PERSON
John Maynard Keynes
The economist who named technological unemployment in 1930 and built the most precise available account of what calculation cannot reach—whose theory of radical uncertainty, animal spirits, and the long run we are all dead is the sharpest instrument for thinking about a technology built entirely on probability.
John Maynard Keynes named the exact problem we are arguing about in the autumn of 1930 and spent the next sixteen years building the most sophisticated account of why it could not be solved by calculation alone. He called it
technological unemployment—unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for it—and gave us the precise terms in which to ask whether the present moment is different from the many previous moments when the same fear was raised and refuted. He thought it a temporary phase of maladjustment; what he also thought, and what matters more, is that the long run in which the maladjustment resolves is cold comfort to the people living through it: in the long run, he noted in 1923, we are all dead, and economists who can only tell