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Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
Keynes's 1930 essay predicting material abundance within a century — and a fifteen-hour work week his grandchildren would use to cultivate the art of living well. The abundance arrived. The leisure never did.
Written at the bottom of the Great Depression, 'Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren' is Keynes's most audacious exercise in long-run forecasting. Extrapolating from compound interest and technological trajectory, he predicted that by 2030 the standard of living in advanced economies would multiply four to eightfold — a prediction that has been borne out with uncanny precision. He then predicted that this abundance would produce a fundamental reorientation of human activity away from production and toward what he called 'the arts of life.' That second prediction failed catastrophically. The essay has become the permanent reference point for any serious discussion of what a post-scarcity economy actually does to the human beings who live inside it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay occupies a singular position in the Keynesian corpus — neither technical economics nor political commentary but something closer to secular prophecy. Keynes was writing during the worst economic crisis