As people inthe developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employmentafter the Great Recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionaryessay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called “Economic Possibilitiesfor our Grandchildren.”

Keynes’s GeneralTheory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equippedgovernments with the intellectual tools to counter the unemployment caused byslumps. In this earlier essay, however, Keynes distinguished betweenunemployment caused by temporary economic breakdowns and what he called“technological unemployment” – that is, “unemployment due to the discovery ofmeans of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can findnew uses for labor.”

Keynesreckoned that we would hear much more about this kind of unemployment in thefuture. But its emergence, he thought, was a cause for hope, rather thandespair. For it showed that the developed world, at least, was on track to solvingthe “economic problem” – the problem of scarcity that kept mankind tethered toa burdensome life of toil.

Machineswere rapidly replacing human labor, holding out the prospect of vastlyincreased production at a fraction of the existing human effort. In fact,Keynes thought that by about now (the early twenty-first century) most peoplewould have to work only 15 hours a week to produce all that they needed forsubsistence and comfort.

Developedcountries are now about as rich as Keynes thought they would be, but most of uswork much longer than 15 hours a week, though we do take longer holidays, andwork has become less physically demanding, so we also live longer. But, inbroad terms, the prophecy of vastly increased leisure for all has not been fulfilled.Automation has been proceeding apace, but most of us who work still put in anaverage of 40 hours a week. In fact, working hours have not fallen since theearly 1980’s.

At the sametime, “technological unemployment” has been on the rise. Since the 1980’s, we have never regained the fullemployment levels of the 1950’sand 1960’s. Ifmost people still work a 40-hour week, a substantial and growing minority havehad unwanted leisure thrust upon them in the form of unemployment,under-employment, and forced withdrawal from the labor market. And, as werecover from the current recession, most experts expect this group to grow evenlarger.

What thismeans is that we have largely failed to convert growing technologicalunemployment into increased voluntary leisure. The main reason for this isthat the lion’s share of the productivity gains achieved over the last 30 yearshas been seized by the well-off.

Particularlyin the United States and Britain sincethe 1980’s, wehave witnessed a return to the capitalism “red in tooth and claw” depicted byKarl Marx. The rich and very rich have gotten very much richer, while everyoneelse’s incomes have stagnated. So most people are not, in fact, four or fivetimes better off than they were in 1930. It is not surprising that they areworking longer than Keynes thought they would.

But there issomething else. Modern capitalism inflames through every sense and pore thehunger for consumption. Satisfying it has become the great palliative of modernsociety, our counterfeit reward for working irrational hours. Advertisersproclaim a single message: your soul is to be discovered in your shopping.

Aristotleknew of insatiability only as a personal vice; he had no inkling of thecollective, politically orchestrated insatiability that we call economicgrowth. The civilization of “always more” would have struck him as moral andpolitical madness.

And, beyonda certain point, it is also economic madness. This is not just or mainlybecause we will soon enough run up against the natural limits to growth. It isbecause we cannot go on for much longer economizing on labor faster than we canfind new uses for it. That road leads to a division of society into a minorityof producers, professionals, supervisors, and financial speculators on oneside, and a majority of drones and unemployables on the other.

Apart fromits moral implications, such a society would face a classic dilemma: how toreconcile the relentless pressure to consume with stagnant earnings. So far,the answer has been to borrow, leading to today’s massive debt overhangs inadvanced economies. Obviously, this is unsustainable, and thus is noanswer at all, for it implies periodic collapse of the wealth-producingmachine.

The truth isthat we cannot go on successfully automating our production withoutrethinking our attitudes toward consumption, work, leisure, and thedistribution of income. Without such efforts of social imagination, recoveryfrom the current crisis will simply be a prelude to more shattering calamitiesin the future.