Keynes on the Future of His Grandchildren — Quote of the Day

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I have contributed the below comment to a post by Nick Johnson, whose blog I enjoy following:

Keynes' stance here [see Keynes's quote below] strikes me as uncharacteristically naive. As you write, prediction is a hard business, and, may I add, it is one of the few human activities in which it is impossible to become an expert or specialist, which may explain why Keynes handles the matter of divining the future rather clumsily.

He exaggerates the incidence of "the love of money as a possession," failing to look into the depth structure of acquisitiveness and success reflected in income and wealth. People tend to have serious reasons other than enjoyment of pure pecuniary possession, even in those times that Keynes has had first hand experience of, when thrift was a high cultural value and likely to be pursued in excess by some people.

It is not always easy not to try to make money for an entrepreneur whose business might fail, if he does not go on trying to be successful, or for someone like Bill Gates and the many rich who have become rich and keep on working and making money because they love their work. 

In fact, Keynes provides us with a case in point. He was so brilliant and so passionate about his work, his visions, and projects, he couldn't help making good money in the process, and in the end, he worked himself to death, so committed was he to his callings—instead of loving "money as a means to enjoyments ... of life."

It is particularly naive of Keynes to expect a time beyond the horizon when people no longer disagree on what counts as "distasteful and unjust".

The quote I refer to:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.

We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. 

We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.