Not yet Enough

I was reading Skidelsky's critique of Keynes' "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren". In Economic Possibilities, written in 1930, Keynes asked

What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?

He concluded that by the year 2030,

Assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution.

Because economic growth makes us wealthier, at some point people would have enough--"the absolute needs...satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non­-economic purposes"--and would cut back on hours worked.

This seems reasonable (if a bit far from the problems we face today) but Skidelsky notes that, despite significant progress in the developed countries towards what Keynes viewed as enough, we are not working less.

...We are two-thirds of the way towards Keynes’s target. We might therefore have expected hours of work to have fallen by about two-thirds. In fact they have fallen by only one-third – and have stopped falling since the 1980’s.

This makes it highly improbable that we will reach the three-hour working day by 2030. It is also unlikely that growth will stop – unless nature itself calls a halt. People will continue to trade leisure for higher incomes.

Skidelsky says the reason is that

The accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the “good life,” becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living.

Now, I think Skidelsky is a genius, both in his biography of Keynes* and his more recent book on Keynes' renewed influence, Keynes: The Return of the Master. But I think his acceptance of Keynes' definition of enough--about eight times the average income of 1930--is the flaw, not human nature.

It must have seemed to Keynes that incomes eight times higher than the then-current incomes would be an enormous amount. Today the average US household income is about $68,000**. Imagine if the average household income were north of $500k. Everyone would certainly then have enough, wouldn't they?

This is probably how Keynes felt. And it's true that we've become wealthy in terms of what people thought they needed in 1930. In 1934--soon after Keynes wrote Economic Possibilities--food, clothing and shelter consumed 76% of household income, on average. In 2002-2003, these expenses were only 50% of household income***. (And, god knows, we are consuming more food, housing and clothing than we were in 1934, so our well being has increased more than these numbers indicate.) Far more households can now afford the basics they need to survive, and far more households have much more money left over after they buy these basics.

What have we done with all this new wealth, this extra income? Why haven't we, as Keynes expected, cut back our working hours, and thus our incomes? Why haven't we realized that we now have enough? Skidelsky thinks it's because of our paucity of imagination.

But maybe instead it's because once we had food, shelter and clothing, we realized that we needed more. We've moved up the hierarchy of needs, from physiological to safety. Now that we can, on average, afford the physiological needs, we are spending on health and education. In this light, the enormous increase in the costs of these services might be the desirable result of our ability to finally afford them.

Or, at least, start to afford them. Our healthcare debate is now dominated by whether we really can pay for everyone to have basic healthcare. Costs have increased at jaw-dropping rates, and many feel that we've lived beyond our means for too long already. Even with incomes that Keynes would think were more than enough, we find that we don't have nearly enough for what we now think we need.

But this also points to the solution. Just as we grew into being able to afford the basic needs, we need to grow into the ability to afford these new needs. On healthcare, for instance, the question is not How can we keep the cost down? but, instead, What policies can we enact to be able to afford it sooner? The answer to Skidelsky's question--How Much is Enough?--is that what we have now isn't enough: it would be inhuman to have the means to make peoples' lives better and then not do it, to be able to save lives and then not save them. Instead, we need to think about what we can do to increase our rate of economic growth. What can we do to be able to afford quality healthcare for all, not 100 years from now, but within our lifetimes?

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* Although not so much a genius that I read the full three volumes. I read the 1056 page "abridged" version.
** Median is about $50k and, while the median is more telling about how the average person lives, I think using the average is a better measure when talking about societal income.
*** Source: "100 Years of of Consumer Spending", US Department of Labor Report 991, May 2006.