Written by Jimmy John
on 

Economic Possibilities for our future

#musings 

In 1930, the English economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay titled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. An excerpt from it:

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It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress
which characterised the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down --at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us.

I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. 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; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick; the banking and monetary system of the world has been preventing the rate of interest from falling as fast as equilibrium requires.
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The prevailing world depression, the enormous anomaly of unemployment in a world full of wants, the disastrous mistakes we have made, blind us to what is going on under the surface to the true interpretation. of the trend of things. For I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time-the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.
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Thing is, the above passage could just as easily have been written in 2025. And be just as relevant !

Since 1930, the human condition has improved significantly. More people have been pulled out of poverty than any time before. Less wars have been fought and more lives have been saved through breakthroughs in medicine than ever before.

Changes and challenges have always been a constant. In 1930 it was the industrial revolution, today it may be AI. Then it was the rise of facism, today it’s a different flavor of it.

But what has also been a constant is our undying spirit that carries us through these times. We have to place our belief in innovation and perseverance that the future will indeed be better than the present. As it always has proved to be.

It’s hard to tell what the future will hold. But I’m absolutely convinced that our kids will have a better life than us in terms of safety, technology, healthcare and just about everything else. There will no doubt be a phase of readjustment. But the new reality will be brighter and better for all of mankind. And optimism is the spark that will keep that pilot light alive in each one of us to get us there.

But first, you have to believe in that vision.