John Maynard Keynes

Keynes was, above all, a practical thinker. He did not write economics for posterity. He wrote it to change policy, redirect institutions, and intervene in presents he found intolerable. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) demolished the classical assumption that markets automatically absorb displaced workers and create enough demand to justify their own supply. The essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), written at the bottom of the Great Depression, predicted abundance within a century and a fifteen-hour work week. The prediction was half right: the abundance arrived on schedule. The leisure never did. Human beings, given the option of working less, chose to work differently—more intensely, at a higher pitch, on things that filled the hours that necessity had vacated. The AI transition is the terminal expression of this pattern. A twenty-fold productivity multiplier has arrived, and the builders accelerate rather than rest. Animal spirits—the spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction that Keynes identified