In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that a hundred years hence—which is to say, right about now—“the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution.” People would work perhaps three hours a day. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes wrote, “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 for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
If only! It’s 2022, and most of us are still on the clock. Oddly, though, much of Keynes’s reasoning was correct. He estimated that, over the next century, annual economic growth would average, globally, 2 percent. That must have seemed insanely optimistic at the start of the Great Depression. But it was too low. The Yale economist Fabrizio Zilibotti has calculated that since 1930, annual growth has averaged, over the long term, closer to 3 percent. Keynes predicted the standard of living within the more advanced economies would increase by a factor of eight. In fact, according to Zilibotti, it increased by a factor of 17. Keynes was even right, up to a point, that the number of hours worked would fall, and that people would find other things to do. Observing this phenomenon in vthe 1960s, the journalist Tom Wolfe made his name chronicling a proliferation of leisure activities—surfing, stock-car racing, dropping acid—well beyond the imagining of Keynes and his Bloomsbury set. Wolfe called it a “Happiness Explosion.”
