Keynes famously predicted 88 years ago [1] that "the economic problem" would be solved 100 years thence (hence in 12 years), and assumed that people would only need to work 15 hours a week. But back then already he pointed out two issues:
* what will people do with their free time? "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing!" He asked whether there might be a "general 'nervous breakdown'" of people "who cannot find it sufficiently amusing [...] to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing."
* While most of our needs would easily be fulfilled, he noted a second class of needs, jostling for relative status, that might never be: there are two classes, "needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they."
And he got somewhat overly optimistic then maybe:
"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 semi-criminal, 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."
Seems to me the massive inequality and concomitant struggle for relative status keeps most everyone working like crazy, even though we have many times more than what people had a century ago.
* what will people do with their free time? "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing!" He asked whether there might be a "general 'nervous breakdown'" of people "who cannot find it sufficiently amusing [...] to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing."
* While most of our needs would easily be fulfilled, he noted a second class of needs, jostling for relative status, that might never be: there are two classes, "needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they."
And he got somewhat overly optimistic then maybe:
"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 semi-criminal, 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."
Seems to me the massive inequality and concomitant struggle for relative status keeps most everyone working like crazy, even though we have many times more than what people had a century ago.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/...
EDIT to add: Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky has a book about it, How much is enough?:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/29/how-much-is-en...