Art Carden is Professor of Economics & Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University.
Making Keynes’s Vision Reality
Over a century ago, John Maynard Keynes, an economist and critic of unregulated, unmanaged markets, pointed to the miracle that one could order the wonders of the world over the phone while lying in bed and have them delivered:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he may see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep…
That’s from Keynes’s 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and at the time, Keynes described a fantastic privilege reserved for the richest of the rich who could afford phones and phone calls and buy on credit from people they couldn’t see and couldn’t see them.
Keynes’s dream has come true in the 21st century for the poor and middle class, and not because of the interventionism he and his intellectual descendants thought was necessary. Whatever you want can be had with a few flicks of your thumb. With some planning, you can automate many of your groceries through Amazon’s Subscribe and Save and similar services. All the payment processing, ordering, and so on are automated and handled without you having to pay much attention to them.
Paper towels? You can subscribe to them. Chocolate? Coffee? Shaving gear? Subscription box services will replenish you every month. People who earn higher incomes will have an easier time of it, but subscription boxes and subscribe-and-save services are widely available and largely affordable to just about anyone.
By this point, someone is probably sneering and saying, “Great. My life has meaning now because I can get my groceries delivered.” If that’s you, then you expect the market to do something it can’t. The market can deliver bananas and spring rolls. It can’t deliver existential meaning–though you can support Amazon workers you might think are being oppressed by buying more stuff from Amazon.
As Christopher Freiman pointed out on Twitter, even poor people today are richer than the Rockefellers in all the ways that matter. If you can get a cheap digital wristwatch, what does it matter that Elon Musk can wear a Rolex on each wrist? Elon Musk’s net worth might be many multiples of mine, but even a $200 billion net worth can’t buy him a smartphone and mobile service that is hundreds of thousands of times better than mine.
A little later in the passage quoted above, after he has described the Londoner’s financial opportunities, Keynes continues:
But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.
Would that this life of peace and prosperity were the reality for everyone, everywhere. There is good news, though: as we embrace the Bourgeois Deal and (ironically) reject coordinated Keynesian macroeconomic management, it’s turning that way.