1

Walk up to the house, which is my house, and therefore familiar and safe. A place to feel at ease, to the extent that I am ever at ease, to put my cares behind me as I face the front steps of my own house, mine and Ed’s and Ali’s, though they aren’t with me now, or waiting inside either—where should I put them? Someplace nice. Not here in the hotel. Out for ice cream? Why not. And I am alone feeling suddenly overwhelmed and underprepared as I climb the porch steps—one, two, three—having imagined all along I’d be swimming in confidence, but now full up with worry and nerves. Worried that worrying about nervousness will cause nervousness, all that stupid self-conscious stuff you let into your brain that takes over your mindspace and mucks up your mnemonic, derailing your already precariously teetering train of thought.

But no, you will focus.

Picture the porch.

I’m up on it now and in fact I’m not alone because here waiting for me is a familiar face, the kind eyes, horsey features, white push-broom mustache: it’s Keynes. We haven’t officially met, but we’ve known each other all along, and he’s smiling, he’s happy to see me. “Abigail,” he says, “welcome home. I am Maynard. I was born in Cambridge in 1883 and died in Tilton in 1946. Between those dates I lived an extremely busy life filled with lots of interesting facts and anecdotes which you should feel free, my dear, to sprinkle around like pixie dust as we proceed through the rooms of your very nice house, assigning to each a portion of your speech, or talk, or whatever you’re calling it. But dust is a little dry”—he coughs—“even pixie dust is a little dry, and right off you won’t want to fill up the air with it. You need a simple introduction, I think.” He gives a worried grandpa look. “Have you considered where you might start?”

I take his arm and together we push open the front door.

“Why, of course!” he smiles. “We shall start in the living room.”

Picture the living room.

Big, airy, soft gray. Rectangular blue coffee table with the glossy finish that always reminds me of pudding, like its surface is coated with smooth blue pudding. Green couch, a little ratty with wear. Big plants on the floor, smaller plants on the bookshelves. Disheveled shelves, poorly organized, under the stained-glass windows. One of each—a window, a bookshelf—­on either side of the fireplace. Utterly derelict fireplace, cobwebs in the wire netting, why have we never cleaned the fireplace? Impressive mantel, though. Broad and white and shelfy, like a glacier. Like the edge of an ancient glacier inching its way into the living room. The mantel clutter-free except for that urn Robert gave us as a wedding gift, tucked back there on the right-hand side. Brown speckled urn, little Grecian handles, to someday store our ashes, joked Ed when we opened the box. Which was kind of a sweet thing to say, if you think about it.

“We’re in the living room?” asks Keynes.

We’re in the living room.

“So start your speech!”

Thanks for inviting me, it’s a pleasure to be here, and:

In 1930, with the whole world on the verge of the economic disaster that here in the U.S. we called the Great Depression but which in England they called the Great Slump, a name I’ve always thought had a playful ring to it—slump—though obviously nothing about that situation was playful and my god I am rambling already.

In 1930, with the whole world on the verge of the Great Depression, which in England they called the Great Slump, the British economist John Maynard Keynes, by that time already well known, though not as spectacularly famous as he would eventually become, penned a short article titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in which he made certain specific predictions about future economic growth. He predicted there would be a lot of it. Keynes had no children of his own, let alone any grandchildren, but his message was really to all the fear-stricken people of England on the cusp of their Great Slump, and his message was: You don’t need to worry so much.

Of course, when an economist tells you not to worry, you might worry all the more. An economist’s “don’t worry” usually means something bloodlessly calculated, like “worrying will increase the inclination to hoard currency and decrease spending on consumer goods.” Keynes worried about those things, too. But he was before all else a humanist, an old-school liberal pragmatist, who believed in the importance of a stable monetary policy for improving the standard of living, but who condemned the love of money for its own sake as a somewhat disgusting morbidity. When he proposed that people not worry, it wasn’t to paper over the inequities of a system by which the rich come to control an ever-increasing percentage of the aggregate wealth while the poor are systematically disenfranchised. He was saying that he really didn’t think worrying was the right thing to do.

And people were very worried, then. In that sense, it was not so different from today. The reasons for worry may have been a little different: there was vast economic inequality and rampant nationalism, but no global environmental crisis, at least not that anyone was paying attention to. But the amount of worry was about the same, and the various types of worry as well. There was the pessimism of the revolutionaries, as Keynes called it, the worry of those who thought the world so doomed that the only hope was to turn everything upside down. Then there was the pessimism of the reactionaries, those who thought the world so doomed that any sort of change at all would send civilization reeling into the abyss. Keynes’s reply to both was that actually, in the larger scheme of things, if you stepped back a little and looked at history, at where we’ve come from and how greatly things have changed, not just in the previous couple of years but over the previous centuries, at the incredible things humans are capable of and the incredible things we have actually done, then you would see a world on track to great prosperity. Think how exponentially the standard of living had improved for the average person over just a few hundred years. And weren’t the next hundred years likely to see even greater improvements?

And so in this article, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” written on the cusp of the worst economic slump of modern times, Keynes predicts that over the following century, owing to advances in technology and accumulated capital, the problems of poverty and hunger, which he calls the economic problem, by which he means the struggle of humans to survive, to feed ourselves and clothe ourselves—all these sorts of problems, he says, will be permanently solved. Everyone will have more than they need, and will no longer have to work so much, at which point we will all come to realize that the economic problem, which humans have always assumed was our number one problem—the reason we spend large chunks of our lives at jobs we often dislike or even despise—we’ll see that this problem is not our ultimate problem at all. No longer struggling merely to get by, finding ourselves instead with time on our hands, we will at long last recognize humanity’s true dilemma, its permanent problem, which is—

Ali turns—wakes? No, snugs into the covers. Was I mumbling? I often do and don’t realize, catch myself while walking down the street. But I think I’d notice my mumbling in a room as quiet as this. In the dark stillness of a room I can’t see but know is still out there, all around me, the carpeting I don’t want to set anything down on and the shellacked furniture much uglier than ours. If I can hear Ed breathing, certainly I would hear my own mumbling. And Ali’s breathing, little soft puffs.

What time is it, anyway? Don’t check, you’ll wake her. Light sleeper like her mom. Late. Early. The least you can give her is sleep. The very least a mother can do. Someday, daughter, all this insomnia will be yours (imaginary wide-sweeping arm gesture). Until then, I will do everything in my power to guard your quiet. I will lie still as a mummy. A mommy mummy. British people call their mothers mummy. Keynes. Ali. Ed. I will keep my busy thoughts trapped in the dungeon of my overactive imagination, where no one else will be made to suffer them.

“No one but us!” Keynes quips.

Where was I?

“The living room. Coffee table, bookshelves, urn. You had described what I meant by the economic problem and had me declaring that humanity’s true dilemma, its permanent problem, is—”

What to do with all our free time.

“And we are back.”

“Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” is not the sort of essay you might expect an economist to write. It has only a few numbers in it. It looks at history and predicts the future based on the past, which is more or less what economics does, but the future it is predicting is so far off, and the claims it makes so sweeping and impractical, that it comes across more like a prophecy than a proposal, and Keynes more like a poet than a math guy. As an economist myself, and painfully conscious of my profession’s need to see itself as objective, as a “science,” what excites me most about Keynes’s essay is how provocative, how literary, how improvisational he allows himself to be. Even the history he gives is like something out of a novel, an epic about the Dawn of Civilization.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there must have been a moment, a distant period of great innovation during which humanity discovered things like language, fire, the wheel. When we domesticated animals, invented religion, figured out math. Then history kicked in, the dubiously glorious progress of Western recorded history, and innovation slowed way down. After that initial burst of invention, we lived with pretty much the same technologies for thousands of years.

Starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, two things happened: England got rich on gold that Sir Francis Drake stole for Queen Elizabeth, who proceeded to invest it in trade, yielding an income of six and a half percent annually, while scientific breakthroughs led to advances in technology on a scale not seen since those early days of wheels, fire, language, math, religion, and domesticated animals. This technological burst brought a revolution in industrial efficiency, but it also spread—or Keynes predicts it would soon spread—to fields like mining and agriculture. Everywhere production would go up, with far less human effort. This would lead, or was leading, or actually it had already led to a phenomenon Keynes calls technological unemployment, a term you and I hear all the time but which Keynes apparently thought would be new enough to his readers that he had to explain it. He admits it’s a problem, this 1930s version of the robot-future we’re all still freaking out about. He admits there will be “a temporary phase of maladjustment,” but it isn’t an important part of his argument, because his point is that the moment we’re living in, or the moment Keynes was writing in, which from the perspective of all of human history is basically the same moment—that this moment is volatile and exciting, a period of uncertainty that will involve growing pains but that will ultimately find us in a more mature stage of human existence. The financial catastrophe of 1930 would be a bother, a bad day in a long week, but at its far end lay tremendous widespread prosperity, and in a hundred years, your real problem will be that you’re bored. The permanent problem is not poverty or scarcity or robots. The permanent problem is life.

He talks about how hard it will be, in a work-free world, for ordinary people to adjust. How both nature and culture have taught us to derive our sense of purpose through work, and how for most people, leisure, too, will have to be learned, slowly and over time. “How to occupy the leisure.” Leisure as occupation. Finding meaning in a jobless life.

He says it’s not just an adjustment to a new way of life but a realignment of values bred into us over countless generations. Money, in particular, will become less important to us. We’ll understand that money was never important in itself, that it was only ever important in relation to our needs.

He delineates two kinds of needs. Absolute needs are the ones that can be adequately filled: food, shelter. Relative needs are the things you think you need in order to make yourself feel superior to other people: giant cars, designer clothes, the greener grass over the proverbial fence, or whatever the proverbial Joneses have gotten up to. Those wants masquerading as needs, he admits, will never go away. It’s only real needs we won’t have to worry about.

He anticipates the craft craze of the 1950s and the “slow” movements of today. Home-brewed beer. Farm-to-table. The arts of living. An existential turn toward culture. A radical undoing of the division of labor, which since the days of Adam Smith has made our society so efficient but our occupations so drab.

“We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today.”

In fact, the rich man of his day, the sort of person who already enjoyed the economic freedom Keynes’s essay was describing, seemed to Keynes a bad example of the people we would become. The rich man of his day still saw money as an end, not a means, and found meaning in a constantly deferred future rather than the here and now. “For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day,” Keynes says, paraphrasing one of the queens in one of the Lewis Carroll books. Whereas we, his presumptive grandchildren, will find meaning in life itself. We will become better people and learn to help each other more.

Of course, it seems more than a little idealistic from where you and I are sitting. The obvious rejoinder is that today we are close to reaching the one-hundred-year deadline for the utopian predictions John Maynard Keynes made in 1930, and looking around I don’t think many of us would claim that what to do with our free time is the greatest crisis human beings currently—what? Too long?

Keynes, seated on my living room sofa, has made a face.

“You need to stick to only the most relevant points or this talk will go on forever. On the one hand, you’re jumping around too much for a listener to fully appreciate my essay or its various points. On the other, there is much more detail already than you need for your own argument, given that this is only the living room and we have, what, five, six more rooms to go? Plus time for a Q&A. Largely, the problem is that you held off preparing until the very last minute, your infamous procrastination, so instead of a carefully plotted progression, you are following only a hazy outline, stringing together bits and bobs of passages remembered from your book. Quoting yourself and others. Now, Abigail, don’t get worked up. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. You’ve always been overly reactive, and always wished you were less so, but none of that wishing has made the slightest bit of difference, when push comes to shove. Tomorrow, let’s face it, won’t go very well. It won’t go badly, but in case it does: Who cares? What does it matter? Well, it matters to you. Okay. Better to be a person who cares about things than a person who doesn’t. Better still to care but not lose sleep over it. The lengthy history lesson, at least, needs to go. Personally, I would keep the line about me sounding like a prophet rather than an economist, then cut to those hundred years being now nearly past, then say something simple like: ‘To put it in Keynesian terms, the economic problem has not been solved.’”

Understatement it is, then.

In fact, the economic problem is so far from being solved that most of Keynes’s predictions seem, from the perspective of today—ridiculous? Naïve? Or, or, we might be misunderstanding the lesson of “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”—and this is what I wish to speak about today. About optimism and pragmatism, about reality and storytelling, about being “right” versus being “useful,” and what all these things have to do with how we think and talk in our own day and age. Keynes himself, when he made his predictions, said his forecast for humanity depended upon some important practical caveats, such as there not being any more major wars or much growth in population. I think we can all agree this describes very poorly the situation we’ve experienced since 1930, which of course Keynes had no way of foreseeing.

“Except that I predicted World War II.”

Except that he warned, in the wake of World War I, that harsh reparations against the Germans would end badly, would crush the German economy and cripple their ability to pay, and would therefore be both impractical and dangerous, leading to deepening resentment and a reescalation of tensions. In other words, yes, he predicted World War II.

“That was in 1919,” adds Keynes, who’s looking very comfortable on my slightly ratty green sofa. He is too much the gentleman to rest his feet on the coffee table, but he leans back with his long thin legs crossed, not the intense posture and expression I imagine he perpetually struck in real life but rather a picture of ease, a pastoral Keynes, like a character out of The Wind in the Willows. Would Keynes have read The Wind in the Willows? He liked Lewis Carroll, but Carroll is a different sort of English sensibility. Math and light melancholy, playfulness and possibility. Wry wit. Grahame is weightier, more sentiment-heavy, though line for line the better writer, I think. Less clever but more convincing. Ali prefers him. She likes Mr. Toad. What do I mean by “convincing”?

Anyway, Keynes, I’m glad to see you making yourself at home. I was starting to wish I’d never agreed to this whole “loci” method—which was Ed’s idea, by the way, back when the invitation for this talk came in. He was rereading Cicero, working on I-don’t-know-what, he doesn’t always tell me what he’s working on. But the invitation asked for a talk, not a paper, they seemed very concerned that I would put them through a PowerPoint presentation—well, I probably would have—and Ed said, You know, it always impresses people when you wing it. Wing it? When you know your stuff so entirely you can just talk. The logical fallacy there being, I replied, that just because a person “knows her stuff,” therefore she will be able to “wing it,” as if everybody who knows their stuff also has the gift of effortless gab, as if the source of all oratorical effortlessness is simply the knowing of one’s stuff and has nothing to do with actual skill in public speaking. At which point Ed, lacking a compelling counterargument, but fascinated as usual with his own pet interests, said, You know what? You should use the loci method. Then he hauled out again that story about the ancient Greek banquet and the poet whose name I can never remember. Simon something.

Simonides.

Simonides of Ceos.

Once upon a time, Simonides of Ceos, a poet who lived so long ago that he actually invented several letters of the Greek alphabet, was at a banquet, a swanky affair. At some point in the evening he was called outside, maybe he needed to pee, I don’t remember, but while he was gone the roof collapsed and killed everyone. The bodies were too mangled to identify—lovely story, Ed—but Simonides of Ceos pulled an interesting trick: by mentally imagining himself moving around the room, he was able to recall all of the people in the order in which they’d been seated. And a colleague of his, or just someone who was listening, and who was apparently unfazed by the gruesome backstory, realized this would be a great way to remember a speech. You assign a different portion of the speech to each room of a building you know well, then you mentally move through this building as you go, remembering each speech portion by picturing yourself in the room you put it in. Thus out of the ruins of the worst party ever—says Ed—came a method of memorization taught by Cicero and Quintilian and practiced by lawyers and politicians for hundreds of years.

We were in this very living room when he said that, Keynes. The actual room in my house, I mean. I was pacing and Ed was sitting right where you’re sitting now, and I said, Okay. I said, Sure, let’s try it. Why? Because back then tomorrow’s talk was still far off in the distance. Back then my life and career prospects were all sunshine and promises, not the devastated wasteland that stretches before me tonight. Back then my party was hopping, the roof seemed imperviously sturdy—Abigail was on the rise! A force to be reckoned with, full of confidence or hubris or at the very least indifference to a far-off lecture for a bunch of people I didn’t know, who I didn’t even have a particularly good sense of, in terms of their interests in general or in me in particular, just that they liked “talks,” but nothing too technical, not a paper I would give to colleagues, and who also—these mysterious people—differed from my colleagues in that once my talk was over, I would never see them again. The future seemed chock-full of such speaking engagements back then, Keynes, speaking engagements as far as the eye could see. And there was Ed saying, It always impresses people when you wing it. There was me thinking, How bad could it be?

But it’s lonely, is what I didn’t expect. Even with Ali and Ed right here. Lying in the dark in this shitty hotel, proceeding in my mind through my imaginary house, imagining myself talking to empty rooms, to no one. Did Cicero never consider how lonely that is? Weren’t any of those hundreds of years’ worth of lawyers and politicians ever bothered by this? But with you along, Keynes—this was what I started off to say—with you along, I have to admit, I feel much better about it.

“You get to show me around.”

I do.

“You’ve always felt a special affection for me.”

For some reason!

“We will move through your house and your speech together.”

Because even an imagined togetherness beats being alone.

“Though I should point out that the atmosphere of loneliness you’ve imposed upon the rhetorical house you are constructing in your imagination has only to do with the fact that you are stuck here rattling around in your head rather than standing in front of, and talking to, people. Your mind won’t wander like this tomorrow. You’ll be addressing actual people who are expecting to hear something interesting, or at least coherent. There won’t be time for me, or need for me, then.”

Will that be sad?

It will not.

All of this will end. Life will move on to whatever comes next.

“We’re finished with the living room?” Keynes, standing, pats down his pants.

We’re finished with the living room.

“Off to the dining room, then!”