Sandwichman wrote:
Here's how I parse it. Secular stagnation is the deep structure. The
current recession (or worse) is the result of failing to respond
appropriately to the deep structure problem. So there is hardly a
contradiction between secular stagnation and a business cycle
recession. The short-term ups and downs are still part of the long
term waves.
For Keynes, as for Marx, capitalism is a means to a truly good life.
Its ultimately inconsistent such a life, however, because of its
"dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-
loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the
economic machine."
These motives are "passions" in the sense of Hegel and Marx, i.e.
irrational motives that, without conscious intention of the part of
those so motivated, provide "the impelling and actuating force for
accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large."
In a rational community economic activity would be largely
instrumental. It would serve to meet the needs of ends in themselves
activities. These activities would be non-economic.
Such a community would minimize the time devoted to economic activity
so as to maximize time available for "the true realm of freedom".
Its practicability requires highly developed productive forces.
Keynes, again like Marx, makes capitalism the means of developing
these. About 80 years ago, he placed the time by which capitalism
would have developed productive forces to the degree necessary to make
self-conscious movement toward a rational community practicable at
least 100 years into the future.
In the interim, one way of preparing for this which would also
contribute to solving capitalism's unemployment problem would be "to
encourage wise consumption and discourage saving,--and to absorb some
part of the unwanted surplus by increased leisure, more holidays
(which are a wonderfully good way of getting rid of money) and shorter
hours."
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social
importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We
shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral
principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which
we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into
the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to
dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money
as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means
to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what
it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal,
semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder
to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs
and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of
economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs,
however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because
they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of
capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied
purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth-unless they can find
some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be
under any obligation to applaud and encourage them. For we shall
inquire more curiously than is safe to-day into the true character
of this “purposiveness” with which in varying degrees Nature has
endowed almost all of us. ...
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and
certain principles of religion and traditional virtue‑that avarice
is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the
love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths
of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We
shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the
useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour
and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are
capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the
field who toil not, neither do they spin.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another
hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that
fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not.
Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little
longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of
economic necessity into daylight.
<http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/368keynesgrandchildren.html
>
Ted
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