So what kind of life does economic growth give us?

And here is the fascinating thing. People will have enough to satisfy all their absolute needs, and Keynes thinks relative needs are not so important. People will become satiated with material goods and services.

And so in his view we will solve the struggle for subsistence, the economic problem which has always been mankind's biggest challenge. We will have an age of abundance, not scarcity. Hunger and want and need will be forgotten, because the sheer growth of productive capacity and technology will make it easy to fulfil any such wants.

But this is not all good news.

Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature-with all our impulses and deepest instincts-for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.

What do we do then?

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

This expectation of shorter hours is anything but true today. The idea of a three hour work day is unimaginable to most.

He thought that people would find it hard to deal with increased leisure. When the idle rich have tried it, they tend to end up bored, dissipated and unhappy.

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his
permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age
of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. 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! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard-those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me-those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties-to solve the problem which has been set them.