Intro. [Recording date: September 20, ] Russ: Guest is Robert Skidelsky, author of many books, including much-celebrated biography of John Maynard Keynes. Latest book, co-authored with son Edward Skidelsky, is How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life, subject of today's program. You start your book with a discussion of an essay of John Maynard Keynes's, quite a provocative and fascinating essay, which is titled "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." It was written in , or published in And it was Keynes's vision for the future. What was that vision? Guest: Well, I think basically the vision was that when societies became sufficiently rich, they would ease off on work. And he wrote, as you said, in he thought that by now the average standard of living in most societies in the West would be about 4 or 5 times higher than in Machines would to a large extent have replaced human labor. So, we could have achieved this higher standard of working, living, with a fraction
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‘They Mean us no Harm’
Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the intellectual and public life of this country is in Skidelsky’s debt. This third volume starts in , where the second volume left off. It might have been better had that volume finished with the publication of the The General Theory in , rather than, as it did, with the debate over The General Theory. It ended, as a result, on rather an anti-climactic note (though that is anything but the tone of the book as a whole), since the debate was both indeterminate and, from Keynes’s point of view, unsatisfactory. Keynes, though he participated in the debate, was oddly detached, seeming at times not to see its significance to the argument of The General Theory. He took six months – astonishing, as Skidelsky points out, in one normally so punctiliou
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