technological unemployment

The popular view

It’s common in contemporary sci-fi movies to see the future portrayed as a place of vast inequalities, where a tiny elite enjoys advanced technology and a life of leisure, while the masses slave away in poverty, in a polluted world stripped of resources. But sci-fi is very often not a vision of the future, but a mirror of our present-day concerns. So it is the case with concerns over inequality and fears of technological unemployment.

The worlds portrayed in these dystopian movies are filled with contradictions. Often the world’s resources have been depleted, and yet advanced technology exists, capable of generating cheap, unlimited energy. Often, this technology makes human work obsolete, yet the masses are depicted scrabbling in the dirt for a living. And the elite have access to unparalleled health, longevity and synthetic enhancements, while the masses live short brutal lives, without even twentieth-century standards of healthcare and comforts.

Of course, this is Hollywood, so conflict and injustice are the cornerstones of the plot. Inconsistencies are not the director’s prime concern. But these logical contradictions persist in people’s thinking. They prevent us seeing clearly where our world is headed.

Technology creates wealth

If we want to find real-world examples of a tiny elite living a pampered life, while the huddled masses toil in poverty, we can find them in the past, not the future. The defining feature of pre-industrial societies was their lack of technology. This led to inefficiency, requiring most of the population to engage in hard manual work for long hours, and with little to show for it, except poverty and subsistence.

Our present world is characterised by its extensive use of technology. Technology allows humans to achieve more with less work. It improves efficiency, reducing costs and creating wealth.

But whenever new technology reduces work, it necessarily puts workers out of jobs. This is the point of technology, after all – getting machines to do work, so we don’t have to. In the short term, for those who have lost their job, this is clearly a problem. In the longer term, and if we consider the whole of society – not just those who lost their jobs – the effect is universally beneficial, but those wider, long-term benefits are harder to see than the immediate suffering of the newly unemployed. If we focus all our attention on the problems, we may form the view that technology creates wealth for the few and poverty for the masses. In reality, the reverse is true – technology creates wealth for the masses, and its economic downsides are short-term.

The link between technological development and unemployment has been noted for centuries. Adam Smith, in his classic economics treatise of 1776, Wealth of Nations, wrote that, “a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly could not make twenty, but with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day.” By implication, the invention of pin-making machinery rendered 4,799 pin-makers unemployed for every pin worker who kept his job. A queue of 4,799 unemployed men desperately looking for work is highly visible. What is less visible is the benefit to the rest of society of reducing the cost of pin-making by a factor of 4,800. The cost of living is reduced, and the money saved is spent on other goods and services, creating new jobs in other industries. It should be obvious that the net benefit to society as a whole is vastly positive, and that what is happening is a shift of employment from one industry to another, not permanent unemployment.

The history of agriculture in the United States is an excellent example of this process at work. The US Census reported that in 1870, agricultural workers comprised half of all workers and that agricultural technology was characterized by manual labor and horse-drawn machinery. By 1950 less than a fifth of all workers were agricultural workers, and tractors and electrical machinery had largely replaced the horse. Now, in the twenty-first century, hired farmworkers make up less than 1 percent of all US wage and salary workers. It is too obvious to point out that this has not led to vast unemployment, nor has it impoverished ordinary workers – quite the opposite.

In 1900, the average American family spent more than 40% of its total income on food. Now it is less than 15%. Food is cheaper, the money saved on food is spent on other purchases, and ordinary Americans are vastly wealthier as a result of technological progress in agriculture.

Is it different this time?

One of the most influential writers on technological unemployment in recent years, Martin Ford, in his books The Lights in the Tunnel, and Rise of the Robots, seems to accept that technological advancement creates wealth, but advocates that this time, things are different. Ford’s primary argument is that for the first time in human history, technological advancement threatens to make a large fraction of the human workforce permanently obsolete.

Looking at how the agricultural revolution rendered half of all US jobs obsolete, and how the industrial revolution had effects of similar magnitude, Martin Ford’s argument that “This time is different” seems difficult to justify. The principles of economics do not change. If Ford was writing in 1800, as steam-powered machines began to do the work of hundreds of men, or in 1900, as the introduction of tractors and other technology destroyed 30% of all American jobs in 50 years, he might well have arrived at the same conclusion. Indeed, Eleanor Roosevelt clearly felt the same when she wrote in 1945, “We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.”

When it comes to economics, “This time is different” is a common refrain from down the centuries, but the evidence doesn’t support human obsolescence now, any more than it has done in the past.

Ford cites as evidence the stagnation of wages in the Unites States since the 1970s. Yet wages aren’t necessarily a useful statistic if we want to examine real wealth. Wages are affected by inflation, immigration, and other factors. Instead, if we look again at the proportion of income spent on food, this has continued to fall steadily throughout the twentieth century, and did not stop in 1970. The proportion of US personal income spent on food was 13.9% in 1970, falling to 13.2% in 1980, 11.5% in 1990, 9.8% in 2000, and 9.6% in 2010. Another indicator of American wealth is the proportion of families owning cars. In 1969, 80% of American households owned at least one car; 32% owned two or more. By 2009, car ownership had increased to 92% of households, with 58% owing two or more cars. This is a story of steadily growing affluence, not declining wealth, and is exactly what we would expect form the rapid developments in technology over the past 40 years.

The pace of change

What is undoubtedly true is that the pace of technological progress is faster than ever before and is continuing to accelerate. Thus, both the long-term benefits and short-term problems are increasing. For most people, in their everyday lives, it is the short-term problems that are most clearly visible, especially if they or someone they know loses their job.

Fortunately, we are well placed in the modern world to help with the transitions needed when jobs are made obsolete by technology. In Victorian London, the working classes were left to sink or swim as machines took their jobs. In the 1930s, society was able to do little to help those who lost their livelihoods in the Great Depression. Now, due almost entirely to the increased wealth that technology has given us, society has the means to offer transitional help to those who need it.

Inequality

Perhaps our real concern isn’t unemployment, but inequality. The fear is not that robots will do our work for us (which would be a good thing), but that unemployment will cut off our means of earning a living. In short, we are conditioned to see ourselves as workers, under the power of a wealthy elite. A popular narrative tells us that inequality is growing, and that capitalism, globalization and technology are the driving forces for this.

I beg to differ.

Technological efficiency creates wealth and raises living standards for the poorest in society as well as the rich – perhaps for the poorest most of all. It always has done and it always will. After all, in ancient times it was not Kings and Queens who had to carry water from the well, or plough the fields, but ordinary people. Mechanization benefits those who do the work.

Kings and Queens have always enjoyed leisure time and luxuries – now ordinary people do too. Our ancestors toiled in the field, and starved whenever droughts or famine hit. Now you and I are well fed (I presume), and have leisure time to read and write articles such as this.

An ordinary American born in 1900, worked an average of 60 hours a week and had a life expectancy of 47 years, whereas a modern American works 40 hours a week and can expect to live to 78.

The fact is that wealth becomes more available to more people as time goes on. Augustus Caesar (63BC – 14AD) ruled over an empire that accounted for 30% of the world’s economy, but he didn’t have access to even basic healthcare. Genghis Khan (1162 – 1227) ruled a kingdom that spread from China to Europe, but he didn’t use a cell phone, fly in a plane, or watch TV – activities that all of us take for granted. My point? That real wealth increases inexorably as time passes, for the poor more than for the rich, who have always enjoyed the privileges of luxury and leisure. This increase in the wealth of ordinary people is driven by technology.

If we’re really interested in the effects of technology on inequality, we should look beyond developed nations, and compare ourselves with those in the poorest countries. The big picture is not one of increasing, but of decreasing inequality.

In fact, the advancement of technology during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has led to startling (and generally under-reported) changes in wealth, health and equality.

• In the past two decades, the number of people living in extreme poverty (at or below $1.25 a day) has halved from 2 billion to 1 billion.
• Life expectancy is increasing in every single country in the world. Even in the poorest nations, like South Sudan and Angola, in the past three decades, life expectancy has risen from 40 years to over 50 years, despite the HIV epidemic.
• One of the most encouraging statistics is that infant mortality is falling rapidly all around the world, and the fall is most rapid in the very poorest countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia and Sierra Leone.

The usual narrative of growing inequality that we’re constantly fed fails to capture what’s actually happening in the world. And as always, technology is the driving force for good.

Thanks to technology, poverty is diminishing at an unprecedented rate around the world, life expectancy is increasing, diseases are being eradicated, and more people than ever before have access to clean water. These are all exponential trends.

Accelerating technology, falling costs

A striking feature of new technology is that it benefits the poorest in society, not just the richest. In fact, it’s the most powerful force known for reducing wealth inequality. One of the myths perpetuated in Hollywood movies is that life-enhancing technology will be prohibitively expensive and available only to the elite. All the evidence points to the opposite being true.

Moore’s law that says computer processing power doubles every two years has a flipside – processing power halves in cost every two years. And Ray Kurzweil’s familiar graphs (after Hans Moravec) of exponential increase in technological capability can equally be used to show its exponential fall in cost.

Already, one of the most remarkable trends of the twenty-first century is how cheap and universal the latest technology is becoming. As of January 2014, 90% of American adults owned a cell phone. And as of October 2014, 64% of American adults owned a smartphone.

Globally, the picture is perhaps even more dramatic. As of May 2014, there were nearly 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, equivalent to 95.5 percent of the world population.

Technology drives social change

Technology isn’t merely an engine for creating material wealth. It’s a powerful catalyst for social change. It’s no coincidence that the enormous growth in wealth in recent centuries has brought profound changes in social attitudes and human rights.

• The printing revolution was a necessary precursor to the rise of education, secularism and democracy in our modern world.
• The invention of machines for sowing seeds and harvesting crops made the abolition of slavery in 1833 a political possibility.
• Birth control and washing machines liberated women in the 1960s just as much as progressive social attitudes.

Again and again, technology has helped to break down social barriers, giving rights to minorities and the oppressed. It is the friend of the poor and the disadvantaged, not the enemy.

Capital and inequality

A lot has been written about capitalism, and how it must be overthrown, or superseded. If we fail to do this, it is said, in the future a tiny elite will control all the world’s wealth, while technological unemployment will leave the rest of us living in poverty. But that is not a vision of the future, it is Karl Marx’s vision of the industrial revolution in Britain in the nineteenth century.

Marx was wrong about the industrial revolution. Rural peasants flocked to the cities not to be exploited, but because the economic opportunities created by new technology made their lives better than before. While agricultural jobs were destroyed by technology, new industrial and commercial jobs were created. The factories raised income levels and life expectancy for the poorest in society. The murder rate plummeted. Famine became a thing of the past. The cost of essentials such as food and clothing fell dramatically. And social discrimination began to diminish, with women participating in the workforce in increasing numbers, and the fledgling feminist movement beginning amongst the middle classes, becoming a potent force for change as the nineteenth century progressed. The driving force for all these changes was technology.

Marx was wrong then, and predictions of future poverty are wrong too. It is the same error again. Marx saw the world divided into rich and poor. In his world view, the elite controlled the wealth and the means of production. Marx focussed his attention on how technology gave the elite ever greater power. But what Marx failed to see was how technology gave everyone more power over their lives, lowering costs for everyone, most especially the poor and disadvantaged. Now, in the twenty-first century, the means of production is just as likely to be held by a work-from-home tech entrepreneur or a mom-and-pop business as by a mega corporation. In the future, the means of production might actually be free.

Perhaps it already is, in some cases. My 12-year-old son is making and publishing his own YouTube videos. My 16-year-old son is learning how to code smartphone apps. The technology that enables this is empowering, and it is completely free.

Everywhere, barriers are falling. Want to write and publish a book? Traditional barriers to publishing have gone, and online tools enable anyone to publish their own e-book or paperback for zero cost. More music is being created and shared now than ever before. Crowd funding is unleashing a tsunami of creativity, and barriers to entry are being swept aside in the flood.

Marx was wrong – the means of production are becoming available to everyone, even the poorest and disadvantaged. The luddites were wrong – technology liberated the masses, not enslaved them. And today’s heralds of doom are wrong too – increased efficiency will create wealth and opportunity, and lift us all out of poverty.

In the Middle Ages, the wealthy elite owned land, and ownership of land was the means by which they exerted control over the population. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, control of mines, steelworks, railroads and oil gave the elite their power. Now, in the first part of the twenty-first century, knowledge is power, and corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are key players in this knowledge-based economy. When knowledge is power and ideas are wealth, they can more easily be spread and shared. As long as we are careful not to create barriers to sharing, such as patents and IP protection, the source of wealth in the future can be made accessible to all.

What if robots do everything?

In the short- to medium-term, rapid advances in technology will make us more efficient, eliminate more jobs, create new ones to replace them, lower costs, improve standards of living, and reduce global inequality. Computers and robots will do more and more work, until ultimately, little or no human work will be necessary. Eventually a day may come when computers and robots really can do everything for us and jobs will be destroyed and not replaced. What then?

Extrapolating current trends too far is fraught with pitfalls. Remember poor Malthus, who extrapolated population and food production trends to predict global starvation in the eighteenth century? Let’s not make the same mistake again.

Errors come about by extrapolating certain trends (the tendency for jobs to be destroyed by new technology) and ignoring others (the tendency for new technology to reduce the overall cost of living). A dramatic increase in technological unemployment would necessarily go hand in hand with an equally dramatic reduction in the need for people to earn money.

Let’s consider an example of how this works in practice. The production of books by scribes was once a very slow and time-consuming process. Few books were produced, and the ownership of books was restricted to a wealthy elite. The invention of the movable type printing press by Gutenberg put those scribes out of work, but greatly increased the availability of books. And the unemployed scribes soon found new work in the ever-expanding printing industry, which continued to innovate in the centuries that followed. Waves of new printing technologies destroyed jobs, and created new ones, all the while bringing down the cost of books and increasing their availability.

Now, in the twenty-first century, those books, which were once available only to the privileged few, are now available to literally everyone. Much of what we now read (this essay, for example) is actually free. Imagine how that would play out if all goods and services were rendered essentially free.

This is the world we must try to imagine if we are to glimpse the future.

A common objection to this is to counter that the world’s resources are finite, and that as time goes by, their costs will rise because of scarcity. But again, this ignores the effects of technology. In particular, it ignores the fact that technology creates resources. Coal only became a resource once the technology to harness it was invented. Oil became a resource later, once the technology to drill, pipe and refine it became available. Solar power, computing power and healthcare are examples of resources that are currently growing exponentially. So new technology creates new resources, rendering old ones obsolete. That’s why peak firewood and peak horse are in the distant past, and peak coal has perhaps already been reached.

It’s also the reason why new industries are increasingly software-dependent, with zero marginal cost to produce and sell their wares. As writers like Ray Kurzweil have noted, zero marginal cost industries are poised to explode into the real world during the twenty-first century, reducing the cost of living in unprecedented ways, and probably upsetting governments whose economic and monetary systems are founded on a faith in relentless inflation.

Those who argue that automation will make 99% of the population unemployed, and concentrate all of the wealth in the 1% who own the robots, are making simple errors. They ignore the fact that total automation will make the cost of goods and services tend towards zero, eliminating the need for money all together. In any case, the scenario is a logical contradiction. If working people lose their productive power by being replaced by machines, they will have zero purchasing power, and the greedy capitalists will have no source of income.

Projections of future poverty due to technological unemployment are fallacies. Instead, imagine a future where robots and computers do all the work. They grow, mine, harvest and collect all the raw materials necessary for this. The robots also repair themselves, and manufacture more robots when needed. They even design new and improved versions of themselves, so that ever more work can be done. In this future, nobody needs to work. Nobody is paid to work. Nobody has any money, because none is needed. People can spend their time doing whatever they want.

What will people do when they no longer have to work? Technology doesn’t render people useless – it enhances their creative potential, and expands their options enormously. That’s actually what technology is for.

Technological unemployment? Yes! Problem? No! Fantasy? Not necessarily.

Working towards a better future

Technology is making our lives materially better, and this trend is accelerating. Whatever happens next, it is almost certainly unstoppable. But we could still make the wrong policy decisions that will cause the future to be worse than it might otherwise be. The right policies will enable technology to deliver its benefits to all, without creating barriers to its adoption or ownership. They will also support those in need during the inevitable transition and turmoil as the world changes.

Transitional welfare payments will be needed to support those who cannot work, or whose skills have been rendered obsolete. Some economists have argued for the introduction of universal welfare. But logically, universal welfare would only become necessary if unemployment is universal. And in that case, who would the government tax to pay for the welfare? So perhaps our current system is the right way forward.

Old forms of wealth, such as agriculture and mining were resource-based, and tended to promote inequality. New wealth is knowledge-based, and can easily be shared and taught. To ensure that technological advances benefit everyone equally, we will want to ensure that they result in the cost of living falling to zero, or near-zero. A knowledge-based economy can reduce the costs of goods and services only as long as an efficient and competitive market operates.

So we will need to eradicate protectionism and barriers to trade. We will want to minimize intellectual property rights, so that knowledge becomes common and available to all. We will want to encourage industry standards and open source systems that promote competition and drive down costs, rather than proprietary software and operating systems that create artificial scarcity and inflate prices. We will want to disrupt monopolies wherever they occur, either in the private or in the public sectors. And we will want governments to refrain from imposing intrusive regulation that protects vested interests and discourages competition – such as in the banking, telecom and energy sectors, and most recently illustrated by attempts to regulate the Uber taxi phenomenon.

Many economists have long argued that we need all those things already.

Thanks to technology, the present is better than the past, and the future looks set to be better still. Unemployment isn’t our real fear. Poverty is. And the solution to poverty is technology. If universal technological unemployment does eventually happen, it will not be something to fear. It will mark the end of poverty, and bring to a close this chapter in human history.

About the author:

Steve Morris studied Physics at the University of Oxford and spent ten years working for the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He now runs tech review site S21.

Related articles

• Marshall Brain on Singularity 1on1: We’re approaching humanity’s make or break period
• Martin Ford on Singularity 1on1: Technological Unemployment is an Issue We Need To Discuss
• Will Work For Free: A Doc About Technological Unemployment
• Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren by John M. Keynes

The essay below was re-published from A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook titled Essays in Persuasion by John Maynard Keynes. It is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country’s copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this file.

Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren [1930]

 by John Maynard Keynes

I

We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down—at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us.

I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. 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. And even so, the waste and confusion which ensue relate to not more than 7½ per cent of the national income; we are muddling away one and sixpence in the £, and have only 18s. 6d., when we might, if we were more sensible, have £1; yet, nevertheless, the 18s. 6d. mounts up to as much as the £1 would have been five or six years ago. We forget that in 1929 the physical output of the industry of Great Britain was greater than ever before, and that the net surplus of our foreign balance available for new foreign investment, after paying for all our imports, was greater last year than that of any other country, being indeed 50 per cent greater than the corresponding surplus of the United States. Or again—if it is to be a matter of comparisons—suppose that we were to reduce our wages by a half, repudiate four-fifths of the national debt, and hoard our surplus wealth in barren gold instead of lending it at 6 per cent or more, we should resemble the now much-envied France. But would it be an improvement?

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. For I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time—the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.

My purpose in this essay, however, is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?

From the earliest times of which we have record—back, say, to two thousand years before Christ—down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change. Some periods perhaps 50 per cent better than others—at the utmost 100 per cent better—in the four thousand years which ended (say) in A.D. 1700.

This slow rate of progress, or lack of progress, was due to two reasons—to the remarkable absence of important technical improvements and to the failure of capital to accumulate.

The absence of important technical inventions between the prehistoric age and comparatively modern times is truly remarkable. Almost everything which really matters and which the world possessed at the commencement of the modern age was already known to man at the dawn of history. Language, fire, the same domestic animals which we have to-day, wheat, barley, the vine and the olive, the plough, the wheel, the oar, the sail, leather, linen and cloth, bricks and pots, gold and silver, copper, tin, and lead—and iron was added to the list before 1000 B.C.—banking, statecraft, mathematics, astronomy, and religion. There is no record of when we first possessed these things.

At some epoch before the dawn of history—perhaps even in one of the comfortable intervals before the last ice age—there must have been an era of progress and invention comparable to that in which we live to-day. But through the greater part of recorded history there was nothing of the kind.

The modern age opened, I think, with the accumulation of capital which began in the sixteenth century. I believe—for reasons with which I must not encumber the present argument—that this was initially due to the rise of prices, and the profits to which that led, which resulted from the treasure of gold and silver which Spain brought from the New World into the Old. From that time until to-day the power of accumulation by compound interest, which seems to have been sleeping for many generations, was re-born and renewed its strength. And the power of compound interest over two hundred years is such as to stagger the imagination.

Let me give in illustration of this a sum which I have worked out. The value of Great Britain’s foreign investments to-day is estimated at about £4,000,000,000. This yields us an income at the rate of about 6½ per cent. Half of this we bring home and enjoy; the other half, namely, 3¼ per cent, we leave to accumulate abroad at compound interest. Something of this sort has now been going on for about 250 years.

For I trace the beginnings of British foreign investment to the treasure which Drake stole from Spain in 1580. In that year he returned to England bringing with him the prodigious spoils of the Golden Hind. Queen Elizabeth was a considerable shareholder in the syndicate which had financed the expedition. Out of her share she paid off the whole of England’s foreign debt, balanced her Budget, and found herself with about £40,000 in hand. This she invested in the Levant Company—which prospered. Out of the profits of the Levant Company, the East India Company was founded; and the profits of this great enterprise were the foundation of England’s subsequent foreign investment. Now it happens that £40,000 accumulating at 3¼ per cent compound interest approximately corresponds to the actual volume of England’s foreign investments at various dates, and would actually amount to-day to the total of £4,000,000,000 which I have already quoted as being what our foreign investments now are. Thus, every £1 which Drake brought home in 1580 has now become £100,000. Such is the power of compound interest!

From the sixteenth century, with a cumulative crescendo after the eighteenth, the great age of science and technical inventions began, which since the beginning of the nineteenth century has been in full flood—coal, steam, electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production, wireless, printing, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, and thousands of other things and men too famous and familiar to catalogue.

What is the result? In spite of an enormous growth in the population of the world, which it has been necessary to equip with houses and machines, the average standard of life in Europe and the United States has been raised, I think, about fourfold. The growth of capital has been on a scale which is far beyond a hundred-fold of what any previous age had known. And from now on we need not expect so great an increase of population.

If capital increases, say, 2 per cent per annum, the capital equipment of the world will have increased by a half in twenty years, and seven and a half times in a hundred years. Think of this in terms of material things—houses, transport, and the like.

At the same time technical improvements in manufacture and transport have been proceeding at a greater rate in the last ten years than ever before in history. In the United States factory output per head was 40 per cent greater in 1925 than in 1919. In Europe we are held back by temporary obstacles, but even so it is safe to say that technical efficiency is increasing by more than 1 per cent per annum compound. There is evidence that the revolutionary technical changes, which have so far chiefly affected industry, may soon be attacking agriculture. We may be on the eve of improvements in the efficiency of food production as great as those which have already taken place in mining, manufacture, and transport. In quite a few years—in our own lifetimes I mean—we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed.

For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively which are not in the vanguard of progress. We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

II

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day. Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us.

Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes—those 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. But this is not so true of the absolute needs—a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

Now for my conclusion, which you will find, I think, to become more and more startling to the imagination the longer you think about it.

I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.

Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because—if, instead of looking into the future, we look into the past—we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race—not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.

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.

Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.

To use the language of to-day—must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”? We already have a little experience of what I mean—a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations—who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.

To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet—until they get it.

There is the traditional epitaph written for herself by the old charwoman:—

Don’t mourn for me, friends, don’t weep for me never,
For I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.

This was her heaven. Like others who look forward to leisure, she conceived how nice it would be to spend her time listening-in—for there was another couplet which occurred in her poem:—

With psalms and sweet music the heavens’ll be ringing,
But I shall have nothing to do with the singing.

Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable—and how few of us can sing!

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.

I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.

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!

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. 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. For we shall inquire more curiously than is safe to-day into the true character of this “purposiveness” with which in varying degrees Nature has endowed almost all of us. For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward for ever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.

Let me remind you of the Professor in Sylvie and Bruno:—

Perhaps it is not an accident that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions.

I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate. But, of course, it will all happen gradually, not as a catastrophe. Indeed, it has already begun. The course of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed. The critical difference will be realised when this condition has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed. For it will remain reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.

The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things—our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.

Meanwhile there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as the activities of purpose.

But, chiefly, do not let us overestimate the importance of the economic problem, or sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater and more permanent significance. It should be a matter for specialists—like dentistry. If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!