The Golden Age: Keynes, Marx, Malthus and the Post-Scarcity Vision - Online University of the Left

The Golden Age: Keynes, Marx, Malthus and the Post-Scarcity Vision - Online University of the Left:

The Golden Age: Keynes, Marx, Malthus and the Post-Scarcity Vision

by admin

The 15-hour working week predicted by Keynes may soon be within our grasp – but are we ready for freedom from toil?

By John QuigginSolidarityEconomy.net via Aeon Magazine

Sept 27, 2012 – I first became an economist in the early 1970s, at a time when revolutionary change still seemed like an imminent possibility and when utopian ideas were everywhere, exemplified by the Situationist slogan of 1968: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’ Preferring to think in terms of the possible I was much influenced by an essay called ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,’ written in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes, the great economist whose ideas still dominated economic policymaking at the time.

Like the rest of Keynes’s work, the essay ceased to be discussed very much during the decades of free-market liberalism that led up to the global financial crisis of 2007 and the ensuing depression, through which most of