In the long run we're all rich (not)

Unlike that joke about being dead, Keynes really did say we would all eventually be rich enough that we wouldn't have to work. Keynes predicted that would happen right about now. What went wrong?

Not quite 100 years ago John Maynard Keynes wrote that a hundred years hence, “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 you’re like me, you’re wondering why this didn’t happen, and why it won’t likely be happening 100 years from now (assuming the planet is still habitable). Keynes’s calculations about economic growth over the 20th century were actually too low, but he was still wrong. Why we never attained freedom from economic cares is the subject of Bradford DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia, and also the subject of my latest New Republic piece, which reviews DeLong’s book alongside Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality. You can read my review here.

Also, last week I wrote in the New Republic that Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is turning out to be kind of a disappointment, which is a problem given that Joe Biden is supposed to care more about labor than any president since Harry Truman. You can read that piece here.