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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 desir

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.