U.S. Circuit Court Judge and “public intellectual” Richard Posner, aka “Book a Week Dick,” responds with a deliciously acrid review in the New York Times. Speaking of Keynes’ essay, Posner says “His essay is very English, because the traditional aspiration of the English upper class was not to work at all. Keynes, middle- rather than upper-class, worked hard all his life, but he was highly cultivated, a member of the Bloomsbury set, a balletomane, an admirer of the ‘good life’ in a distinctively English sense unrelated to material comfort.”
Getting the bit fairly between his teeth, Dick riffs enjoyably on the myriad inadequacies of English life and thought:
In recent years, England has become much more like the United States, but I well remember as recently as the 1980s how shabby England was, how terrible the plumbing, how shoddy the housing materials, how treacherously uneven the floors and sidewalks, how inadequate the heating and poor the food — and how tolerant the English were of discomfort. I recall breakfast at Hertford College, Oxford, in an imposing hall with a large broken window — apparently broken for some time — and the dons huddled sheeplike in overcoats; and in a freezing, squalid bar in the basement of the college a don in an overcoat expressing relief at being home after a year teaching in Virginia, which he had found terrifying because of America’s high crime rate, though he had not been touched by it. I remember being a guest of Brasenose College — Oxford’s wealthiest — and being envied because I had been invited to stay in the master’s guest quarters, only to find that stepping into the guest quarters was like stepping into a Surrealist painting, because the floor sloped in one direction and the two narrow beds in two other directions. I recall the English (now American) economist Ronald Coase telling me that until he visited the United States he did not know it was possible to be warm.
That’s because European societies are elitist, and people tend to prefer status to cash. It doesn’t matter—at least it shouldn’t—if the floor in the master’s guest quarters at Brasenose is sloping and the bed is narrow. What matters is that it is the master’s guest quarters at Brasenose. It doesn’t matter if the food is bad. What matters is that you have someone to serve it to you. If you have servants, you have everything, because you have status.
Much of Keynes’ “vision” for the year 2030 came from what was an unconscious desire to maintain a class society in an age of plenty. He wanted the working class to work only 15 hours a week because he didn’t want them to be rich. He was horrified, as early as the Twenties, by the spectacle of American workers—workers!—owning cars. “Fordism” was once a pervasive European cliché for a world gone mad. Workers owning cars! Don’t ask “What’s next?” because there can’t be anything worse! There simply can’t be!
But if people only worked 15 hours a week, they couldn’t afford cars. They would live in efficient flats, designed for them by gifted architects, with tram stations located conveniently nearby, leading to major railway terminals, and there would be none of this going about on your own, with nobody in charge.
The Skidelskys clearly think this would a good thing. With no work to do, and no money to spend, people could spend their time “playing football in the park, making and decorating one’s own furniture, strumming the guitar with friends.” And, perhaps, someday, even learn some chords. But that would be too much like work.
Afterwords
This notion of a no-hassle bliss is a classic product of outgroup thinking. When the Irish were contemplating actually getting the British boot off their faces in the Twenties, they looked forward to an easy-going, uncompetitive lifestyle, without all the British lust for power and success at any price. Brits like the Skidelskys are the “new Irish,” who want to create an alternative to those pushy Americans. And in the U.S., blacks often picture a similar world, where everyone is “family,” no one is put on the spot, and life is just a celebration of life.
