Keynes 13.1

[chris macrae]

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xIQCSdIUk-eMoZ2wAgVJtkIAOE9cSOIAYQlM8AlJY9M/edit

Numbers 1 to 20 refer to checklist of anti-youth monopolies that phony capitalism has designed into global systems of 2010s just at a time when 41 years of dialogues started at The Economist 1972 (Entrepreneuril Revolution) mapped how the net generation could be worldwide youth’s most productive and sustainable time www.wholeplanet.tv

 

Quotes from Keynes essay on Future in his series of essays on Persuasion: This included the device of reviewing debates stimulated by HG Wells story on time machines

 

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KEYNES ANALYSES FROM HG WELLS THE DOUBLE WHAMMY OF WHAT FUTURISTS UNDERSTAND THAT MONEY MEN DONT

 

WELLS FUTURE CRISIS 1

Wells describes his hero’s disillusionment with socialism and asks whether there is an alternative. From whence we are to draw the forces which are “to change the laws, customs, rules, institutions of the world”. From what classes and types are the revolutionaries to be drawn. How are they to be brought into co-operation? What are to be their methods? The Labour movement is represented by a dangerous force of destruction led by sentamentalists and pseudointellectuals who have “feelings in place of ideas”. We must recruit our revolutionaries from the Right not the Left by persuading the type of man to whom it now amuses to create a great business, that there lie waiting for him much bigger things that will amuse him more.Open Conspiracy:  We need a revolutionary shift far to the left but we need to summon from the right the creative force and constructive will which is to carry him there. The remoulding of the world needs the touch of the creative Brahma. But at present Brahma is serving Science and Business , not Politics or Government. The EXTREME DANGER of the world is

”before the creative Brahma can get to work, Siva (the passionate destructiveness of Labour awakening to its now needless limitations and privations), may make Brahma’s task impossible.”

 

What is holding us back? Why do practical men find it more amusing to make money than join the Open Conspiracy? I suggest it is much the same reason as that which makes them find it more amusing to play bridge on Sundays than go to church. They lack altogether the kind of motive, the possession of which, if they had it, could be expressed by saying they have a creed. They have no creed, these potential open conspirators, no creed whatsoever. That is why unless they have the luck to scientists or artists, they fall back on the grand substitute motive, the perfect Estatz, the anodyne for those who want nothing at al -MONEY.

 

WELLS-FUTURE CRISIS2 -OLD AGE POPULATION BUBBLES : Protest against conservatism: insistent emphasis on the necessity and rapidity of change, the folly of looking backwards, the danger of inadaptability. Wells’ time machine produces a curious sensation by contemplating vast stretches of time backwards and forwards which gives an impression of slowness until accelerating the Time Machine as he reaches present day so now we travel at enormous pace and no longer have millions of years to turn.around in.  : The Conservative influences in our life are envisaged as dinosaurs whom literal extinction is awaiting just ahead. The contrast comes from the failure of our ideas, our conventions, our prejudices, to keep up with the pace of material change. Our environment moves too much faster than we do. Conservatism is no better than suicide. Woe to our dinosaurs. This is one aspect: we stand still at our peril. Time flies. But there is another aspect of the same thing.  What a bore for the modern man, whose mind is in his active career moves with the times, to stand still in his observations and way of life. What a bore to go through the social contortions  which have lost significance and the conventional pleasures which no longer please. The contrasts between the exuberant constructive activity of a prince of modern commerce  and the lack of an appropriate environment for him after offers hours is acute. Moreover, there are wide stretches of the career of moneymaking which are entirely barren and nonconstructive. There is a fine passage about the boredom of City men in which the company promoter and speculator falls first into megalomania and then into fraud because he is bored. Let us, therefore , mould with both hands the plastic material of social life into our contemporary image.

 

We do not merely belong to a latter-day age - we are in a literal sense older than our ancestors were in the years of our maturity and of our power. A too much neglected feature of modern life is : we live much longer than formerly, and what is  more important, prolong our health and vigour into a period of life which was formerly one of decay, so that the average man can now look forward to a duration of activity which hitherto only the exceptional could anticipate. Furthermore in the next 50 years as compared with the past 50 years, the average age of a rapidly increasing population is much less than that of a stationary ;population. For example, in hypothesising stable conditions. we rapidly approach in proportion to population, elderly people over 65 years will be 100% more and middle-age people over 45 will be 50% more than the recent past.

 

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older- and this process begins long before their intelligent judgments on detail is apparently impaired. We are threatened, at best, with the appalling problem of an able-bodied “retired”.

We are living therefore in an unsatisfactory age of immensely rapid transition, in which most, but particularly those at the vanguard, find themselves and their environment ill-adapted to one another, and are for this reason far less happy than their less-sophisticated forbears were or their yet more-sophisticated descendants need to be.

[chris macrae]

 

OH CAPITALISM! competition on what the greatest youth economists actually said

 

 Can you see if any of your young Scottish friends get this idea? Can they turn the main scripts of Keynsian and Smithsian economists into maximum 9 minute transcripts suitable for MOOC? Urgently now that Scotland's main universities and the open university and British Museum are sharing same MOOC platform FutureLearn.

 

 It would help a lot if I can spread gossip at the World Bank that they do before my trip to Scotland. Attached is an example script - of course it needs a competition to edit it down in youth's words

 

Almost every word is taken from Keynes essay on the future in 1935 where he comments on economics -and society in revolution - lessons he sees from HG Wells. What applied to change world systems then is 10 times more urgent now I would suggest

 

So the intent of the picture in attached is to show that Keynes then is the same train of thought as:

My father's and Muhammad Yunus' in 1976

or

James Wilson founder of The Economist in 1843

 

As James was an alumn of Adam Smith, I expect it is there in Smith writings in 1758 but I don't know these as well as Glaswegians can

 

cheers

 

chris

As well as paper form in attached - there is a wiki version at  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xIQCSdIUk-eMoZ2wAgVJtkIAOE9cSOIAYQlM8AlJY9M/edit

 

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