Paso Natural Gas, 102 Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), 81–82 Employment. See Jobs; Unemployment Energy and Commerce Committee, 109 England, textile machinery in, 18 Environmental Defense Fund, 99 Environmental movement, 134–135 Epstein, Joshua, 31–33 Equity leverage, 47–48 European carbon trading system, 99, 104–105 European Union (EU) universal guaranteed income ideas in, 129–130 value added taxes (VATs) and, 140–141 Euthanasia of the rentier, 56 Everyone-gets-a-share capitalism, 3–4, 42, 126 Externalities, 63–64, 98–99 Extracted rent, 43, 45–57 recycled rent compared, 60 Extreme inequality, 33–34 ExxonMobil, 102 F Facebook, 48 Fair market value, 52 Fallacy of composition, 24–25 Family Assistance Plan, 80–81 Federal Reserve on new money creation, 144 quantitative easing, 22 shared market economy and, 83 FedEx, 26 Fee and dividend program, 115 Financial derivatives, global value of, 57 Financial infrastructure.

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Further, it not only adds no value to the economy but “distorts resource allocation and makes the economy weaker.”14 And finally: “There’s no begrudging the wealth accrued by those who have transformed our economy—the inventors of the computer, the pioneers of biotechnology. But, for the most part, these are not the people at the top of our economic pyramid. Rather, to a too large extent, it’s people who have excelled at rent seeking in one form or another.” EIGHTY YEARS AGO, JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES looked forward to what he called “the euthanasia of the rentier.” That day would come when the supply of capital was so large, relative to the demand for it, that the return to capital “would have to cover little more than [its] exhaustion by wastage and obsolescence together with some margin to cover risk and the exercise of skill and judgment.”

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Kerr, J. et al. (2012) ‘Prosocial behavior and incentives: evidence from field experiments in rural Mexico and Tanzania’, Ecological Economics 73, pp. 220–227. Keynes, J. M. (1923) ‘A Tract on Monetary Reform’, in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 4, 1977 edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1924) ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, The Economic Journal, 34: 135, pp. 311–372. Keynes, J. M. (1931) ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Keynes, J. M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1945) First Annual Report of the Arts Council (1945–46), London: Arts Council.

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Oxfam (2013), ‘Tax on the “private” billions now stashed away in havens enough to end extreme world poverty twice over’, 22 May 2013. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2013-05-22/tax-private-billions-now-stashed-away-havens-enough-end-extreme 59. Tax Justice Network (2015) ‘The scale of Base Erosion and Profit Shifting’ (BEPS). http://www.taxjustice.net/scaleBEPS/ 60. Global Alliance for Tax Justice, http://www.globaltaxjustice.org 61. Keynes, J.M. (1931) ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ in Essays in Persuasion, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, p. 5, available at: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 62. Coote, A., Franklin, J. and Simms, A. (2010) ‘21 hours: why a shorter working week can help us all flourish in the 21st century’ London: New Economics Foundation. 63.

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In 1968, the prestige of Nobel Prizes awarded for scientific advances in physics, chemistry and medicine was controversially extended: Sweden’s central bank successfully lobbied and paid for a Nobel-Memorial prize to be awarded annually in ‘Economic Sciences’ too, and its laureates have become academic celebrities ever since. Not all economists have been comfortable with this apparent authority. Back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes – the Englishman whose ideas would transform post-war economics – was already worrying about the role played by his profession. ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else,’ he famously wrote.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Consider, now, the ethical concern that most exercised John Maynard Keynes, namely the central role of the money motive in capitalism – or, to put it more bluntly, greed. One of the sayings attributed to the great economist is that capitalism amounts to ‘the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds’.220 And that certainly is consonant with the view he expressed – only slightly tongue in cheek, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky – in his essay ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great change in the code of morals.

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Shaw’s fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde was less of a windbag, but of much the same conviction: ‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.’ A further dimension to the argument is provided by the great economist John Maynard Keynes. Like Dr Johnson, who declared that ‘there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money’, Keynes thought that moneymaking was a socially productive way of channelling the basest instincts: Dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement.

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How far society’s waning tolerance of these excesses will lead to a much more heavily regulated, lower growth form of capitalism turns heavily on these difficult issues about the moral character of money. Certainly money and business have suffered a major setback on the path towards respectability as a result of the great financial crisis that struck in 2008. CHAPTER TWO ANIMAL SPIRITS Few understood better than John Maynard Keynes the importance of enterprise for the workings of the capitalist system. Yet the great economist had a poor view of entrepreneurs. His celebrated reference to their so-called animal spirits in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a lofty implicit put-down and he regarded the money motive as a form of morbidity.

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume I, Indian Currency and Finance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1919 [1971]. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume II, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1923 [1971]. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume IV, A Tract on Monetary Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1925–1926. Unpublished fragment. Keynes Papers, PS/6. King’s College Archive Centre, University of Cambridge. ———. 1930 [1971]. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume V, A Treatise on Money in Two Volumes: 1 The Pure Theory of Money.

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Economic Journal LVI, No. 222: 172–187. ———. 1978. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XIV, The General Theory and After: Defence and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1978. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XVI, Activities 1914–19: The Treasury and Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1978. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXII, Activities 1939–45: Internal War Finance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1979. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXIII, Activities 1940–43: External War Finance.

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. ———. 1979. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXIV, Activities 1944–46: The Transition to Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXV, Activities 1940–44: Shaping the Post-war World: The Clearing Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXVI, Activities 1943–46: Shaping the Post-war World: Bretton Woods and Reparation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXVII, Activities 1940–46: Shaping the Post-war World: Employment and Commodities.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In 1839, Thomas Carlyle (who famously called economics “the dismal science”) fretted about the “demon of mechanism” and its prospects for “oversetting whole multitudes of workmen.”26 Around the same time, Karl Marx took aim. “Capitalist production,” he warned, “develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the laborer.”27 In 1930, John Maynard Keynes contemplated “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: 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.28 Keynes foresaw only “a temporary phase of maladjustment.”

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“The Return of the Machinery Question,” The Economist, June 25, 2016, https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/06/23/the-return-of-the-machinery-question. 27. Karl Marx, Capital, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, (Hertfordshire, UK, Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013) Kindle edition location 8018, page 391. 28. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–73, http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. 29. Matthew Scherer, “Regulating Artificial Intelligence Systems: Risks, Challenges, Competencies, and Strategies,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 29, no. 2 (Spring 2016), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

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It’s the kind of advice that any household should heed: if you can trim your spending to avoid running up your credit cards, you’ll be in a much healthier state. But when it comes to governments, the rules are not the same as for households. Governments have options that households do not. They can issue bonds, and they can increase the money supply. They can stimulate demand. The disciples of the legendary British economist John Maynard Keynes argue against the Austrian school. Pointing to the Great Depression, these economists advocate for reviving a sluggish economy with borrowed cash. Keynesians argue fiscal stimulus can prevent painful and damaging depression and insolvency. Keynes recognized the paradox of thrift. When one household owes more than it can manage, prudent families cut spending and increase savings as much as possible.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Keynes (1914a), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 18, Activities: 1914–1919, Macmillan, London, 1971, p. 4. —— (1914b), ‘War and the Financial System’, Economic Journal, 24, 1971, p. 473. —— (1919), The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Macmillan & Co., London. —— (1922), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 17, Activities: 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction, ed. Elizabeth Johnson, Macmillan, London, 1977. —— (1923a), A Tract on Monetary Reform, Macmillan, London. —— (1923b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 18, Activities: 1922–1932: The End of Reparations, ed.

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. —— (1923b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 18, Activities: 1922–1932: The End of Reparations, ed. Elizabeth Johnson, Macmillan, London, 1978. —— (1930), A Treatise on Money, Macmillan, London. —— (1931), ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, Macmillan, London. —— (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan, London. —— (1937a), ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 51, pp. 209–23. —— (1937b), ‘Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population’, The Galton Lecture published in Eugenics Review, XXIX, pp. 13–17. King, Mervyn (2000), ‘Balancing the Economic See-Saw’, Speech at the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce and Industry 187th Anniversary Banquet, 14 April 2000, Bank of England website. —— (2003), Speech in Leicester, 14 October, Bank of England website. —— (2006), Speech in Ashford, Kent, 16 January, Bank of England website. —— (2007), ‘The MPC Ten Years On’, Lecture to the Society of Business Economists, 2 May, Bank of England website. —— (2009), Speech to the CBI Dinner, Nottingham, at the East Midlands Conference Centre, 20 January, Bank of England website. —— (2012), ‘Twenty Years of Inflation Targeting’, Stamp Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, 9 October, Bank of England website.

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I experienced at first hand the evolution of macroeconomics from literary exposition – where propositions seemed plausible but never completely convincing – into a mathematical discipline – where propositions were logically convincing but never completely plausible. Only during the crisis of 2007–9 did I look back and understand the nature of the tensions between the surviving disciples of John Maynard Keynes who taught me in the 1960s, primarily Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson, and the influx of mathematicians and scientists into the subject that fuelled the rapid expansion of university economics departments in the same period. The old school ‘Keynesians’ were mistaken in their view that all wisdom was to be found in the work of one great man, and as a result their influence waned.

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Bresnahan, The Economics of New Goods, University of Chicago Press for National Bureau of Economic Research, Chicago, 1997, at: http://papers.nber.org/books/bres96–1/ Page 31 gives a wax candle's emission as 13 lumens; Table 1.4 gives hours of labour at prevailing US wages required to buy 1,000 lumens in different years. 21. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion: The collected writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978. The relevant essay is available online: at: www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 22. In the first ‘lost decade’, 1991–2000, real growth averaged just 0.5%; over the second, 2000–10, the average was 0.8%.

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At that time, Thomas De Quincey was admittedly guessing when he ventured that a quarter of all human misery was toothache; but thanks to progress in dentistry – and our ability to afford it – no one would make the same guess today. All this growth, then, is real money; it should be able to offer society real protection against hard times. As the world slid towards the abyss in 1930, Keynes took a brief break from peering over the edge and looked forward instead, to the ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’.21 He correctly predicted how much magic technology would work, and then suggested that there might come a point when getting richer would ‘no longer [be] of high social importance’. It has always been said that the most valuable things are those that money can't buy. Keynes’ essentially accurate long-range forecast prompts the thought that we might already have reached a pass where we can afford to protect the things that really matter – things like mental health, family and community – from the vicissitudes of the business cycle.

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, BBC News, 24 July 2012, at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk–18973923; on anti-depressants see Mark Easton, ‘The north/south divide on antidepressants’, BBC News, 2 August 2012, at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk–19076219 8. On Gallup's 0–10 scale the overall average score fell from 6.9 to 6.4 between February and November 2008. By January 2009, however, the overall average score was back at 6.9. 9. Layard, Happiness, pp. 49–50. 10. Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion, available online at: www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 11. Rather than a 1–10 life satisfaction score, Eurobarometer asks respondents whether they are satisfied with their lives on a four-point scale. In the text we concentrate on the total proportion satisfied, i.e. the proportion ‘very’ or ‘fairly’, as against those who are ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ dissatisfied.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

., 2001 (1961), p. 232. 3Peter Drucker, Management: tasks, responsibilities, practices, Heinemann, London, 1973. 4Samuel Gompers, ‘The miracles of efficiency’, American Federationist 18 (4), 1911, p. 277. 5John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life, Part II, Chapter 10, 1887, Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7952. 6Ibid., Part I, Chapter 2. 7Fabrizio Zilibotti, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren 75 Years after: A Global Perspective’, IEW – Working Papers 344, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, 2007. 8Federal Reserve Bulletin, September 2017, Vol. 103, no. 3, p. 12. 9https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf. 10Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1996. 11John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1975. 12Advertising Hall of Fame, ‘Benjamin Franklin: Founder, Publisher & Copyrighter, Magazine General’, 2017, http://advertisinghall.org/members/member_bio.php?

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People like Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, who in 1776 sung the praises of the ‘very pretty machines’ that he believed would in time ‘facilitate and abridge labour’, or Oscar Wilde who a century later fantasised about a future ‘in which machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work’. But none made the case as comprehensively as the twentieth century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. He predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first century capital growth, improving productivity and technological advances should have brought us to the foothills of an economic ‘promised land’ in which everybody’s basic needs were easily satisfied and where, as a result, nobody worked more than fifteen hours in a week.

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It connotes not just effort but also suffering, and so evoked the recent tribulations of France’s Third Estate – the lower classes – that had laboured for so long under the yoke of wigged aristocrats and monarchs with a taste for grandeur. And in linking the potential of machines to liberate the peasantry from a life of labour, he invoked an embryonic version of the dream, later taken up by John Maynard Keynes, of technology leading us to a promised land. ‘Work’ is now used to describe all transfers of energy, from those that occur on a celestial scale when galaxies and stars form to those that take place at a subatomic level. Science also now recognises that the creation of our universe involved colossal amounts of work, and that what makes life so extraordinary and what differentiates living things from dead things are the very unusual kinds of work that living things do.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

He described unemployment as something close to a mirage: “the army of the unemployed is no more unemployed than are firemen who wait in fire-houses for the alarm to sound, or the reserve police force ready to meet the next call.”14 The creative forces of capitalism, in short, required a supply of ready labor, which came from people displaced by previous instances of technological progress. John Maynard Keynes was less confident that things would always work out so well for workers. His 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” while mostly optimistic, nicely articulated the position of the second camp—that automation could in fact put people out of work permanently, especially if more and more things kept getting automated. His essay looked past the immediate hard times of the Great Depression and offered a prediction: “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.

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In one paper, Erik estimated that the elasticity of demand for computer hardware was about 1.1, implying that each 1 percent increase in price led to a 1.1 percent increase in demand, so as a result total spending increased as technology made computers more efficient. See Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Contribution of Information Technology to Consumer Welfare,” Information Systems Research 7, no. 3 (1996): 281–300. 22. This is an example of Say’s Law, which states that demand and supply are always kept in balance. 23. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes on Possibilities, 1930, http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf. 24. Tim Kreider, “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” Opinionator, June 30, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/. 25. Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz has argued that rapid automation of agriculture, such as via gasoline-engine tractors, is part of the explanation for the high unemployment of the 1930s.

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We’re making things here in the U.S. that we’re shipping over to China. . . . We just need to make sure that we’ve . . . got the infrastructure in place to be able to handle the increased work.”25 There’s an interesting historical wrinkle in discussions about infrastructure investment. The legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, whose name is attached to a school of thought that advocates stimulus spending, famously suggested in 1936 that during recessions the government should put money in bottles, bury the bottles deep in old coal mines, then sell the rights to dig them up.26 Doing so, he argued only partly in jest, would “be better than nothing” because it would create demand during periods when labor and capital would otherwise go unused.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

The Starship Enterprise exists not to fight or colonize or extract, but to explore. Esteem and respectability become social proxies for wealth. The universe is one of artisans, scholars, religious thinkers, and philosophers. Economists have long pondered such worlds of abundance. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes wrote a famed 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicting that such economies would be in reach by the year 2030: Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes—those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.

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agriculture went from employing 40 percent: David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” MIT Technology Review, June 12, 2013. textile workers destroyed their looms: Richard Conniff, “What the Luddites Really Fought Against,” Smithsonian Magazine, Mar. 2011. an end to long hours: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–73. “the combination of the computer”: Linus Pauling et al., “The Triple Revolution” (Santa Barbara, CA, The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 1964), http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/​coll/​pauling/​peace/​papers/1964p.7-01.html.

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a man with a white-collar job: Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, “The Expanding Workweek? Understanding Trends in Long Work Hours Among U.S. Men, 1979–2004” (NBER Working Paper no. 11895, Dec. 2005). “Labor cannot be distinguished from leisure”: Manu Saadia, Trekonomics: The Economics of “Star Trek” (New York: Inkshares, 2016). “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930).” help smooth transactions: Matthew Yglesias, “The Star Trek Economy: (Mostly) Post-Scarcity, (Mostly) Socialism,” Slate, Nov. 18, 2013. dystopian visions: Yglesias, “The Economics of The Hunger Games,” Slate, Nov. 22, 2013. “The future is already here”: Pagan Kennedy, “William Gibson’s Future Is Now,” New York Times, Jan. 13, 2012.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

For example, residents of a rich country in Europe might decide that the level of welfare they enjoy now is exactly sufficient and that it can be maintained thanks to technological progress with a much smaller labor input. They might decide to work only fifteen hours per week, the number of hours that John Maynard Keynes, in “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), believed would be sufficient to “satisfy old Adam in most of us.” But very soon such a country and its population would discover that they had been overtaken by others. Perhaps, happy in their comfortable lifestyle, they would not worry too much about global economic rankings at first.

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Some two hundred years ago, Jean-Baptiste Say, one of the most renowned early economists, claimed that “no machine will ever be able to perform what even the worst horses can—the service of carrying people and goods through the bustle and throng of a great city.”27 Other famous economists, like David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes (in “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”), thought that human needs were limited. We should know better today: our needs are unlimited, and because we cannot forecast exact movements in technology, we cannot forecast what particular form such new needs will take. The third “lump” fallacy is the “lump of raw materials and energy” fallacy, the idea of the so-called carrying capacity of the earth.

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“Freedom of Movement for Workers.” IZA World of Labor 2014: 86, September. https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/86/pdfs/freedom-of-movement-for-workers.pdf. Keynes, John Maynard. 1919. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: Macmillan. Keynes, John Maynard. 1930. “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” parts 1 and 2. The Nation and Athenaeum 48, October 11 and 18. Keynes, John Maynard. 1972. Essays in Biography. London: Macmillan. Kissinger, Henry. 2011. On China. New York: Penguin. Kristov, Lorenzo, Peter Lindert, and Robert McClelland. 1992. “Pressure Groups and Redistribution.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

During the pandemic, governments concluded that, through no fault of their own, people could not earn money and so deserved to be paid for not working. Further down the line, could the state decide that people forced out of work by AI similarly deserve to be compensated? In his 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes pondered this exact question. He looked forward to a world of fifteen-hour workweeks made possible by technology. But even if such a world materializes, we will need to find a way to give people things to do. That could involve creating extra jobs in a variety of fields, from education to public works projects to park and wilderness maintenance—just as FDR’s celebrated Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps hired millions of Americans to expand infrastructure and beautify the country.

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Haidt, “Number of Truckers at All-Time High,” US Census, June 6, 2019, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps-on-trucking.html. 111 4,000 drivers a week: Fred Smith, Federal Express CEO, “Transcript: The Path Forward: Business & the Economy,” Washington Post Live, May 14, 2020. 111 Machines Like Me: Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me: A Novel (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2019). 112 algorithms that can write literature: Brian Merchant, “When an AI Goes Full Jack Kerouac,” Atlantic, October 1, 2018. 113 “spread the bread thin on the butter”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (originally written 1930), reprinted in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–73. 113 Jetson of the 1960s cartoon: “works three hours a day, three days a week,” per Sarah Ellison, “Reckitt Turns to Jetsons to Launch Detergent Gels,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2003; pushing a button, per Hanna-Barbera Wiki, “The Jetsons,” https://hanna-barbera.fandom.com/wiki/The_Jetsons. 113 four-day workweek: Zoe Didali, “As PM Finland’s Marin Could Renew Call for Shorter Work Week,” New Europe, January 2, 2020, https://www.neweurope.eu/article/finnish-pm-marin-calls-for-4-day-week-and-6-hours-working-day-in-the-country/. 114 “bullshit jobs”: David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 115 “slaves of time without purpose”: McEwan, Machines Like Me. 116 atoms in the observable universe: David Silver and Demis Hassabis, “AlphaGo: Mastering the Ancient Game of Go with Machine Learning,” Google DeepMind, January 27, 2016, https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering-ancient-game-of-go.html. 116 all fifty-seven games: Kyle Wiggers, “DeepMind’s Agent57 Beats Humans at 57 Classic Atari Games,” Venture Beat, March 31, 2020; Rebecca Jacobson, “Artificial Intelligence Program Teaches Itself to Play Atari Games—And It Can Beat Your High Score,” PBS NewsHour, February 20, 2015. 117 Stuart Russell: Stuart Russell, “3 Principles for Creating Safer AI,” TED2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_3_principles_for_creating_safer_ai/transcript?

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The last great era of global integration was in the early years of the twentieth century. The world was largely at peace. The technological revolutions that drove the era were stunning—telegraphs, telephones, radio, trains, steamships, automobiles, and electric lighting. Trade had swelled to unprecedented levels. Describing that heady time, the economist John Maynard Keynes observed that people were getting used to previously unimaginable conveniences: “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.”

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford University Press 2005), 109. epilogue 1. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 21. 2. Ibid., 325. 3. President John F. Kennedy, News Conference 24 (14 February 1962), https://www. jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/Press-Conferences/ News-Conference-24.aspx, archived at https://perma.cc/LDS6-Y8X7 4. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 325. 5. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?

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For the industry to operate to everyone’s benefit, however, we need to ensure that platforms can no longer arbitrage around existing rules and have to bear the cost of their operations. Employment law is the key to equitable conditions for all workers, and equal competition amongst businesses new and old. * * * * * * Epilogue Amidst the economic depression of the 1930s, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes penned a note about the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Where others saw stagnation and decline, he predicted prosperity and development. Unprecedented technological improvements in manufacture and transport were key to this vision. In the long term, the resulting productivity gains would bring manifold improvements in living standards for all.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

And, for that matter, when Faludi was writing her book in the mid-1990s, the depiction of a downsized Dad, the manly breadwinner, was a growth industry, as anybody who has seen Toy Story or Terminator II can attest. In fact, it’s been almost a century since we started hearing this lament, this warning, about the end of men as a result of the end of work. By now we’re all familiar with what John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”—dozens of writers, including Rosin, have recently cited the piece as introduction to their own studies of the endings impending in the crash of the labor market. All of them wonder how he went so wrong, predicting increased leisure, less labor time, more pleasure.

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If growth no longer requires net additions to the labor force, work itself can’t be justified by the invocation of economic necessity, and income must be decoupled from work—full employment becomes a fool’s errand. And if growth requires neither more capital nor more labor, less work and more leisure become the key not just to the good life, as John Maynard Keynes insisted, but to life as such. So if we want to save the planet, and with it, ourselves, we need to work less, not more. That’s what I mean when I say Fuck Work! No More Work Introduction I Work means everything to us. For centuries—since, say, 1650—we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth).

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

In practice, the analytical apparatus excludes from consideration the possibility that the movement to higher and higher indifference curves is of declining urgency. [back] *** 7 J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 365–66. Notice that Keynes, as always little bound by the conventional rules, did not hesitate to commit the unpardonable sin of distinguishing between categories of desire. [back] *** 1 J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 365. [back] *** 2 James'S. Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 28.

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Randall, A Creed for Free Enterprise (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1952), pp. 3, 5. [back] *** 2 "Tenth Philosophical Letter." Quoted by Henri See, Modern Capitalism (New York: Adelphi, 1928), p. 87. [back] *** 3 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 232. [back] *** 1 J. M. Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 360. [back] *** 2 E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, "Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders' Wage Rates." Economica, New Series; Vol. XXIII, No. 92 (November 1956). [back] *** 3 have used the phrase "central tradition" to denote the main current of ideas in descent from Smith.

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By the second year of the Hoover administration, the budget was irretrievably out of balance. In the fiscal year ending in 1932, receipts were much less than half of spending. The budget was never balanced during the depression. But not until 1936 did both the necessities and advantages of this course begin to triumph in the field of ideas. In that year, John Maynard Keynes launched his formal assault in The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. Thereafter, the conventional insistence on the balanced budget under all circumstances and at all levels of economic activity was in retreat. Keynes, as we shall see presently, was on his way to being the new fountainhead of conventional wisdom.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations1 Don’t mourn for me, friends, don’t weep for me never, For I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever. Epitaph for a charwoman, traditional, quoted in ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, John Maynard Keynes, 19302 Introduction In January of 2014, The Economist, my employer, published a piece I had written on the future of work in an age of rapid automation. A sample: Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master.

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Utopia might, then, seem to be waiting just over the horizon (as a number of recent books, such as Postcapitalism by Paul Mason,13 argue); all that must be managed is the slow reduction of hours devoted to menial work, combined with the distribution across society of the common wealth generated by productive technologies. But is this better world of work achievable? Scholars have been imagining it for generations. In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay describing his view of how the economic future would unfold.14 At the time, the world was caught in a deepening depression. ‘We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism,’ Keynes noted in the opening to his essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Yet in the piece he invited readers to look past short-term troubles to the remarkable long-run process of growth and progress in which humanity was engaged.

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Abbreviations BEA US Bureau of Economic Analysis BLS US Bureau of Labor Statistics EIA US Energy Information Administration IMF International Monetary Fund NBER National Bureau of Economic Research OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development EPIGRAPH   1.  Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776).   2.  Keynes, John Maynard, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931). INTRODUCTION   1. ‘The Onrushing Wave’, The Economist, 18 January 2014.   2. ‘Is 4.4 jolt an end to Los Angeles’ “earthquake drought”?’, Los Angeles Times, 17 March 2014.   3. http://www.statista.com/chart/612/newspaper-advertising-revenue-from-1950-to-2012/   4. 

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Government’s Role in Technology Development, ed. Fred Black and Matthew R. Keller (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011), 5–10. 21. Robert Whaples, “Hours of Work in U.S. History,” Economic History Association, February 1, 2010, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.cork.hours.us. 22. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). 3 The Cushion Deflates For the three decades immediately after World War II, U.S. wages and incomes rose three times as fast as they had in the previous seven decades. Then suddenly the paycheck prosperity came to a halt.

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Although not quite as secure, the largest concentrations of wealth held by Americans also have a sort of immortality that is the special privilege bestowed on the corporation by the state. Individual corporations can die from bad luck and incompetence or a reorganization of investors’ portfolios. But adequately managed, the wealth moves from one protected corporate nest to another—deathless as long as its special status is indulged by society. “In the long run,” John Maynard Keynes famously said, “we are all dead.” But living off large privileged stores of capital, most members of the governing classes are protected on the downside from the natural capitalist cycles of boom and bust. Recessions, even depressions and other economic calamities, are not typically life-threatening.

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Even Herbert Hoover—who, somewhat unfairly, was blamed for the Depression—understood that there was something fundamentally wrong in this response. In 1931, he signed the Davis-Bacon Act, which established the eight-hour workday in construction and required employers to maintain prevailing wage levels in government-financed projects. British economist John Maynard Keynes provided the economic theory for what almost all businesspeople understood in practice: that they expanded their businesses not when workers received lower wages but when they saw customers coming in the door with money in their pockets. In 1914, Henry Ford, otherwise a brutal and repressive employer, doubled the basic wage he paid to his auto workers.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

CHAPTER TEN VALUES MAXIMIZING CLASS Few people in history can take credit for creating as much economic growth as John Maynard Keynes. The British economist was the founder of macroeconomics and a key architect of the global economy. During the Great Depression he successfully convinced world governments to spend public funds to create jobs and other forms of social support. Maybe you’ve heard someone say “Keynesian economics” on a podcast before. They meant this guy. Keynes was a great champion of capitalism. In a 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he points out that from 2000 BCE until 1700 CE (aka the bloodletting era) there was little economic growth or technological development in the world.

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this was thirty-five years away: Isaac Asimov’s predictions of the future were published in the Canadian newspaper the Star (“35 Years Ago, Isaac Asimov Was Asked by the Star to Predict the World of 2019. Here Is What He Wrote,” December 27, 2018). CHAPTER TEN: VALUES MAXIMIZING CLASS “economic necessity into daylight”: John Maynard Keynes’s words about the nature of capitalism come from the 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” collected in a book of Keynes’s writings called Essays in Persuasion. 271 times more than the average worker: From Fortune (“CEO Pay: Top Execs Make 271 Times More Than Workers,” July 20, 2017). seventeenth in 2018: From U.S. News & World Report (“Quality of Life” 2018 ratings).

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See also specific companies cultural heritage, 180–81 Curtis, Adam, 270–71 data/data science, xv, 97, 123, 150, 159–62, 215 decision making, 28, 96–97 affects other people, 127–28, 144 and Bentoism, 130, 134, 138–40, 206–11 best-case outcome for, 126, 152, 243 guided by defaults, 22–23, 34–35 and making money, x–xi, 23, 135 of Maximizing Class, 62–63 rational, xiii, 134–35, 137, 139 values-driven, xiii, 132, 138–39, 152–53, 174–76, 209–10, 223 See also autonomy defaults (hidden) and bento box, 129–30 explanation of, 19–23 and financial maximization, x, 22–26, 64, 83 and game theory, 32, 34–35 and maximizing here/now, 136–37 set what’s normal, 34–35 and values, 214–15, 223 defaults (visible), 22 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 78–79 deregulation, 77–78, 83, 257 disrupting, in business, 87–88, 95–99, 103 downtown, demise of, 48, 51–52, 54 Drive (Pink), 117–19 drugs, xii, 23, 81, 249 Dublin, Ireland, 9–10 e-commerce, 47, 162 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 193–94 economy, 261 downturn in, 61–62, 71, 120 and financial maximization, x, xiii, 70, 72, 116 growth of, 120, 151, 193–95, 267 “Mullet,” 66–74, 77, 84, 110, 163 shareholder-centric, 60–61, 67–73, 82–85 See also gross domestic product (GDP); stock buybacks education, 24–26, 74–75, 110, 170–71, 197, 216, 259 electric cars, 173–75, 183 Ellison, Larry, 109–10 emotions, 22–23, 103, 113–15, 195, 260 Enron, 78, 210 Entrepreneurial State, The (Mazzucato), 78 entrepreneurship, 52–54, 75, 78–81, 196, 241 environmental issues, 14–15, 77, 172–74, 201, 212 Etsy, 212 “evergreen” model, 217 exercise, xiv, 177–78, 184–87, 189–90, 265, 267 Facebook, 53–54, 98, 109 fairness, xii–xiii, xv, 102, 142, 145, 158, 163, 195, 202, 216 family, the, xiii, xv, 26–27, 90–91, 111, 127, 138, 142, 222 Federal Reserve, 49 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 72–73 financial crises, 77–78 debt, 65–66, 74–75 growth, xv–xvi instability, 110, 112 security, xi, 109–14, 116, 141, 201, 205 Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE), 166–69 financial maximization, 236 becomes mainstream, 59–61, 63–65, 91, 180 case against, 110–11, 115–16, 119 dominance of, x–xiii, xvi, 23–25, 27, 37, 73, 97, 104–5, 133–35 downsides to, xi–xiii, 45, 196–97, 199, 243 ending its reign, xiii, 13–14, 225 four phases of, 83–85 growth of, xi, 92, 123, 196, 265 moving beyond it, 163, 168–69, 206, 209, 212 normalization of, 91, 183 not the goal, 9–10, 43–44 origins of, x, xvi, 26–32, 255 prioritizing it, 14, 63, 82–83 Financial Times, 70–71 First Amendment, 39 Fonda, Jane, 187 Food and Drug Administration, 188 Fortune, 68 Fox News, xii Friedman, Milton, 59–61, 63, 82, 90–91, 105, 180, 255, 261 Future Me examples of, 138, 167–69, 202–6, 211 explanation of, 132, 143, 206 and values helix, 218–23 Future Us, 196 examples of, 138, 169, 171–75, 201–6, 211 explanation of, 132, 144–45, 206 and values helix, 218–19 game theory, 237, 250 and collaboration, 32–34 and Community Game, 33–35, 98 its notion of rationality, 29–35, 97 and Prisoner’s Dilemma, 28–34, 130–33, 198–99 and Stag Hunt, 32–34 and Wall Street Game, 33–35, 98 Garfield, James, 146–47, 149, 179 Gates, Bill, 109–10 generational change, xiv, 180–84, 187, 191–92, 266–67 influence, xi, 152, 218–24, 271 generosity, xii, 7, 118, 134, 175 Gomory, Ralph, 82 Google, 53–54, 110, 123 Great Depression, 71, 77, 120, 193 Greatest Generation, 192 grit, 135, 143–45 gross domestic product (GDP), xii, 23, 83, 120–24, 196, 235 gross domestic value (GDV), 217–18 Groupon, 96–97, 100 gyms, xiv, 20, 186–87 Hanchett, Thomas, 49 happiness.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

In the winter of 1930, Keynes was understandably preoccupied with the depression that was strangling the life out of European and American economies and the collapse of his personal fortune in the stock market crash the preceding year. Perhaps to persuade himself of the ephemeral nature of the crisis, he published an optimistic essay titled “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”1 “My purpose in this essay … is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future,” explained Keynes in its introductory paragraphs. The future to which Keynes’s wings flew him was an economic Canaan: a promised land in which technological innovation, improvements in productivity, and long-term capital growth had ushered in an age of “economic bliss.”

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—Seneca AFFLUENCE WITHOUT ABUNDANCE Southern Africa and the Kalahari Basin Khoisan Peoples and Language Groups of Southern Africa Key Archaeological Sites in Khoisan History Eastern and Central Namibia The Bantu Expansion Notes Chapter 1: The Rewards of Hard Work 1   All quotes by Keynes in this chapter are from his essay “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” published in J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–73. 2   Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968). 3   Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 4   Sherwood Washburn, foreword to Richard B.

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To me their apparent indigence was neither a consequence of laziness nor even entirely a consequence of their ill fortunes. Instead I saw in their behavior a trace of how their parents and grandparents had lived before the white settlers came, a way of life that shines a new light on an ever more urgent and perplexing problem that was first raised by the economist John Maynard Keynes at the height of the Great Depression, a time when in this part of the Kalahari manketti nuts still fell from the trees and kudu bearing their giant spiral horns walked gamely into hunters’ paths. In the winter of 1930, Keynes was understandably preoccupied with the depression that was strangling the life out of European and American economies and the collapse of his personal fortune in the stock market crash the preceding year.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do by Richard Robb

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Brexit referendum, capital asset pricing model, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, effective altruism, endowment effect, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, family office, George Akerlof, index fund, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Philippa Foot, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, search costs, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, survivorship bias, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, trolley problem, ultimatum game

“Keynes Predicted We Would Be Working 15-Hour Weeks. Why Was He So Wrong?” NPR Planet Money. Podcast audio, August 13, 2015. http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong (accessed February 2, 2019). Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” In Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. ———. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt, 1964. ———. “My Early Beliefs.” In The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum, 82–97.

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Finally, I began to wonder what effect seeing the world in terms of rational choice has on our inner lives. Does removing everything from its context to determine the rate of exchange at which we would trade this for that—even if subconsciously—impoverish our experience? I wondered whether John Maynard Keynes might have been right when he warned, the “pseudorational view of human nature [leads] to a thinness, a superficiality, not only of judgment, but also of feeling.”4 Theory Collides with Evidence In 1992, I moved to New York City to become the head options trader for the derivatives subsidiary of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank (DKB), Japan’s largest bank at the time.

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As Jacob Viner wrote in 1925, “There are many who would place greater stress on the importance of the process of desire-fulfillment itself than on the gratifications or other states of consciousness which result from such fulfillment” (“Utility Concept in Value Theory,” 641). 3. Veblen, “Limitations of Marginal Utility,” 620. 4. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 224. 5. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 13. 6. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 160. 7. See Dow and Dow, “Animal Spirits Revisited.” 8. Sen, “Maximization,” 747. 9. An experimental literature stretching back to 1956 (Brehm, “Postdecision Changes”) finds that subjects who choose between two equally valuable options will reevaluate the options after they choose.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

But what is certain is that the rise of the money form and the capacity for its private appropriation has created a space for the proliferation of human behaviours that are anything but virtuous and noble. Accumulations of wealth and power (accumulations that were ritually disposed of in the famous potlatch system of pre-capitalist societies) have not only been tolerated but welcomed and treated as something to be admired. This led the British economist John Maynard Keynes, writing on ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ in 1930, to hope that: 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.

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This fascinating story is told in Paul Seabright (ed.), The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies, London, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 2. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, New York, Classic House Books, 2009, p. 199. 3. Silvio Gesell, (1916); http:www.archive.org/details/TheNaturalEconomicOrder, p. 121. For some further discussion of Gesell’s ideas see John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1964, p. 363, and Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition, Berkeley, CA, Evolver Editions, 2011.

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., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

, New York Times, 11 December 2017 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/style/robots-jobs-children.html>. 3 ‘Labor: Sabotage at Lordstown?’, Time, 7 February 1972 <http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,905747,00.html> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 4 John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), pp. 321–332 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-59072-8_25>. 5 Creative Destruction Lab, ‘Geoff Hinton: On Radiology’, 24 November 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ> [accessed 24 February 2021]. 6 Paul Daugherty, H.

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., Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Jean, Joel, Patrick Richard Brown and Institute of Physics (Great Britain), Emerging Photovoltaic Technologies (Bristol, UK: IOP Publishing, 2020) <https://iopscience.iop.org/book/978-0-7503-2152-5> [accessed 12 October 2020] Kallenborn, Zachary, and Philipp Bleek, ‘Drones of Mass Destruction: Drone Swarms and the Future of Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons’, War On the Rocks, 14 February 2019 <https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/drones-of-mass-destruction-drone-swarms-and-the-future-of-nuclear-chemical-and-biological-weapons/> [accessed 26 April 2021] Karlis, Nicole, ‘DoorDash Drivers Make an Average of $1.45 an Hour, Analysis Finds’, Salon, 19 January 2020 <https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/doordash-drivers-make-an-average-of-145-an-hour-analysis-finds/> [accessed 27 March 2021] Katsifis, Dimitrios, ‘The CMA Publishes Final Report on Online Platforms and Digital Advertising’, The Platform Law Blog, 6 July 2020 <https://theplatformlaw.blog/2020/07/06/the-cma-publishes-final-report-on-online-platforms-and-digital-advertising/> [accessed 30 March 2021] ———, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), pp. 321–332 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-59072-8_25> Khan, Lina M., ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’, Yale Law Journal, 126(3), January 2017, pp. 710–805 Klenert, David, Enrique Fernández-Macías and José-Ignacio Antón, ‘Don’t Blame It on the Machines: Robots and Employment in Europe’, VoxEU, 24 February 2020 <https://voxeu.org/article/dont-blame-it-machines-robots-and-employment-europe> [accessed 10 September 2020] Klinger, Joel, Juan Mateos-Garcia, and Konstantinos Stathoulopoulos, ‘A Narrowing of AI Research?’

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They were protesting against increasing automation, which they claimed was resulting in layoffs and an inhumane increase in what managers expected of workers.3 In other words, we’ve seen the ‘rise of the robots’ before. Anxieties like these usually crop up during periods of rapid technological change. And it’s not just the workers themselves. The economist John Maynard Keynes popularised the idea of ‘technological unemployment’ in 1928, when he noted, ‘The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption’ – that is, the ability to find work for workers.4 Now we have entered the Exponential Age, new technology appears to be challenging workers’ raison d’être once again.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2015/february/economic-growth-information-technology-factor-productivity/ 21 The economist Brad DeLong makes this point in: J. Bradford DeLong, “Making Do With More”, Project Syndicate, 26 February 2015. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/abundance-without-living-standards-growth-by-j--bradford-delong-2015-02 22 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 1931. 23 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”, Oxford Martin School, Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, University of Oxford, 17 September 2013. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf 24 Shelley Podolny, “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?”

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We need, however, to also recognize and manage the negative impacts it can have, particularly with regard to inequality, employment and labour markets. 3.1.2 Employment Despite the potential positive impact of technology on economic growth, it is nonetheless essential to address its possible negative impact, at least in the short term, on the labour market. Fears about the impact of technology on jobs are not new. In 1931, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously warned about widespread technological 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”.22 This proved to be wrong but what if this time it were true? Over the past few years, the debate has been reignited by evidence of computers substituting for a number of jobs, most notably bookkeepers, cashiers and telephone operators.

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Keynesian Grandchildren While few contemporary economists seem particularly concerned about the seemingly inevitable transition to an automated economy, one legendary economist did have remarkable insight into the future. In 1930, as the world plunged into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”52 In his essay, Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment,” writing: We are being inflicted with a new disease of which some readers many not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment.

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Not Much”, New York Times, August 30, 2005, web: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30profile.html 51 See Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, a book based on an article in Wired Magazine, October 2004. Web: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html 52 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” (written in 1930), Essays in Persuasion, New York, W.W. Norton, 1963. Web: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf p. 195 footnote, Einstein’s view on technological unemployment, see: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2007, p.403.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In the views of these modern critics and of those who had taken part in the “Occupy Wall Street” movements a few years earlier, modern capitalism is clearly not “leading to a destination far better than our present place” for many people and workers. In the United States and in some other countries workers’ wages have stagnated for decades, the income distribution has become less even, and, in the views of these critics, our grandchildren will not live in a world as good as the present one. In another famous essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” written in 1930, Kenyes may not have offered as good a forecast of the future as some have interpreted those “possibilities” to offer. In that essay, Keynes worried about the fact that “technical efficiency [has] been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labor absorption” (Keynes, 1933, p. 358).

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Can it be assumed that the poor and the average middle class voter will be grateful to the rich individuals, because the rich individuals are not allowing their absolute incomes to fall? This question merits being addressed, especially in countries that have market economies and continue to have democratic governments. In a classic article titled “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, first written in 1930, Keynes wrote that “the needs of human beings … fall into two classes – those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to our fellows”; he added that “needs of the second class … may … be insatiable” (in Keynes, 1933, p. 365).

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., 3, 319 Du Pont, Pierre, 307 Dutch Republic, welfare policies in, 50 Dynamic scoring, 76 Eastern Europe Gini coefficient in, 317 laissez faire in, 35 taxation in, 381–82 Easy credit, 107–9 Eckstein, Otto, 2–5 Economic aristocracy, 117–18 Economic freedom deregulation and, 86 economic planning and, 159 income redistribution and, 159–60 regulations, effect of, 130–31 Economic growth. See Growth Economic planning. See also specific country overview, 25–28 economic freedom and, 159 Hayek on, 159 “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 29 Economics. See also specific topic constitutions and, 270–72 legal rules and, 252–53 supply-side economics, 33, 74–78, 395, 397 Economics of Our Patent System (Vaughan), 359 The Economist, 77, 203, 343, 355–56, 361, 366 Education entrepreneurs and, 309 income redistribution and, 193 as public good, 180–81 in US, 208 Efficient market hypothesis, 86–87 Einaudi, Luigi, 269, 342 Eisenhower, Dwight, 4, 40, 178 Elizabeth I (England), 215 Elmore, Bartow, 325 Employment entrepreneurs and, 309 quotas, 145–46 role of government, 189–90 stabilization policies and, 237 unemployment compensation, 237–38 “The End of Laissez Faire” (Keynes), 31–32 Energy industry, 17, 167, 283–84 Enron, 127–28, 172–73 Entertainment industry, 345, 348, 353 Entitlements, 50–51 The Entrepreneurial State (Mazzucato), 196 Entrepreneurs corporations and, 308 desires of, 308–9 education and, 309 employment and, 309 government, relationship with, 309–10 historical background, 306–7 income tax and, 308 infrastructure and, 309 laissez faire and, 307–8 obstacles to, 307–8 public resources and, 310 referee, government as, 310 Smith on, 307 taxation and, 309 in UK, 307 in US, 307 Environmental regulations, 147, 182, 183 Index Envy income inequality and, 319–21 poverty and, 216–18 Equitable growth, 310, 312 Esping-Anderson, Costa, 47 Ethical values of market, 398 European Central Bank, 244 European Commission, 113 European Monetary Union, 5, 69, 72, 260, 273 European Union Constitution (proposed), 271 “fake goods” in, 149 intellectual property in, 347 mislabeling of fish in, 149–50 occupational licensing in, 125–26 regulations in, 276 Exchanges, 91–94 asymmetry in, 94 complexity of, 92–94 contracts in, 92–94 Friedman on, 114–15 Hayek on, 93, 112–15 individuals, role of, 112–13 information in, 93, 112–13 Executive compensation in Australia, 364 in Austria, 364 bonuses, 82–83, 85–86 in Denmark, 364 directors, role of, 364–65 in financial institutions, 168–69 income inequality in, 82–83, 85–86, 105–6 increase in, 387, 398 intellectual property and, 348, 363–64 in Japan, 364 in Norway, 364 performance-based compensation, 363–64 in Sweden, 364 in UK, 364 in US, 169, 363, 364 Ex post income distribution, 118, 119 Expropriation, 136 Externalities balancing of, 164 Coase Theorem and, 183–85 correcting or reducing through regulations, 147, 281–82 cross-border externalities, 185–86 drones as, 165 environmental regulations and, 182, 183 federalism and, 183–84 global government and, 120–21 guns as, 165 income inequality and, 321 inter-institutional externalities, 290 431 legal rules and, 255 poverty and, 216–17 public goods and, 181–82 regulations and, 164 smoking as, 164 urbanization and, 91, 163–64 Facebook, 347 “Fake goods,” 149 Fascism, 23, 231, 266–67 Fashion industry, 345 Federalism in Australia, 284 in Brazil, 284 in Canada, 284 externalities and, 183–84 legal rules and, 260 regulations and, 125, 126, 173, 284–85 in US, 260, 284 The Federalist Papers (Madison), 249 Fees, 142 Financial crises complexity and, 156 government intervention and, 156 Great Depression, 22, 26, 31, 253 Great Recession, 76, 109, 318 moral hazard and, 156–57 Southeast Asian financial crisis (1997-1998), 109, 243–44 2007-2008 Financial Crisis.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

We need optimistic speculation and vision to go where no one has gone before. This includes reimagining the financial system. So in that spirit, I’d like to do some reimagining in this concluding chapter and speculate about the future of finance and the finance of the future. “COMPUTER, MANAGE MY PORTFOLIO!” In his important essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes wrote that “there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.”2 Keynes believed, as do I, that a Star Trek–like “age of leisure and of abundance” for everyone is within human reach.

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Behavioral Ecology 13: 757–765. Kendall, Maurice G. 1953. “The Analysis of Economic Time-Series, Part I: Prices.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Ser. A. 96: 11–25. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. ___. 1963. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: W. W. Norton. Khandani, Amir, and Andrew W. Lo. 2007. “What Happened to the Quants in August 2007?” Journal of Investment Management 5: 5–54. ___. 2011. “What Happened to the Quants in August 2007? Evidence from Factors and Transactions Data.”

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., 121–122 deterministic strategy, 190, 191, 192, 197, 200 de Waal, Frans, 337 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 125–126 Dictator Game, 337 differential reproduction, 146, 152, 187 Digital Age, 163 discount rate, 98, 416 DNA, 187; database of, 402–403; discovery of, 137, 144, 401; evolutionary theory confirmed by, 137–138; of identical twins, 159, 161; mutations of, 418–419; of related species, 136, 146, 150, 151–152 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 140 Dodd, David, 234 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010), 228, 329, 375 dodo, 149 dopamine, 87–88, 89, 91, 97, 99, 409 dopamine dysregulation syndrome, 186 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, 86 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, 337, 339 double blind tests, 123 Double Eagle Fund, 234 doubling down, 60–61, 62, 84, 189 Douglas, Michael, 345, 346 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 22, 358 Down syndrome, 111 Duchenne muscular dystrophy, 409 Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, 160 Dyck, I. J. Alexander, 353–354 dynamic index funds, 267–269, 271, 273, 398–399 dyscalculia, 125 dyslexia, 125 East India Company, 412 ECM1 gene, 144 e-commerce, 405 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 397 Eddington, Arthur, 141 Edison, Thomas, 356 Education of a Speculator, The (Niederhoffer), 277 Efficient Markets Hypothesis, 5, 14, 16, 35, 92, 112–113, 122, 213; Adaptive Markets Hypothesis vs., 2, 198, 207–208, 214, 225; counterintuitive quality of, 21, 25, 26–27; experimental validation of, 40–43; Fama’s formulation of, 21–25, 209; index funds inspired by, 27–28, 263; irrationality explained away by, 108–109; limitations of, 3, 175, 176–177, 206; as orthodoxy, 38, 70, 72–74, 182, 185, 234; physics in lineage of, 211; Samuelson’s formulation of, 20–21, 25.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Commentary on Evans and Stanovich (2013)’, Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 8, No. 3 (2013), 257–62 Keren, G. and Schul, Y., ‘Two Is Not Always Better than One: A Critical Evaluation of Two-System Theories’, Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 4, No. 6 (2009), 533–50 Keynes, G. and Keynes, J. M., Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933) Keynes, J. M., ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ (1930) in Keynes, J. M., Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan and Co., 1931) Keynes, J. M., ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics , Vol. 51, No. 2 (1937), 209–23 Keynes, J. M., The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan and Co., 1936) Keynes, J.

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And over the last century economists have attempted to elide that historic distinction between risk and uncertainty, and to apply probabilities to every instance of our imperfect knowledge of the future. The difference between risk and uncertainty was the subject of lively debate in the inter-war period. Two great economists – Frank Knight in Chicago and John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, England – argued forcefully for the continued importance of the distinction. Knight observed that ‘a measurable uncertainty, or “risk” proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all’. 17 Keynes made a similar distinction.

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We assumed that the Duke and Marquis were equally likely to win each of the remaining games, and perhaps there was a frequency distribution of past results of similar games to guide our conjecture. In the Monty Hall problem, we judged that if there were three identical boxes the probability that the keys were in any one of them was one third. 17 John Maynard Keynes is known to everyone for his many contributions to public policy in Britain and internationally during the inter-war period and the Second World War. Before the Great War, however, Keynes had completed a fellowship dissertation – in effect, his doctoral thesis – at King’s College, Cambridge.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Describing the economy as driven only by abstract economic forces suggests that the economy operates in a moral vacuum, that there is no criticism of their leadership. John Maynard Keynes: Narrative Economist Kristol’s dismissal of opinion polls notwithstanding, some of the most famous economic forecasts in world history appear to be based substantially on observations of narratives and worries about their human consequences. In his 1919 book Economic Consequences of the Peace, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that Germany would become deeply embittered by the heavy reparations imposed by the Versailles treaty ending World War I.

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History of Political Economy 39(3):529–43. Kermack, William Ogilvy, and Anderson Gray McKendrick. 1927. “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics.” Proceedings of the Royal Society 115(772):701–21. Keynes, John Maynard. 1920 [1919]. Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: Macmillan. ________. 1932. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930).” In Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: Harcourt Brace. ________. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirnarskaya, Dina. 2009. The Natural Musician: On Abilities, Giftedness, and Talent. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Irving Kristol, writing in 1977, expresses the typical economist’s view succinctly, dismissing public opinion polls purporting to measure business confidence: It is all supremely silly. Business confidence—as represented by the willingness to invest in new plant and equipment—is not a psychological phenomenon but an economic one. It is what Mr. Carter and what Mr. Burns do that counts, not what they say. John Maynard Keynes may have believed—and some of his disciples obviously still believe—that the propensity to invest is governed by the high or low “animal spirits” that prevail among businessmen. But then, Keynesian economists have always had a poor opinion of the intelligence of businessmen, whom they represent as temperamental children, to be paternalistically “managed.” … What governs business confidence are the prospects for profitable investment.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

We can do this by adjusting the incentives for people to do other productive things with their time. I’m by no means the first one to consider what the world will be like when our basic needs can be met without our own labor. None other than John Maynard Keynes, the legendary economist, wrote a fascinating meditation on this question in 1930 entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In this thoughtful essay, he projects that within a century (which is nearly up, of course), continued economic growth would permit us to meet the basic needs of all humans with little to no effort. As he puts it, “All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem” (his italics).

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See assets ownership stock markets IP addresses, 28 iPhone, 46, 198 IRAs (individual retirement accounts), 169 Jain, Kapil, 213n7 Jennings, Ken, 30, 150 Jeopardy! (TV quiz show), 30, 36, 150, 198–99 job mortgage loans proposal, 13–15, 153–57 jobs. See labor market John, George, 70, 72 Johnson, Lyndon B., 167 Kaiser Permanente, 214n8 Kennedy, John F., ix Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” 186 kitchen equipment, multipurpose, 46–47 Kiva Systems, 135 Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, 95 knowledge engineers, 23 Komisar, Randy, 218n15 Labor Department, 157 labor market, 119–27 advanced technology and, 191 alternatives to paid work and, 185–86 autonomous systems as threat to, 10–12, 20, 126–27, 131–58 average salary and, 116 competition for jobs and, 121–25 conventional economics and, 12 education-work sequence and, 13, 153, 157–58 excess workers and, 158 exclusions from, 170–71 federal measures and, 170, 171–72 historical comparisons and, 115–16, 164, 222n3 job skills and (see skills) letters of intent to hire and, 14, 154, 155 predictions about, 138–39, 140 reasons for working and, 184–85 salaries and, 116, 120, 145 tectonic shifts in, 133–35 turnover (2013) in, 137 workday standardization and, 171 work incentives and, 184–85 working adult statistics and, 172–74, 176.

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As a first approximation, I would suggest that the closure has to be computed until it reaches a natural person. 43. William McBride, “New Study Ponders Elimination of the Corporate Income Tax,” Tax Foundation, April 11, 2014, http://taxfoundation.org/blog/new-study-ponders-elimination-corporate-income-tax. 44. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Classic House Books, 2009). OUTRODUCTION 1. These are called “portmanteaus,” ironically itself a mash-up of the French words porter (carry) and manteau (coat). 2. John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” Appleton’s 8 (1906), http://explorepahistory.com/odocument.php?

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

only 9 percent of jobs are truly threatened: “Automation and Independent Work in a Digital Economy,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, May 2016, https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/Policy%20brief%20-%20Automation%20and%20Independent%20Work%20in%20a%20Digital%20Economy.pdf. “technological unemployment”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 358–83. Harvard economist Wassily Leontief: Charlotte Curtis, “Machines vs. Workers,” New York Times, February 8, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/08/arts/machines-vs-workers.html. Hal Varian: Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” Pew Research Center, August 6, 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/.

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“stultifying utilitarianism”: Farhad Manjoo, “The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable,” New York Times, May 28, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/the-soylent-revolution-will-not-be-pleasurable.html. “Imagine a meal”: Sam Sifton, “The Taste That Doesn’t Really Satisfy,” New York Times, May 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/technology/the-taste-that-doesnt-really-satisfy.html. “The ideas of economists”: John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. 7, The General Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 383. “tool for solving”: Thomas H. Cormen et al., Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 5. George Dantzig: George B. Dantzig, “Linear Programming,” Operations Research 50, no. 1 (February 2002): 42–47, https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.50.1.42.17798.

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Engineering has obviously brought humanity lots of good. But the story of Soylent is powerful because it reveals the optimization mindset of the technologist. And problems arise when this mindset begins to dominate—when the technologies begin to scale and become universal and unavoidable. The Education of an Engineer In 1936, John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists ever to live, observed the following: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The other correlated parts that have to change to reduce cultural lag are our systems of governance, beliefs, habits, cultural norms, and values. Almost a century ago John Maynard Keynes foresaw many of the economic and cultural challenges we are now facing. Keynes was deeply worried about a new societal dysfunction—technological unemployment (what he called job loss due to automation).6 He knew then, just as we know now, how difficult it would be for people who were threatened by change to adapt to it, and he accurately foresaw the stresses that rapid increases in productivity would exert on our value system. In 1930, in his now-classic article, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes postulated the end of the Protestant work ethic—one of our most basic values—and imagined a time when the accumulation of wealth would no longer be of high social importance: [T]echnical improvements in manufacture and transport have been proceeding at a greater rate in the last ten years than ever before in history.

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“Gilgamesh and Civilization,” Chamelionfire1, December 17, 2013, https://chameleonfire1.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/gilgamesh-and-civilization/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 5. “Fintech, the Incredible Growth of P2P (Peer to Peer) in China,” Marketing to China, September 22, 2017, https://www.marketingtochina.com/fintech-incredible-growth-p2p-peer-peer-china/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 6. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Marxists.org, 1930, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm (accessed June 28, 2019). 7. Ibid. 8. “What Does Voluntary Compliance Mean, in Regard to Taxes?,” Optima Tax Relief, July 29, 2014, https://www.optimataxrelief.com/voluntary-compliance-mean-regards-taxes/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 9.

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See also retail sector cybercrime and security, 132, 153–154 credit card, 74–76 cyber currencies, 78–80, 177–178 evolution of, 172–173 fake news classification as, 169–170 financial, 39–40, 75–76, 78–80, 171–172, 177–178 global effort needed for, 179 government response to, 172–176, 179 public utilities threat with, 173, 174 response rate relation to rate of, 171–172 Russia-based, 174 cyber currencies, 10, 83 blockchain technology of, 79, 80 electricity and miners involved with, 176 governance rules and systems, 176–178 government regulation needed for, 176–177 security with, 78–80, 177–178 as spatial equivalence, 16 cyber weapons, 16, 172–173, 174, 176 Daimler, Gottlieb, 53 Data and Goliath (Schneier), 127 Data Protection Directive, 129 data tracking/collection: advertising revenues’ role in, 89, 90, 120–123 algorithmic prisons with, 13, 114, 123–128 behavior manipulation in, 117, 121, 123 consumer protections against, 127–128 cookies’ role in, 89, 116, 117–118, 128 of credit rating agencies, 118–119 evolution and factors behind abuses of, 116–118 freemium business model role in, 121–123, 129–130 government agencies purchasing, 119, 131 information fiduciaries as protection for, 129–131 laws and regulations on, 128–130 liberty threats to and factors with, 13, 116–117, 123–128 privacy threat evolution with, 116–119 from social networking sites, 116, 118 transparency of, 127 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 109 Deep Blue, 46–47 delivery services, 102 democracy: authoritarianism threat to, 158–159 collective identity of citizens key to, 163, 166, 168 income inequality in relation to, 163–164 social media/networking threats to, 7, 18, 168–169 depression, 147–148, 166 Dichter, Ernest, 135 discrimination, 162–163, 165–166 displacement: business, 71, 72–73, 99 job, with job creation historically, 51–54, 106 job, without new job creation, 43, 51, 60–64, 98–99, 105–106 Distracted Minds (Gazzaley), 155 Echo, 119 economic policy and metrics: Depression-era, 67, 160 on monetizable productivity, 58–59 non-monetizable productivity in relation to, 52, 58–59, 66, 67, 68 unemployment rates in relation to, 106–107 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 187–189 economy: automation impacts on, 12–13 Autonomous, 60–61, 96–98 entrepreneurship, 110 gig, 7, 34, 63, 84, 85, 94 Second Economy contrasted with traditional, 97–98, 103 sharing, 70, 83–87, 100, 101–102 social empathy decline with decline of, 164–165 traditional compared to Autonomous, 96 elder care, 111 election tampering, 89, 167, 180, 186 electricity: cyber currency mining use of, 176 invention of, 29, 182 ELIZA, 46 Elsevier, Reed, 119 email, 60–61, 150 emotion detection technology, 115–116 empires, rise and fall of, 6–7, 24–25 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama), 158 Enlightenment, xii, 2, 22, 152 entrepreneurship, rates of, 110 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 24, 183–184, 185 Equifax, 75–76, 118, 126, 130 Estonia, 174 ethnicity.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

James Robbin, “Free Market Flawed, Says Survey,” BBC News, Nov. 9, 2009, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8347409.stm. 44. “New Poll: Socialism Is Gaining Popularity in America,” Cleveland Leader, Apr. 9, 2009, clevelandleader.com/node/9655. 45. See John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 358–73. The essay was first published in 1930. 46. John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” Yale Review 22 (1933): 761. 47. Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (New York: Crown, 2012), 239. 48. Schor, Plenitude; Wolff, Democracy at Work; Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, 2d ed.

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This is a recession, and it is a part of a business cycle that has always existed under capitalism. Of course, recessions end when conditions change—inventories run down, wages fall, bad debt is cleared off the books—and generally turn into booms. Even at the business cycle’s peak, as contemporary Americans know well, it will not necessarily gravitate to full employment. Instead, as John Maynard Keynes posited in his General Theory, the logical resting spot for an advanced capitalist economy may be with significant unemployment and unused capacity. The business cycle may “peak” with millions unemployed and incomes in decline.75 A major conclusion of Keynesian economics was the need for an increased role of the government in the economy.

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It is only recently, as capitalism has floundered, that it has become almost mandatory to regard capitalism as permanent, irreplaceable, and benevolent. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, when it produced golden-age results in America by today’s standards, it was more common to have frank, no-holds-barred discussions of the system’s merits and demerits. Going back further, many of the great economists, including John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes, understood capitalism as a historically specific system, not as the eternal state of nature for humanity. Mill and Keynes saw capitalism as solving the “economic problem” and eventually making a world without scarcity—and therefore without capitalism—possible. Granted, Mill and Keynes saw that outcome as generations away and championed capitalism in their own times, but their historical perspective sharpened their critique and gave it tremendous lasting significance.45 During the depths of the Great Depression, Keynes wrote an extraordinary essay acknowledging that economists, as well as business and political leaders, had been woefully wrong about the economy and how to make it work for the bulk of the population.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Nordhaus, “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement,” National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 10433, issued April 2004, doi:10.3386/w10433. 297 had to change its policies: Sam Shead, “Apple Is Finally Going to Start Publishing Its AI Research,” Business Insider, December 6, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-finally-going-to-start-publishing-its-artificial-intelligence-research-2016-12. CHAPTER 14: WE DON’T HAVE TO RUN OUT OF JOBS 298 “live wisely and agreeably and well”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–73, available online from http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ 116a/keynes1.pdf. 298 the world has been getting better: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” OurWorldIn Data.org, first published in 2013; substantive revision March 27, 2017, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/. 299 once destroyed factory jobs: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A.

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As Max Roser, creator of Our World in Data, a remarkable collection of visualizations about how the world has been getting better over the last five hundred years, notes: “Even in 1981 more than 50% of the world population lived in absolute poverty—this is now down to about 14%. This is still a large number of people, but the change is happening incredibly fast. For our present world, the data tells us that poverty is now falling more quickly than ever before in world history.” Much of Keynes’s essay, titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” concerns the issue of what people might do with their time when productivity has increased to the point where the machines do all the work. Is there really not enough work left for humans to do? Keynes didn’t think so in 1930, and I don’t think so now. “We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism,” he wrote.

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See fake news disruptive forces, xxiii disruptive technology, 351–52 Dobbs, Richard, xxiii “Dog and the Frisbee, The” (Haldane), 175 Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (Janeway), 104–5, 274 DonorsChoose, 183 dot-com boom, 29 Dougherty, Dale, 28–29, 81, 99–100, 337 Drucker, Peter F., 250 Dvorak, John, 41 Dyson, George, 45 eBay, 39, 182–83, 294 “Economic Mechanism Design for Computerized Agents” (Varian), 261 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 298–99 economics, 271–73 assigning a value to caregiving, 310–11 efficiency wages, 197 employers’ 29-hour loophole, 194–95, 196 fundamental law of capitalism, 268 invisible hand of competition, 262–70 the “laws” of economics, 257–62 and leisure time, 308–11 machine money and people money, 306–7, 308, 309 minimum wage, 197–98, 264–68 secular stagnation, 271 Stiglitz exposes the 1%, 255 trickle down, 244, 265, 273 universal basic income, 305–6, 307–11 wealth inequality, 263–65 welfare economics, 263, 266, 307 economy, xxii and adaptations to change, xxiv–xxv creativity-based, 312–19 financial crisis of 2008, 172–73, 175, 238, 265, 275, 359 as government’s thick marketplace, 133 of Korea, 134 technology and the future of the economy scenario plan, 364–67 See also financial markets economy and Silicon Valley, 274–75 the Clothesline Paradox, 295–97 digital platforms and the real economy, 288–89 market capitalization/supermoney, 276–79, 280–84, 289 measuring value creation, 289–95 pool of qualified workers, 347–50 venture capital-backed startups, 275, 282–84 Y Combinator program for VC-funded companies, 286–87 education/training creating, sharing, and embedding into tools, 323–32, 334–36 as investment in other’s children, 320–21 for jobs, 303, 304, 321 lagging behind technology, 335–36 learning by doing, 337–41, 345–50 on-demand education, 341–45 Open Cloud Academy at Rackspace, 350 play element, 340–41 and social capital, 345–50 efficiency wages, 197 efficient market hypothesis, 259–61 “Eight Principles of Open Government Data” (Malamud, Lessig, and O’Reilly), 130–31 electric cars, safety-related load of, 66–67 Eliot, T.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Underlying this loss of hope is a new economic reality where it’s not just the poor who are missing out on economic gains. Much of the middle class is also feeling squeezed. Instead of technology allowing for a fifteen-hour work week, as Keynes predicted when he penned his 1930s essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” vast numbers of people are working longer, in jobs they rightly fear will soon be gone. Trapped—wondering how they will provide for their families and basic needs when the other shoe drops. At the same time, we are seeing a massive rise in inequality: in the United States, the top 5 percent of the population now holds more than two-thirds of the wealth, while the remaining 95 percent of the population fights for their share of the other third.1 Just three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—account for more wealth than 50 percent of the population.

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Introduction: The End of Inflation “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) Technology is deflationary. That is not conjecture. It is the nature of technology. And because technology underpins more and more of the world around us, it means that we are entering into an age of deflation unlike any the world has ever seen.

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This race to the bottom on currencies only serves to further push up global asset prices. And the endless game of reducing the value of currencies relative to others only serves as a short-term panacea, because asset prices will rise far more quickly than jobs can be created—and pay rates increased—to keep pace with the asset price rise. As the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

While most economists today would look at an era of nearly free goods and services with a sense of foreboding, a few earlier economists expressed a guarded enthusiasm over the prospect. Keynes, the venerable twentieth-century economist whose economic theories still hold considerable weight, penned a small essay in 1930 entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which appeared as millions of Americans were beginning to sense that the sudden economic downturn of 1929 was in fact the beginning of a long plunge to the bottom. Keynes observed that new technologies were advancing productivity and reducing the cost of goods and services at an unprecedented rate.

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George, 242 The Descent of Man (Darwin), 63 Deutsche Telekom, 54, 101, 198 Dini, Erico, 97 DIY culture, 90, 94–95, 99–100 Dobb, Maurice, 40 Doctorow, Cory, 95 dominance of social media, 201 see also Facebook; Friendster; Myspace; Twitter driverless vehicle(s), 126, 230–231 Drucker, Peter, 264 Duffy, John, 137 eBay becoming an online monopoly, 201–205 cuts out the middlemen, 232 and free currency, 262 as a profit-seeking enterprise, 252 ecological footprint, 107, 274–276, 284, 286, 302 Econofly, 145 economic need for greener/cleaner energy, 10 “Economic Policy for the Information Economy” (Summers and DeLong), 7–9 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 6–7 The Economist, 5, 77–78, 121–122, 251, 259, 265 economy of abundance, 297–303 and a biosphere lifestyle, 297–303 circular, idea of a, 236–237 and the sustainable cornucopia, 273–296 education, higher. see massive open online courses (MOOCs) edX, 115–116 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 179 electricity importance of, 51–53 liberates women, 285 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), 142, 293–294 electromagnetic spectrum, 148, 165, 167, 185, 189–190 electronic healthcare records, 13, 130, 244 Elkington, John, 264 The Empathetic Civilization (Hegel), 301 employment, new kinds of, 266–269 Enclosure Movement, 17, 31, 169 The End of Work (Rifkin), 121–122 energy adaptive computing, 85 Commons, 205–206 cooperatives, 215–217 costs at data centers, 84–86 and economics, 10–11 and fossil fuel(s). see fossil fuel(s) free, 81–84 and Germany. see Germany infrastructure is vulnerable to climate change, 290 IT. see Cleanweb Movement use, proactive rather than reactive, 143 Energy Watch Group, 83–84 entrepreneurialism, strengthened by Protestant theologians, 59 entropy, definition of, 10 Entropy: A New World View (Rifkin), 100 environmentalist(s), 170–172, 187–188 Environmental Movement, 173, 182, 185 era of transparency, 75–77 Etsy, 91, 262 European Bioinformatics Institute, 86 European Commission, 11, 76–77 European enclosures, and birth of the market economy, 29–38 exponential curves, 79– 81 “extreme productivity,” 3, 70–73 ExxonMobil, 49, 54 the Fab Lab, 70, 94–95, 310 Facebook becoming an online monopoly, 201–205 changes the concept of privacy, 76 as communication, 151, 234, 248, 250, 302 exploiting the Commons for commercial ends, 199–200, 310 and freedom, 226 and GM’s decision to yank ads from, 251 as a podium for activism, 189 revenue and market share, 201 and the “Social Energy App,” 147 and Spotify, 145 and Yerdle, 237 and Zuckerberg, 145 Farber, Amy, 241–242 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 147–151, 194, 198–199 Ferris, Cameron, 246 fertility rate, falling, 285 Filabot, 96 “fit-lifters,” 127 Flickr, 180, 234, 250 forager/hunter society(ies), 298–302 Ford, Henry, 52–54, 71, 98, 105, 123, 308 Fortune 500 companies, 22, 114, 175, 310 fossil fuel(s) costs of, 69, 87, 91, 140, 142 and cyberattacks, 294 location of, 22–23 reliance on, 54, 194–195 stalwart supporters of, 86–87 versus renewables, 69–72, 81–87, 216–217, 267, 283 see also oil “free” energy, 81–84 as a marketing device, 5 in price and free from scarcity, 273 Free Culture Movement, 173–188, 202 Freecycle Network (TFN), 236 “free-riders dilemma,” 156, 258 Free Software Foundation, 174–175 Free Software Movement, 100, 170, 174–179 free wi-fi, 147–149 feudal commons, 16–17, 29–32, 36–37, 58–61, 132, 155–156, 167, 269 Foundation on Economic Trends (FOET), 165–167, 182 Friendster, 200, 204 Frischmann, Brett M., 193–194 Frydman, Gilles, 242 Gaia hypothesis, 184 Gandhi, Mahatma, 104–108 Gates, Bill, 171, 174 GDP, 17, 20–22, 54, 74, 123, 129, 240, 266 General Electric (GE), 13, 14, 54, 73–74, 165, 210, 234 General Motors, 53, 54, 228–230 General Public Licenses (GPL), 94, 175–176 Germany and cooperatives, 213–216 flood in, 287 and Google, 201 and renewable energy, 82–83, 101, 141, 253, 257 and 3D printing, 101–102 Gershenfeld, Neil, 94 Gillespie, Tarleton, 203 Girsky, Stephen, 228–229 globalization versus reopening the global commons, 187–192 GM, teams up with RelayRides, 228–229 GNU operating system, 174–176 God of oil. see Hall, Andy Google cashes in on selling Big Data, 199–200 and control of the U.S. media market, 54 and driverless vehicles, 230 energy usage, 85 favors free Wi-Fi connection, 148 market share and revenue generated by, 201 as natural monopoly, 202–205 Ngram Viewer, 18 primary revenue stream is weakening, 251 as tracking tool, 245 Gore, Al, 219 Gorenflo, Neal, 238 Gou, Terry, 124 “The Governing of the Commons” (Ostrom), 158–162 Gram Power, 103–104 Green Button initiative, 146 Great Chain of Being, 30, 58–59, 61 Great Recession, 20, 122–129, 233, 255–262, 281–282 green feed-in tariff(s), 139, 206 Guardian, 104, 116 guilds by trade, 36–37 Gutenberg, Johannes, 35–37 hacker(s) connotations of the term, 93 and cyberterrorists, 291–292 and environmentalist(s), 170–172, 187–188 and the Free Culture Movement, 173–174 and the Makers Movement, 99–104 and 3D printing, 95 Hall, Andy, 87 Hansen, James, 287 Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Layard), 277 Haque, Umair, 253 Hardin, Garrett, 155–159 Hazen, Paul, 213 healthcare, 13, 74, 130, 240–247 hedonistic treadmill, 276 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 279, 301 Heilbroner, Robert, 5, 105 Herr, Bill, 129 higher education. see massive open online courses (MOOCs) The High Price of Materialism (Kasser), 277 high-tech Armageddon. see cyber attacks/cyberterrorism Hoch, Dan, 243–244 Hotelling, Harold, 136–137, 150, 206–211 how best to judge economic success, 20–21 Hoyt, Robert, 58 human race empathetic sensibility of, 278–286, 301 and Enlightenment, 60–65 and human nature through a capitalist lens, 57–65 liberating the, 7, 70 and ostracism, 163 rethinking salvation, 58–59 what makes us happy, 276–285 Hume, David, 62, 308 hybrid economy. see capitalism; Collaborative Commons IBM, 13, 14, 80, 130, 234, 250 infofacture vs. manufacture, 90 Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Frischmann), 193–194 Integrated Transportation Provider Services (ITPS), 228 Intel, 79, 148 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), 195–196 the Internet of Everything, 14, 73 the Internet generation, 132, 145, 179, 226, 230 the Internet of Things (IoT), 11–16, 65 and Big Data. see Big Data and the chief productivity officer (CPO), 15 as a double-edged sword, 78, 267 and healthcare. see healthcare made up of, 11, 14–15 and near zero marginal cost society, 73–78 negatives associated with, 14 obstacles that slowed the deployment of, 74 and smart cities. see smart cities as source of employment, 267–268 and use of sensors, 11–13, 73–74, 143, 219, 230 Internet of Things European Research Cluster, 11 infrastructure, requirements of, 14 Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, 292 Jakubowski, Marcin, 102–103 James, William, 279–280 Jennings, Ken, 130 Jobs, Steve, 305, 308 Jumpstart Our Business Start Ups Act, 257 Kaku, Michio, 79 Kasser, Tim, 277 Keynes, John Maynard, 5–7, 105, 268 Khoshnevis, Dr.

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Many, though not all, of the old guard in the commercial arena can’t imagine how economic life would proceed in a world where most goods and services are nearly free, profit is defunct, property is meaningless, and the market is superfluous. What then? Some are just beginning to ask that question. They might find some solace in the fact that several of the great architects of modern economic thinking glimpsed the problem long ago. John Maynard Keynes, Robert Heilbroner, and Wassily Leontief, to name a few, pondered the critical contradiction that drove capitalism forward. They wondered whether, in the distant future, new technologies might so boost productivity and lower prices as to create the coming state of affairs. Oskar Lange, a University of Chicago professor of the early twentieth century, captured a sense of the conundrum underlying a mature capitalism in which the search for new technological innovations to advance productivity and cheapen prices put the system at war with itself.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Neoliberalism is among the leading reasons why today even the most advantaged people are burning the midnight oil working on projects that deliver minimal value for society. Sure, executing a reorganization or an M&A deal improves “efficiency.” But for whom? In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes, the architect of Keynesian economics, speculated that productivity growth might enable humanity to someday work fifteen hours a week.23 Keynes was correct about productivity growth: since 1948, productivity has tripled.24 But Keynes did not anticipate neoliberalism: American workers today work just 10 percent fewer hours than we did in 1950, and hours have not decreased at all since neoliberalism took hold in the 1970s.25 Productivity gains are not translating into much-higher wages either: while productivity grew 62 percent between 1920 and 1979, hourly pay only increased 17.5 percent. 26 In Old Europe, leisure was a symbol of status.

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(And How to Fix It) (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2019). 22. Jay Greene, “Bill Gates Acknowledges an Affair with an Employee, Which Microsoft Investigated,” Washington Post, May 17, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/17/bill-gates-affair-investigation/. 23. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–373. 24. Willem Roper, “Working More for Less: How Wages in America Have Stagnated,” World Economic Forum, November 10, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/. 25.

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More than the rest of the social sciences, economics is dominated by white men, who leverage their collective power to assert that their contributions are superior to those in other fields like history, psychology, and sociology.3 Since its founding in 1958, the Kennedy School had been led by white men. And since a white male economist was selected as dean in 2004, it has been led by white male economists.4 One of those white male economists decided to host a meeting on Chetty’s research in 2018. I’ll call him John, after John Maynard Keynes, the economist. This John has dedicated his career to the issue of American poverty and welfare. He’s a nationally recognized expert on the topic, and his books have helped to shape national policy. Perhaps due to his perceived status on the topic, John was dominating the conversation in the faculty lounge.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

The Head world is generally a secular one, with little feel for the mysteries of life, which is why so many of us today seek a substitute for it in everything from yoga and meditation to the green movement. Yet it is striking what a disappointing failure humanism has been. It has been an effective critic of religion but has provided no convincing alternative set of ideas on how to live well. John Maynard Keynes, writing about a world in which economic necessity has been largely overcome in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” sees a return to religious principles. “I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue… We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.

…

By the 1930s the proportion of the adult male population in professional occupations remained below 10 percent in all rich countries. The cognitive class was too small to have significant political or cultural influence. The world was still largely ruled by tradition, religious belief, and the “practical men” who, according to John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1936, “believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, but are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes was a member of the loose grouping of English intellectuals and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group whose avant-garde ideas and ways of life—“they lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles,” as Dorothy Parker is said to have put it—had almost no impact on British society in the 1930s.

…

My American grandfather eagerly signed up for one of the new economics courses at Cambridge, England, just before the First World War, only to be told that his proposed tutor at Trinity College was away for the year. Trinity suggested an alternative young economist at King’s but warned that he was not “sound”; his name was John Maynard Keynes. My grandfather decided to study law instead. Chapter Three Cognitive Ability and the Meritocracy Puzzle To equate IQ with human virtue or wisdom or character or a whole variety of other of the most important measures of a value of a person is ridiculous. IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable things that inferior chip speed will not enable.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Kelly, Kevin, “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online.” Wired, May 22, 2009. At http://archive.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all. Kelly, Thomas, “Sunk Costs, Rationality, and Acting for the Sake of the Past.” Noûs, 38.1 (2004): 60–85. Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930). In John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. Norton, 1963. Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy. Harvard Business School Press, 2005. Klein, Naomi, No Logo. Fourth Estate, 2010. Kleiner, Morris M., “Reforming Occupational Licensing Policies.” Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2015-1.

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., “The New Normal.” 33.Acemoglu, Aghion, and Zilibotti, “Distance to Frontier, Selection, and Economic Growth.” 34.Ranasinghe, “Impact of Policy Distortions”; Gabler and Poschke, “Experimentation by Firms, Distortions, and Aggregate Productivity”; Da-Rocha, Mendes Tavares, and Restuccia, “Policy Distortions and Aggregate Productivity with Endogenous Establishment-Level Productivity”; Bhattacharya, Guner, and Ventura, “Distortions, Endogenous Managerial Skills and Productivity Differences”; Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, and Scarpetta, “Cross-Country Differences in Productivity”; Restuccia and Rogerson, “Policy Distortions and Aggregate Productivity.” 35.Gabler and Poschke, “Experimentation by Firms, Distortions, and Aggregate Productivity.” 36.See for example Bhattacharya, Guner, and Ventura, “Distortions, Endogenous Managerial Skills and Productivity Differences.” 8 Capitalism and Robots 1.The Economist, “Coming to an Office Near You.” 2.Gapper and Waters, “Google Chief Warns of IT Threat.” 3.Matulka, “Timeline: The History of the Electric Car.” 4.Deffree, “Karl Benz Drives the First Automobile.” 5.Krugman, “The Big Meh.” 6.ATA, “New ATA Report Shows Growing Shortage of Qualified Truck Drivers.” 7.Akst, “What Can We Learn from Past Anxiety over Automation?” 8.Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” 9.Life Magazine, “Parking Consultants and Surfboarding Instructors May Keep the Economy Going.” 10.Kahn and Wiener, The Year 2000. 11.Akst, “What Can We Learn from Past Anxiety over Automation?” 12.Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, “The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights.” 13.Tracy, “Why Some of Google’s Coolest Projects Flop Badly.” 14.Tracy, “Why Some of Google’s Coolest Projects Flop Badly.” 15.Polymath Consulting, “A Brief History of Payments.” 16.Byrnes, “Technology Repaints the Payment Landscape.” 17.Mainelli and Milne, “The Impact and Potential of Blockchain,” 4. 18.Mainelli and Milne, “The Impact and Potential of Blockchain,” 5. 19.Simmons, “George Foster: Are Startups Really Job Engines?”

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The basic plot, if you will allow a simplification, in much of the intellectual history of the world centers around the battle between new discoveries and old dogma, and the former tends to win over the latter – not immediately, not in the short run, perhaps not even in the medium term, but in the long run new discoveries often do win. However, in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes noted, we are all dead. Political romanticism better suits a historian of ideas than a scholar of contemporary politics and economics. The judgment about the Danes in 1066 and All That, the humorous version of English history, does not apply to economic policy: you cannot be both “right and very romantic.”14 Innovation delayed is innovation denied.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

It’s important to be clear that the Depression was the result of a massive failure of the financial system and not due to the automation of work that was proceeding apace in the nation’s factories. Still, the potential threat to jobs that automation also posed had certainly been noted. John Maynard Keynes, most famously, diagnosed in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” what he called a “new disease” in the world’s largest economies. He called it “technological unemployment” and explained that it was “due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”

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And it can let you keep your job, while making it a better one. Whatever Happened to the Fifteen-Hour Workweek? If you were reading this book half a century ago, you might be very surprised to find us referring to augmentation as something that would help you retain your work, not be rid of it. In 1928, John Maynard Keynes penned an essay he titled “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” which argued that decades of productivity and technology improvements would leave those progeny with a new kind of problem: figuring out what to do with their vast leisure time. He wrote: “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.”9 Keynes expected that by now we’d all be working about fifteen hours per week.

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Maddy Myers, “Google Glass: Inspired by Terminator,” Slice of MIT, May 30, 2013, https://slice.mit.edu/2013/05/30/google-glass-inspired-by-terminator/. 7. David Scott, remarks at the opening of the Computer Museum, June 10, 1982, transcript accessed October 29, 2015, http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/ech/agc_scott.pdf. 8. David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 9. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963), 358–73. 10. David H. Autor, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth,” prepared for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s economic policy symposium on “Reevaluating Labor Market Dynamics,” September 3, 2014, http://economics.mit.edu/files/9835. 11.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Buddha says: “None of the world is good.” I am fond of my hut… But even if I wanted to renounce the world, I wouldn’t be able to afford a hut in California. as old as John Maynard Keynes: Keynes extended the prediction—much, much talked about ever since—in an essay notably published in 1930, just after the stock market crash of 1929: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, October 11 and 18, 1930. “You can see the computer age”: This line first appeared in Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” review of Manufacturing Matters by Stephen S.

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Nichol answers, “But I don’t want to live in a spaceship.” He looked genuinely surprised. In his line of work, he’d never met anyone who didn’t want to live in a spaceship. * * * — That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled. In 1987, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Robert Solow famously commented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This has been, even more so, the experience of most of those living in the developed world in the decades since—rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies – all the traditional touchstones of science fiction – in order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism. Neoliberalism, as secure as it may seem today, contains no guarantee of future survival. Like every social system we have ever known, it will not last forever. Our task now is to invent what happens next. Notes INTRODUCTION 1.John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963); George Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Dery, ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’, in Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970). 2.For exemplars of this stance, see Franco Berardi, After the Future (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011); T.

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, Organization, 2013, at sagepub.com. 58.Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 115–17; Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, p. 76. 59.Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, p. 133. 60.Hunnicutt, Work Without End, p. 1. 61.Ibid., p. 155. 62.Ibid., pp. 147–9. 63.Paul Lafargue, ‘The Right to Be Lazy’, in Bernard Marszalek, ed., The Right to Be Lazy: Essays by Paul Lafargue (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), p. 34. 64.John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963); Hunnicutt, Work Without End, p. 155. 65.Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 820. 66.Hunnicutt, Work Without End, Chapter 7. 67.A handful of EU countries – most notably France – have reduced the working week to as little as thirty-five hours, but the overall trend has been to maintain a forty-hour working week.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

In the professions, though, our general view is that this (often nostalgic) preference for the old ways of working will be too high a price to pay, especially if the quality of service is demonstrably lower than that provided by a machine. 7.3. Technological unemployment? In 1930, speculating about ‘the economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, John Maynard Keynes introduced the concept of ‘technological unemployment’.23 The basic idea is simple—that new technologies might put people out of work. The question to which we now turn is whether there will be technological unemployment in the professions in the very long term. The short answer is, ‘there will’.

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David Musson has been an ongoing source of encouragement and of wise counsel; and we are grateful also at OUP to Kim Behrens, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Phil Henderson, and Clare Kennedy for their enthusiasm and professionalism. Thank you also to Jeff New for his superb copy-editing. The epigraph by John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), © The Royal Economic Society, published by Cambridge University Press, is reproduced with permission. Alan Susskind reviewed the entire manuscript. His observations and his ongoing support were very much appreciated. At the same time, Werner Susskind merits special mention for keeping us fully supplied with relevant articles from the BMJ.

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Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot. John Stuart Mill The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes Contents List of Boxes and Figure Introduction PART I. CHANGE 1. The Grand Bargain 1.1 Everyday conceptions 1.2 The scope of the professions 1.3 Historical context 1.4 The bargain explained 1.5 Theories of the professions 1.6 Four central questions 1.7 Disconcerting problems 1.8 A new mindset 1.9 Some common biases 2.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

But it highlights a key question relevant to the future of work in the Robot Age, namely why do people currently work as much as they do? And whatever the reasons, are they bound to continue in this way in the future? Interestingly, although he envisaged a rather different route to this end state, Keynes had a similar vision to Marx. In an essay entitled “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” published in 1931, Keynes suggested that in a hundred years’ time the standard of living would be between four and eight times as high as it was then.6 This, he claimed, would be enough to end the economic problem, that is to say, shortage, and to replace it with abundance. Hence the question of what to do with our time.

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Minsky, M. (1967) Finite and Infinite Machines, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Mokyr, J. (1990) The Lever of Riches, New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, I. (2010) Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Pecchi, L. and Piga, G. (2008) Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Penrose, R. (1989) The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penrose, R. (1994) Shadows of the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, London: Allen Lane.

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M. (1931) Essays in Persuasion, London: Macmillan. 7 There is an interesting collection of essays on Keynes edited by Pecchi, L. and Piga, G. (2008) Grandchildren: Revisiting Keynes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 8 See Freeman, R. B. (2008) “Why Do We Work More than Keynes Expected?” in Pecchi and Piga, pp. 135–42. 9 J. E. Stiglitz (2010) “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in L. Pecchi and G. Piga (2008), pp. 41–85. 10 Mokyr, J., Vickers, C. and Ziebarth, N. L. (2015) The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: Is this Time Different?, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 29 (Summer 2015). pp. 31–50. 11 Stiglitz (2010), op. cit. 12 Keynes (1931). 13 See Clark, A. and Oswald, A.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Although, as will soon become evident, I am by no means qualified to opine on what is essentially a matter for economists,19 I suspect that the issue is too important to leave entirely to them. The issue of technological unemployment was brought to the fore in a famous article, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” by John Maynard Keynes. He wrote the article in 1930, when the Great Depression had created mass unemployment in Britain, but the topic has a much longer history. Aristotle, in Book I of his Politics, presents the main point quite clearly: For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others . . . if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.

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We need a plausible destination in order to plan a transition—that is, we need a plausible picture of a desirable future economy where most of what we currently call work is done by machines. One rapidly emerging picture is that of an economy where far fewer people work because work is unnecessary. Keynes envisaged just such a future in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” He described the high unemployment afflicting Great Britain in 1930 as a “temporary phase of maladjustment” caused by an “increase of technical efficiency” that took place “faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption.” He did not, however, imagine that in the long run—after a century of further technological advances—there would be a return to full employment: 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.

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See intelligent agent agent program, 48 “AI Researchers on AI Risk” (Alexander), 153 Alciné, Jacky, 60 Alexander, Scott, 146, 153, 169–70 algorithms, 33–34 Bayesian networks and, 275–77 Bayesian updating, 283, 284 bias and, 128–30 chess-playing, 62–63 coding of, 34 completeness theorem and, 51–52 computer hardware and, 34–35 content selection, 8–9, 105 deep learning, 58–59, 288–93 dynamic programming, 54–55 examples of common, 33–34 exponential complexity of problems and, 38–39 halting problem and, 37–38 lookahead search, 47, 49–50, 260–61 propositional logic and, 268–70 reinforcement learning, 55–57, 105 subroutines within, 34 supervised learning, 58–59, 285–93 Alibaba, 250 AlphaGo, 6, 46–48, 49–50, 55, 91, 92, 206–7, 209–10, 261, 265, 285 AlphaZero, 47, 48 altruism, 24, 227–29 altruistic AI, 173–75 Amazon, 106, 119, 250 Echo, 64–65 “Picking Challenge” to accelerate robot development, 73–74 Analytical Engine, 40 ants, 25 Aoun, Joseph, 123 Apple HomePod, 64–65 “Architecture of Complexity, The” (Simon), 265 Aristotle, 20–21, 39–40, 50, 52, 53, 114, 245 Armstrong, Stuart, 221 Arnauld, Antoine, 21–22 Arrow, Kenneth, 223 artificial intelligence (AI), 1–12 agent (See intelligent agent) agent programs, 48–59 beneficial, principles for (See beneficial AI) benefits to humans of, 98–102 as biggest event in human history, 1–4 conceptual breakthroughs required for (See conceptual breakthroughs required for superintelligent AI) decision making on global scale, capability for, 75–76 deep learning and, 6 domestic robots and, 73–74 general-purpose, 46–48, 100, 136 global scale, capability to sense and make decisions on, 74–76 goals and, 41–42, 48–53, 136–42, 165–69 governance of, 249–53 health advances and, 101 history of, 4–6, 40–42 human preferences and (See human preferences) imagining what superintelligent machines could do, 93–96 intelligence, defining, 39–61 intelligent personal assistants and, 67–71 limits of superintelligence, 96–98 living standard increases and, 98–100 logic and, 39–40 media and public perception of advances in, 62–64 misuses of (See misuses of AI) mobile phones and, 64–65 multiplier effect of, 99 objectives and, 11–12, 43, 48–61, 136–42, 165–69 overly intelligent AI, 132–44 pace of scientific progress in creating, 6–9 predicting arrival of superintelligent AI, 76–78 reading capabilities and, 74–75 risk posed by (See risk posed by AI) scale and, 94–96 scaling up sensory inputs and capacity for action, 94–95 self-driving cars and, 65–67, 181–82, 247 sensing on global scale, capability to, 75 smart homes and, 71–72 softbots and, 64 speech recognition capabilities and, 74–75 standard model of, 9–11, 13, 48–61, 247 Turing test and, 40–41 tutoring by, 100–101 virtual reality authoring by, 101 World Wide Web and, 64 “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030” (One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence), 149, 150 Asimov, Isaac, 141 assistance games, 192–203 learning preferences exactly in long run, 200–202 off-switch game, 196–200 paperclip game, 194–96 prohibitions and, 202–3 uncertainty about human objectives, 200–202 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 250 assumption failure, 186–87 Atkinson, Robert, 158 Atlas humanoid robot, 73 autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), 110–13 autonomy loss problem, 255–56 Autor, David, 116 Avengers: Infinity War (film), 224 “avoid putting in human goals” argument, 165–69 axiomatic basis for utility theory, 23–24 axioms, 185 Babbage, Charles, 40, 132–33 backgammon, 55 Baidu, 250 Baldwin, James, 18 Baldwin effect, 18–20 Banks, Iain, 164 bank tellers, 117–18 Bayes, Thomas, 54 Bayesian logic, 54 Bayesian networks, 54, 275–77 Bayesian rationality, 54 Bayesian updating, 283, 284 Bayes theorem, 54 behavior, learning preferences from, 190–92 behavior modification, 104–7 belief state, 282–83 beneficial AI, 171–210, 247–49 caution regarding development of, reasons for, 179 data available for learning about human preferences, 180–81 economic incentives for, 179–80 evil behavior and, 179 learning to predict human preferences, 176–77 moral dilemmas and, 178 objective of AI is to maximize realization of human preferences, 173–75 principles for, 172–79 proofs for (See proofs for beneficial AI) uncertainty as to what human preferences are, 175–76 values, defining, 177–78 Bentham, Jeremy, 24, 219 Berg, Paul, 182 Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks (BRETT), 73 Bernoulli, Daniel, 22–23 “Bill Gates Fears AI, but AI Researchers Know Better” (Popular Science), 152 blackmail, 104–5 blinking reflex, 57 blockchain, 161 board games, 45 Boole, George, 268 Boolean (propositional) logic, 51, 268–70 bootstrapping process, 81–82 Boston Dynamics, 73 Bostrom, Nick, 102, 144, 145, 150, 166, 167, 183, 253 brains, 16, 17–18 reward system and, 17–18 Summit machine, compared, 34 BRETT (Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks), 73 Brin, Sergey, 81 Brooks, Rodney, 168 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 117 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, 253–54 Butler, Samuel, 133–34, 159 “can’t we just . . .” responses to risks posed by AI, 160–69 “. . . avoid putting in human goals,” 165–69 “. . . merge with machines,” 163–65 “. . . put it in a box,” 161–63 “. . . switch it off,” 160–61 “. . . work in human-machine teams,” 163 Cardano, Gerolamo, 21 caring professions, 122 Chace, Calum, 113 changes in human preferences over time, 240–45 Changing Places (Lodge), 121 checkers program, 55, 261 chess programs, 62–63 Chollet, François, 293 chunking, 295 circuits, 291–92 CNN, 108 CODE (Collaborative Operations in Denied Environments), 112 combinatorial complexity, 258 common operational picture, 69 compensation effects, 114–17 completeness theorem (Gödel’s), 51–52 complexity of problems, 38–39 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) seismic monitoring, 279–80 computer programming, 119 computers, 32–61 algorithms and (See algorithms) complexity of problems and, 38–39 halting problem and, 37–38 hardware, 34–35 intelligent (See artificial intelligence) limits of computation, 36–39 software limitations, 37 special-purpose devices, building, 35–36 universality and, 32 computer science, 33 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), 40–41, 149 conceptual breakthroughs required for superintelligent AI, 78–93 actions, discovering, 87–90 cumulative learning of concepts and theories, 82–87 language/common sense problem, 79–82 mental activity, managing, 90–92 consciousness, 16–17 consequentialism, 217–19 content selection algorithms, 8–9, 105 content shortcomings, of intelligent personal assistants, 67–68 control theory, 10, 44–45, 54, 176 convolutional neural networks, 47 cost function to evaluate solutions, and goals, 48 Credibility Coalition, 109 CRISPR-Cas9, 156 cumulative learning of concepts and theories, 82–87 cybersecurity, 186–87 Daily Telegraph, 77 decision making on global scale, 75–76 decoherence, 36 Deep Blue, 62, 261 deep convolutional network, 288–90 deep dreaming images, 291 deepfakes, 105–6 deep learning, 6, 58–59, 86–87, 288–93 DeepMind, 90 AlphaGo, 6, 46–48, 49–50, 55, 91, 92, 206–7, 209–10, 261, 265, 285 AlphaZero, 47, 48 DQN system, 55–56 deflection arguments, 154–59 “research can’t be controlled” arguments, 154–56 silence regarding risks of AI, 158–59 tribalism, 150, 159–60 whataboutery, 156–57 Delilah (blackmail bot), 105 denial of risk posed by AI, 146–54 “it’s complicated” argument, 147–48 “it’s impossible” argument, 149–50 “it’s too soon to worry about it” argument, 150–52 Luddism accusation and, 153–54 “we’re the experts” argument, 152–54 deontological ethics, 217 dexterity problem, robots, 73–74 Dickinson, Michael, 190 Dickmanns, Ernst, 65 DigitalGlobe, 75 domestic robots, 73–74 dopamine, 17, 205–6 Dota 2, 56 DQN system, 55–56 Dune (Herbert), 135 dynamic programming algorithms, 54–55 E. coli, 14–15 eBay, 106 ECHO (first smart home), 71 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 113–14, 120–21 The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism (Chace), 113 Economist, The, 145 Edgeworth, Francis, 238 Eisenhower, Dwight, 249 electrical action potentials, 15 Eliza (first chatbot), 67 Elmo (shogi program), 47 Elster, Jon, 242 Elysium (film), 127 emergency braking, 57 enfeeblement of humans problem, 254–55 envy, 229–31 Epicurus, 219 equilibrium solutions, 30–31, 195–96 Erewhon (Butler), 133–34, 159 Etzioni, Oren, 152, 157 eugenics movement, 155–56 expected value rule, 22–23 experience, learning from, 285–95 experiencing self, and preferences, 238–40 explanation-based learning, 294–95 Facebook, 108, 250 Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Goodman), 85 fact-checking, 108–9, 110 factcheck.org, 108 fear of death (as an instrumental goal), 140–42 feature engineering, 84–85 Fermat, Pierre de, 185 Fermat’s Last Theorem, 185 Ferranti Mark I, 34 Fifth Generation project, 271 firewalling AI systems, 161–63 first-order logic, 51, 270–72 probabilistic languages and, 277–80 propositional logic distinguished, 270 Ford, Martin, 113 Forster, E.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Clark and Claudia Senik, “Will GDP Growth Increase Happinenss in Developing Countries?,” Paris School of Economics, Working Paper no. 2010-43, March 2011. 50. John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren: Essays in Persuasion (originally published 1930) (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 358–73. The discussion here draws upon my reflections on that essay: “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, ed. G. Piga and L. Pecchi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 41–87. See also the other essays in that volume. 51.

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In the last chapter, we observed the enormous decline in the wage share in this recession; the decline amounted to more than a half trillion dollars a year.5 That’s an amount much greater than the value of the stimulus package passed by Congress. That stimulus package was estimated to reduce unemployment by 2 to 2½ percentage points. Taking money away from workers has, of course, just the opposite effect. Since the time of the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, governments have understood that when there is a shortfall of demand—when unemployment is high—they need to take action to increase either public or private spending. The 1 percent has worked hard to restrain government spending. Private consumption is encouraged through tax cuts, and that was the strategy undertaken by President Bush, with three large tax cuts in eight years.

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David Kessler, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration who led the U.S. government charge against the cigarette companies, points out that producers of fast foods, snacks, and other products do quite similar things (even if it isn’t precisely addiction), through their fine understanding of how smells and tastes stimulate the brain and create cravings. See Kessler, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (New York: Rodale Books, 2009). 17. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936), p. 383. 18. See George Soros, The Soros Lectures: At the Central European University (New York: Public Affairs, 2010). 19. See in particular the report The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report of the bipartisan National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, which concluded that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause” (p. xxvi).

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Cockshott and Cottrell, ‘Economic Planning, Computers and Labor Values,’ p. 7 26. P. Cockshott, A. Cottrell and H. Dieterich, Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union, Lulu.com, 2010, pp. 1–20 27. A. Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (London, 1994), p. 1 28. J. M. Keynes, ‘The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, in J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York, 1963), pp. 358–73 29. D. Thompson, ‘The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years: Part II’, The Atlantic, 20 June 2012 30. http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001134 31. D. Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, 1997), p. 48 32.

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‘Done, for you big boy,’ writes one Barclays employee to another as they manipulate LIBOR, the rate at which banks lend to each other, the most important interest rate on the planet.10 We should listen carefully to the tone in these emails – the irony, the dishonesty, the repeated use of smileys, slang and manic punctuation. It is evidence of systemic self-deception. At the heart of the finance system, which is itself the heart of the neoliberal world, they knew it didn’t work. John Maynard Keynes once called money ‘a link between the present and the future’.11 He meant that what we do with money today is a signal of how we think things are going to change in years to come. What we did with money in the run-up to 2008 was to massively expand its volume: the global money supply rose from $25 trillion to $70 trillion in the seven years before the crash – incomparably faster than growth in the real economy.

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From Varga’s recalcitrant works committees in Budapest to the Russian workers who insisted on self-control, or the Fiat workers in Milan who even tried to produce cars without the help of managers, this problem – workers control vs planning – would hit the socialist leaders as a total surprise. If these early attempts at socialism failed, it is worth remembering that capitalist attempts at stabilization also failed. The peace deal of 1919 condemned Germany’s recovery to stall under the stranglehold of reparations. ‘In continental Europe,’ wrote a distraught John Maynard Keynes, shortly after storming out of the British delegation at Versailles, ‘the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or “labour troubles”; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.’24 With hindsight, we can see 1917–21 as a near-terminal social crisis, but as an economic crisis it was not inevitable; it was the result of poor policy decisions.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

The great economists of the past saw economics and ethics as inextricably entwined; one example of this is their emphasis on the limits of economic prosperity in bringing about broader improvements in the human condition, and hence the relative insignificance they attached to economic prosperity alone. Adam Smith was dismissive of economic success as an end in itself: ‘if the trappings of wealth are viewed philosophically, they will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling’.6 John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, shared similar concerns. In ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, Keynes described the ‘love of money as a possession’ as ‘one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease’.7 Keynes accurately predicted British average income per head in the early 21st century, and went on to anticipate the problems of affluenza, and the renewed importance of an ethical framework once society ceases to be focused solely on economic growth.8 In all this, he was remarkably prescient: the essay was written in 1930.

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Since there is no true number to be found, the search for one often becomes desperate, searching in ways which will definitely lead to numbers, regardless of their relevance. It is reminiscent of the drunkard who searched for his wallet under the street light, not because he lost it there, but because that was the only place he could see. Or as John Maynard Keynes possibly commented: ‘I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.’58 Second, the values that emerge from economic theory provide too flimsy a platform for policy advice. The idea that value-free economic advice is possible is another myth, but chasing it has left economics with minimalist values which are too denuded of ethical content to support practical conclusions.

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Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are usually distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. (John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory) What economists don’t admit Economics shapes our lives in countless ways. Each chapter of this book has illustrated this in a practical context. In the process we have uncovered some common themes in the way orthodox economists think. Considered in isolation they might seem only of academic interest, but as previous chapters and Keynes’ remarks suggest, they should interest all of us.

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

Desmond describes the difficulties of those who get evicted, with a court record that makes it difficult to rent again. Even if these numbers are too high for some unknown reason, they still make the point: many families get thrown out of their homes and it will be difficult for them to find another. 12. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 358–73. 13. Eight times: ibid., p. 365. For the growth of US per capita income we used Angus Maddison’s calculations for 1930 to 2000 (“US Real Per Capita GDP from 1870–2001,” September 24, 2012, accessed December 1, 2014, http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2012/09/us-real-per-capita-gdp-from-18702001.html).

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Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street. New York: Penguin, 2009. Kessler, Glen. “Revisiting the Cost of the Bush Tax Cuts.” Washington Post, May 10, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/revisiting-the-cost-of-the-bush-tax-cuts/2011/05/09/AFxTFtbG_blog.html. Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion, pp. 358–73. London: Macmillan, 1931. —. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964. Knowledge@Wharton. “Goldman Sachs and Abacus 2007-AC1: A Look beyond the Numbers.” April 28, 2010. Accessed March 15, 2015. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/goldman-sachs-and-abacus-2007-ac1-a-look-beyond-the-numbers/.

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Some even go over the edge: into bankruptcy; or eviction. Another Perspective Another assay poses for us the Suze Orman puzzle in a different perspective. Most of us think that if our income went up more than fivefold we would be on easy street. Our financial problems would be over. Indeed, that is exactly what John Maynard Keynes, one of the most astute economists of all time, thought would be the case when he looked forward from 1930. In an essay, which was little noticed when published, Keynes projected what life would be like “for our grandchildren,” in 2030: one hundred years thence.12 In one respect he almost hit a bull’s-eye.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game