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Keynes’ Grandchildren
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes, who was considered the world’s foremost economist of his own time, published an essay with the title “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. In this essay, Keynes speaks of a world to come, 100 years from the date that the essay was published, where prosperity would have grown so much that humanity would no longer have to struggle to survive. At that time, England was at the tail end of the second industrial revolution, with mass production becoming the norm. Much like today, with the third and fourth industrial revolutions, where automation and robotics are threatening jobs, so in the 1930s mass production was replacing jobs at an unprecedented scale, causing Keynes to dubb it technological unemployment. However, Keynes had an optimistic view of the situation:
We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption.
Keynes’ was hopeful, not because he thought that jobs would come back, but because he thought the consequences of mass production and technology would result in benefiting all of mankind: “In quite a few years — in our lifetimes I mean — we may be able to perform all the operations of…
