How should we handle unlimited leisure?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting:

To Keynes, the coming age of abundance, while welcome, would pose a new and in some ways even bigger challenge. With so little need for labor, people would have to figure out what to do with themselves: “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won.” The example offered by the idle rich was, he observed, “very depressing”; most of them had “failed disastrously” to find satisfying pastimes. In particular, he pointed to the “wives of the well-to-do classes” in the United States and England, who, “deprived by their wealth” of traditional occupations, like cooking, were “quite unable to find anything more amusing” to do. As a greater and greater proportion of the population found themselves liberated from work, Keynes worried that society might suffer from a sort of generalized “nervous breakdown.” It was those who could appreciate “the art of life itself,” he wrote, who would “be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

Four-fifths of the way through Keynes’s century, half of his vision has been realized. Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six. And what holds for the United States goes for the rest of the world, too: in the past eighty years, the global economy has grown at a similar rate.

Post external references

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    http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/05/26/140526crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all
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