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NICOLÁS ORTEGA

Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.

Instead of never-ending progress, today's kids face a world on the edge of collapse. What next?

by Malcolm Harris

December 16, 2019

The founder of macroeconomics predicted that capitalism would last for approximately 450 years. That's the length of time between 1580, when Queen Elizabeth invested Spanish gold stolen by Francis Drake, and 2030, the year by which John Maynard Keynes assumed humanity would have solved the problem of our needs and moved on to higher concerns.

It's true that today the system seems on the edge of transformation, but not in the way Keynes hoped. Gen Z's fate was supposed to be to relax into a life of leisure and creativity. Instead it is bracing for stagnant wages and ecological crisis.

In a famous essay from the early 1930s called "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," Keynes imagined the world 100 years in the future. He spotted phenomena like job automation (which he called "technological unemployment") coming, but those changes, he believed, augured progress: progress toward a better society, progress toward collective liberation from work. He was worried that the transition to this world without toil might be psychologically difficult, and so he suggested that three-hour workdays could serve as a transitional program, allowing us to put off the profound question of what to do when there's nothing left to do.

Well, we know the grandchildren in the title of Keynes's essay: they're the kids and younger adults of today. The prime-age workforce of 2030 was born between 1976 and 2005. And though the precise predictions he made about the rate of economic growth and accumulation were strikingly accurate, what they mean for this generation is very different from what he imagined.

Instead of progress toward a labor-free utopia, America has experienced disappearing jobs as a kind of economic climate change. Apocalyptic forecasts loom while poor and working-class communities take the brunt of the early impacts: wage stagnation, deregulated and unsafe workplaces, an epidemic of opioid addiction. The increasingly profligate wealth on the other end of society is no less disturbing.

What the hell happened? To figure out why Generation Z isn't going to be Generation EZ, we have to ask some fundamental questions about economics, technology, and progress. After we assumed for a century that a better world would appear on top of our accumulated stuff, the assumptions appear unfounded. Things are getting worse.

As recently as the first web boom two decades ago, it was still possible to talk about technological development and economic expansion as being good for everybody. Take Webvan, the early (and subsequently much derided) grocery delivery startup. The company planned to combine the efficiencies of the internet and other advances in information and logistics to provide better-quality products at lower prices, delivered directly to consumers by higher-paid and better-trained workers. It's a univocal, Keynesian vision of development: not only do all involved benefit individually as consumers, employees, or capitalists, but society itself steps together up the mountain toward the elimination of necessity and a higher plane of being.

When Webvan went belly-up, analysts assumed it meant the core idea was hopelessly wrong: it just doesn't make sense to use human capacity to bring individual people their supermarket orders. Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, when asked about the future of the industry in 2001, said, "Home-delivered groceries? Never." Yet less than 20 years later I can have one of the world's few trillion-dollar companies (Amazon) deliver my order via its grocery brand (Whole Foods) in an hour. And if that's not fast enough, there are various platform services (Instacart, Postmates, and others) through which I can hire someone to go pick my order up and bring it to me immediately. Buzzing clouds of freelance servants, always in motion.