6 ms·

I think the two big problem with Keynes analysis are 1. He underestimated how much we wanted stuff vs leisure. We have much bigger homes now, eat more meat, hav

by neaden 10y ago

I think the two big problem with Keynes analysis are 1. He underestimated how much we wanted stuff vs leisure. We have much bigger homes now, eat more meat, have computers and television etc. 2. He underestimated how much work had to get done that he didn't count. He was from a class that had servants and of course all the invisible work done by women. Raising a child doesn't take substantially less person hours today then it did when Keynes wrote this. Neither does cleaning, since we now expect everything to be cleaner.

kybernetikos 10y ago
In the essay, he says that he's explicitly talking about desires that are absolute rather than positional (beginning of section II). He even accepts that desire for positional goods may in fact be insatiable, so I don't think your first point is a fair representation of his argument. I think there's a lot of truth to your second argument which comes down to the fact that there are quite a few absolute needs that are resistant to improvement through technological progress, that tend to scale with the population and that because of privilege Keynes probably underestimated. Personally, I think that he's too optimistic because he thinks that the rewards of progress will end up shared rather than concentrated in the hands of a small number of people (like e.g. the Walton family who own assets equivalent to the bottom third of the entire population of the US).
- neaden 10y ago
  With Positional Goods I believe he's strictly talking about keeping up with the Jones type things. So I get a fancy car just so everyone knows I'm fancy, but I don't really care about it. While to some extent I think that's true with larger housing sizes for instance, I don't think that's the main reason why houses have gotten larger. Let alone computers and other inventions that we have now. In terms of concentrated wealth I do think that's an issue, but once again it isn't the whole story. The average person is richer then they were 20 years ago, and the person 20 years ago is richer then the person 40 years ago. This is true if you look at middle class, but also if you look at people making minimum wage.
treehau5 10y ago
> Neither does cleaning, since we now expect everything to be cleaner. Modern vacuums, cleaning products, washer and dryer systems, modern storage containers, the refridgerator, dusting products and filtration air condition systems all have made cleaning your house substantially easier.
- neaden 10y ago
  The problem is before vacuums people didn't spend an hour a week cleaning their rugs by hand, they took them out a couple times a year to beat clean. People used to wear clothes more often between cleanings when it was more laborious to launder them. We began to shower every day. You can say these are Positional Goods and all about status, but unlike having a fancy car these are things you can't really opt out of. If you smell like the average person smelt in the 1930s you'll have a hard time fitting in at an office now.
  - oli5679 10y ago
    The fall in time spent doing cleaning, cooking and household chores since Keynes' death is well documented. http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/277/1/3011800000841.pdf http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/277/1/3011800000841.pdf "It took her 4 h to do a 38 lb load of laundry by hand, and then about 4·5 h to iron it using old-fashioned irons. By comparison it took 41 min to do a load of the laundry using electrical appliances and 1·75 h to iron it. The woman walked 3181 feet to do the laundry by hand, and only 332 feet with electrical equipment. She walked 3122 feet when ironing the old way, and 333 the new way"
    - dasmoth 10y ago
      How often did people do 38lb loads of laundry? The argument here is that we wear clothes fewer times between washing now, so laundry has dramatically increased.
      - oli5679 10y ago
        I can't find good data on the topic but I'm sure it exists somewhere and would be confident that the the overall trend is a large reduction. Have a look at the female labour force participation rates in America and USA between 1900 and 2000. How are they compatible with households spending more time cleaning and cooking now than in 1900? As an alternative, ask old family members about the amount of time their mothers spent cooking, shopping and cleaning when they were growing up. Finally, look at time spent on Household chores in Mexico/Kenya vs USA.
philipkglass 10y ago
I think that his argument works in the limit case. Above a certain square footage the work of keeping a larger dwelling outweighs the benefit of having more space. (I've avoided buying a larger house that I could easily afford because I didn't want another 1000 square feet to clean and maintain.) Above a certain consumption level you get uncomfortable and ill from eating more food instead of additional nutrition/pleasure. Nobody can watch television more than 24 hours per day. Or to put it in more concrete terms, look at five different 40 year old males all living in Los Angeles. One has $100,000 in net worth, the next has $1 million, the next $10 million, the next $100 million, and the last has $1 billion. That's spanning 5 orders of magnitude, but personal consumption goes up very sub-linearly with increasing wealth. When people near the top of the wealth pyramid spend a lot they're typically bidding up positional goods to insane levels (how much for the penthouse with the very best location in Manhattan?) or spending for control (e.g. as a shareholder in a corporation) instead of for personal consumption. You can't take a typical middle class family and scale up all the financial numbers by 100x to get a realistic picture of how today's wealthy (or the future middle class after a long period of compounded economic growth) will consume.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
  personal consumption in terms of durable goods probably, but what about in terms of services / experiences? those seem to be more and more the things that high net worth individuals go after, and as many religions will tell you there is really no limit to human desire (and consequently to the money you are willing to spend to fulfill those desires) This is how you go from "I'd like to see Europe some day" to "I am going to have a week to go to Europe once every few years" to "I am flying business class to Europe for tourism every year" to much later "I own a private jet and I feel like having those baguettes from that shop for breakfast tomorrow so I am going to get my personal assistant to fly there and get them for me" There are always goods available no matter how much money you have, as much as the quantity of the food you eat is limited by your physiology, the amount of money it costs is only limited by your imagination.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
digi_owl 10y ago
Nah, what he underestimated was how much his colleagues would bastardize and twist his words to double down on the status quo. Post-war Keynesianism would better be labeled Samuelsonianism, because Samuelson did the bulk work of "rewriting" Keynes into a form that fit with existing (classic) economic thinking.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "He underestimated how much we wanted stuff vs leisure." I'd argue this isn't necessarily a reflection on our personal desires. Whilst I'm sure there are plenty of people who want 'stuff' over leisure, I think there are plenty of other people who would choose a different balance to the one they have now. I'd say the biggest issue blocking this second group is our current work arrangements. If I could I'd choose to work part time or on some form of flexitime (assuming I could earn enough to live on), instead I need to work full time because that's what is on offer and I'm not in a position to push for changes just yet. If people could choose their work hours based on what they needed/wanted, and could afford to work less, I think you'd see a many more people expanding their leisure time than you do now.
- Chinjut 10y ago
  Yes. I would desperately prefer to take on a job with more leisure time, even with a harsh paycut, and yet, there is almost no way to express that desire within the market as it stands. So I take on a job with far more hours than I'd like, since the alternative is destitution, and then get taken as implicitly supporting the opposite trade-off to what I really want.
- grecy 10y ago
  If I could I'd choose to work part time or on some form of flexitime (assuming I could earn enough to live on), instead I need to work full time because that's what is on offer and I'm not in a position to push for changes just yet. If you want it badly enough, you will find a way. Make it your top priority. Start applying for other jobs now, and when they make an offer discuss working 4 or 3 days a week for 4/5th or 3/5th of a paycheck. Suggest to your boss you take some unpaid leave (maybe only a week a year to start) and that will help him cut his costs. Take a leave of absence. Find someone to job share with so you both work 1/2 time to get the same job done - make sure you convince your boss it will have no impact on him, and in fact it will be better in case one of you gets seriously ill or something he has backup. There are a thousand ways to achieve your goal. I choose time over stuff, so in the last ~10 years, I've worked about 5. I also spent 2 years driving AK->Argentina, and now I'm doing 2 years around Africa.
rumcajz 10y ago
What was not accounted for was that working hours will not be shortened and thus lot of people would have to invent ridiculous, mostly paper-pushing, occupations to be able to survive.
norea-armozel 10y ago
I don't think that's entirely true. I love to poke fun at Keynes but on this projection of his he's not far off. The idea that we have to work 40 hours a day to get work done seems naive since most of the "work" is just getting another human to check off on an action that's already correct for the given job. And I'm not talking about federal or state regulators, I'm talking about middle managers, marketing, HR, and other such nonsense jobs which only exist to audit the process of doing business for it's own sake. At this point, I think we should be creating less jobs or at least reducing hours across the board where it makes sense (i.e. how much marketing staff do you really need?).

by neaden 10y ago

kybernetikos 10y ago

In the essay, he says that he's explicitly talking about desires that are absolute rather than positional (beginning of section II). He even accepts that desire for positional goods may in fact be insatiable, so I don't think your first point is a fair representation of his argument. I think there's a lot of truth to your second argument which comes down to the fact that there are quite a few absolute needs that are resistant to improvement through technological progress, that tend to scale with the population and that because of privilege Keynes probably underestimated. Personally, I think that he's too optimistic because he thinks that the rewards of progress will end up shared rather than concentrated in the hands of a small number of people (like e.g. the Walton family who own assets equivalent to the bottom third of the entire population of the US).

neaden 10y ago
With Positional Goods I believe he's strictly talking about keeping up with the Jones type things. So I get a fancy car just so everyone knows I'm fancy, but I don't really care about it. While to some extent I think that's true with larger housing sizes for instance, I don't think that's the main reason why houses have gotten larger. Let alone computers and other inventions that we have now. In terms of concentrated wealth I do think that's an issue, but once again it isn't the whole story. The average person is richer then they were 20 years ago, and the person 20 years ago is richer then the person 40 years ago. This is true if you look at middle class, but also if you look at people making minimum wage.

treehau5 10y ago

> Neither does cleaning, since we now expect everything to be cleaner. Modern vacuums, cleaning products, washer and dryer systems, modern storage containers, the refridgerator, dusting products and filtration air condition systems all have made cleaning your house substantially easier.

neaden 10y ago
The problem is before vacuums people didn't spend an hour a week cleaning their rugs by hand, they took them out a couple times a year to beat clean. People used to wear clothes more often between cleanings when it was more laborious to launder them. We began to shower every day. You can say these are Positional Goods and all about status, but unlike having a fancy car these are things you can't really opt out of. If you smell like the average person smelt in the 1930s you'll have a hard time fitting in at an office now.
- oli5679 10y ago
  The fall in time spent doing cleaning, cooking and household chores since Keynes' death is well documented. http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/277/1/3011800000841.pdf http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/277/1/3011800000841.pdf "It took her 4 h to do a 38 lb load of laundry by hand, and then about 4·5 h to iron it using old-fashioned irons. By comparison it took 41 min to do a load of the laundry using electrical appliances and 1·75 h to iron it. The woman walked 3181 feet to do the laundry by hand, and only 332 feet with electrical equipment. She walked 3122 feet when ironing the old way, and 333 the new way"
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    How often did people do 38lb loads of laundry? The argument here is that we wear clothes fewer times between washing now, so laundry has dramatically increased.
    - oli5679 10y ago
      I can't find good data on the topic but I'm sure it exists somewhere and would be confident that the the overall trend is a large reduction. Have a look at the female labour force participation rates in America and USA between 1900 and 2000. How are they compatible with households spending more time cleaning and cooking now than in 1900? As an alternative, ask old family members about the amount of time their mothers spent cooking, shopping and cleaning when they were growing up. Finally, look at time spent on Household chores in Mexico/Kenya vs USA.

philipkglass 10y ago

I think that his argument works in the limit case. Above a certain square footage the work of keeping a larger dwelling outweighs the benefit of having more space. (I've avoided buying a larger house that I could easily afford because I didn't want another 1000 square feet to clean and maintain.) Above a certain consumption level you get uncomfortable and ill from eating more food instead of additional nutrition/pleasure. Nobody can watch television more than 24 hours per day. Or to put it in more concrete terms, look at five different 40 year old males all living in Los Angeles. One has $100,000 in net worth, the next has $1 million, the next $10 million, the next $100 million, and the last has $1 billion. That's spanning 5 orders of magnitude, but personal consumption goes up very sub-linearly with increasing wealth. When people near the top of the wealth pyramid spend a lot they're typically bidding up positional goods to insane levels (how much for the penthouse with the very best location in Manhattan?) or spending for control (e.g. as a shareholder in a corporation) instead of for personal consumption. You can't take a typical middle class family and scale up all the financial numbers by 100x to get a realistic picture of how today's wealthy (or the future middle class after a long period of compounded economic growth) will consume.

tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
personal consumption in terms of durable goods probably, but what about in terms of services / experiences? those seem to be more and more the things that high net worth individuals go after, and as many religions will tell you there is really no limit to human desire (and consequently to the money you are willing to spend to fulfill those desires) This is how you go from "I'd like to see Europe some day" to "I am going to have a week to go to Europe once every few years" to "I am flying business class to Europe for tourism every year" to much later "I own a private jet and I feel like having those baguettes from that shop for breakfast tomorrow so I am going to get my personal assistant to fly there and get them for me" There are always goods available no matter how much money you have, as much as the quantity of the food you eat is limited by your physiology, the amount of money it costs is only limited by your imagination.
- philipkglass 10y ago

digi_owl 10y ago

Nah, what he underestimated was how much his colleagues would bastardize and twist his words to double down on the status quo. Post-war Keynesianism would better be labeled Samuelsonianism, because Samuelson did the bulk work of "rewriting" Keynes into a form that fit with existing (classic) economic thinking.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

> "He underestimated how much we wanted stuff vs leisure." I'd argue this isn't necessarily a reflection on our personal desires. Whilst I'm sure there are plenty of people who want 'stuff' over leisure, I think there are plenty of other people who would choose a different balance to the one they have now. I'd say the biggest issue blocking this second group is our current work arrangements. If I could I'd choose to work part time or on some form of flexitime (assuming I could earn enough to live on), instead I need to work full time because that's what is on offer and I'm not in a position to push for changes just yet. If people could choose their work hours based on what they needed/wanted, and could afford to work less, I think you'd see a many more people expanding their leisure time than you do now.

Chinjut 10y ago
Yes. I would desperately prefer to take on a job with more leisure time, even with a harsh paycut, and yet, there is almost no way to express that desire within the market as it stands. So I take on a job with far more hours than I'd like, since the alternative is destitution, and then get taken as implicitly supporting the opposite trade-off to what I really want.
grecy 10y ago
If I could I'd choose to work part time or on some form of flexitime (assuming I could earn enough to live on), instead I need to work full time because that's what is on offer and I'm not in a position to push for changes just yet. If you want it badly enough, you will find a way. Make it your top priority. Start applying for other jobs now, and when they make an offer discuss working 4 or 3 days a week for 4/5th or 3/5th of a paycheck. Suggest to your boss you take some unpaid leave (maybe only a week a year to start) and that will help him cut his costs. Take a leave of absence. Find someone to job share with so you both work 1/2 time to get the same job done - make sure you convince your boss it will have no impact on him, and in fact it will be better in case one of you gets seriously ill or something he has backup. There are a thousand ways to achieve your goal. I choose time over stuff, so in the last ~10 years, I've worked about 5. I also spent 2 years driving AK->Argentina, and now I'm doing 2 years around Africa.

rumcajz 10y ago

What was not accounted for was that working hours will not be shortened and thus lot of people would have to invent ridiculous, mostly paper-pushing, occupations to be able to survive.

norea-armozel 10y ago

I don't think that's entirely true. I love to poke fun at Keynes but on this projection of his he's not far off. The idea that we have to work 40 hours a day to get work done seems naive since most of the "work" is just getting another human to check off on an action that's already correct for the given job. And I'm not talking about federal or state regulators, I'm talking about middle managers, marketing, HR, and other such nonsense jobs which only exist to audit the process of doing business for it's own sake. At this point, I think we should be creating less jobs or at least reducing hours across the board where it makes sense (i.e. how much marketing staff do you really need?).