Prologue

Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren:

[T]he economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.…

Thus for the first time since our creation humanity will be faced with our real, our permanent problem—how to use our freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for us, to live wisely and agreeably and well.…

I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

Keynes, born in 1883, was the contemporary of my grandparents. When Keynes published Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in 1930, my father was a child, and my mother was not yet born. The economic possibilities Keynes envisioned were for me, born in 1961.

The economic possibilities Keynes envisioned are for us.