ABSTRACT
In 1930, when John Maynard Keynes pondered the question of “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren” in his Essays in Persuasion (1931), he began by pointing out the unfoundedness of the severe economic pessimism (i.e. “a bad attack of economic pessimism”, ibid., p. 358) resulting from the “Great Depression”:
“We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick; the banking and monetary system of the world has been preventing the rate of interest from falling as fast as equilibrium requires […] The prevailing world depression, the enormous anomaly of unemployment in a world full of wants, the disastrous mistakes we have made, blind us to what is going on under the surface – to the true interpretation of the trend of things.” (1930 in 1931, pp. 358–359)
