John Maynard Keynes and the search for the good life

{"text":[[{"start":6.25,"text":"There are many different ways to measure how well a country is doing. "}],[{"start":10.55,"text":"Some plump unimaginatively for gross domestic product (GDP), or perhaps you prefer gross national income (GNI). Maybe it’s “wellbeing” as defined and diagnosed by the OECD, or the habitability of your environment through the Global Liveability Index. Is it more what human rights are enshrined in law, or average longevity instead? Gold medals, or gold reserves? "}],[{"start":34.55,"text":"If in doubt, the World Happiness Report incorporates many of the above variables into one single metric, adding in extra indicators such as, rather sweetly, the levels of “generosity” exhibited, too. "}],[{"start":46.599999999999994,"text":"And in case you were wondering, no, the UK does not currently rank at the top of any of them. "}],[{"start":52.199999999999996,"text":"A country thrives or dies on its ability to ask the right questions of itself, long before you arrive at adequate answers. That’s why it has given me great satisfaction these past months to spend time in the mind of John Maynard Keynes for a new play on his life and legacy — The Standard of Living — which has just opened in the West End. Keynes, that art-loving heretical economist of the mid-20th century, turned classical orthodoxy upside down. He asked good questions in bad times. "}],[{"start":87.65,"text":"The current bad time we’re living through has been remarkably obstinate by the historic standards of capitalism, as we approach close to the 20-year mark since the crash that inaugurated our doom-loop era of sluggish economic growth and a painful paralysis in our politics. It’s an economic impasse that suggests we may have been asking the wrong things. "}],[{"start":109.4,"text":"Nevertheless, as party conference season trundles on, the areas of focus — particularly for the Labour government — are beginning to emerge. How do we pay for the care and dignity of our elderly? Is the pension triple lock no longer sustainable? And where oh where is that elusive growth ever going to come from? "}],[{"start":128.4,"text":"All valid, urgent questions. "}],[{"start":131.20000000000002,"text":"But do ministers and the exchequer ever take a beat to ask the most basic and obvious question — especially in a happiness and wellbeing crisis? "}],[{"start":139.60000000000002,"text":"Because the most important and impactful economist of the 20th century certainly did, and often, and it informed the philosophies that built the framework of the world you still just about live in today. "}],[{"start":151.8,"text":"In a nutshell: “What makes a good life?” "}],[{"start":154.55,"text":"No, I can’t imagine any prime minister wanting to make that nebulous and naive-sounding niggle the centrepiece of a conference speech alongside trade deals and defence spending. Indeed, very few ever talk of “happiness” as a goal at all, even though it is at the core of most people’s deteriorating lived experience in Britain and much of the world today."}],[{"start":175.70000000000002,"text":"Where is the white paper or policy proposal for the following clear indicators? "}],[{"start":180.85000000000002,"text":"We are measurably lonelier. We feel less productive, and yet more burnt out. We’re less satisfied in our jobs. We are less fulfilled in our personal lives. We’re taking up fewer hobbies. Engaging in less culture and art. We miss our real communities. But we’re going out less. Our trust in our institutions has plummeted. We’re having fewer kids. We’re politically more volatile. We’re believing more lies. A younger generation is going on fewer dates. And they have fewer friends. Opportunities for human contact are shrinking. Anxiety is up, and yes, that overall happiness metric is falling. "}],[{"start":218.15000000000003,"text":"Sorry to be a downer, but then you knew all that already. We all feel it. "}],[{"start":223.65000000000003,"text":"Instead, we are pursuing a race to “growth”. But what kind of growth, and to what end? An AI data centre in a hollowed-out post-industrial community might provide 30-odd jobs and create numerical growth on a Treasury spreadsheet but does it materially address the lack of meaning, purpose or agency many feel in their lives? "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":244.25000000000003,"text":"Like his contemporaries at Cambridge in the early part of the 20th century, many of whom would become part of the Bloomsbury Group of radical artists and liberal lovers, Keynes’s worldview was shaped by the tradition-smashing arrival of GE Moore’s Principia Ethica, which claimed that the most valuable entities in life were not money, purchases or success, but relationships, love and “aesthetic appreciation”. "}],[{"start":268.8,"text":"Beauty, human connections, doing things and the big feels, basically. "}],[{"start":274.40000000000003,"text":"This set the younger Keynes off on his quest to discover the “art of life” and what made it matter, what made it mean something. And what a life. He straddled different strata of establishment and anti-establishment, working at the Treasury during the first world war, and then back again advising it during the second. In between, he published bestsellers, travelled, accumulating an impressive list of male lovers until he fell head over heels in love and married a Russian ballerina."}],[{"start":303.40000000000003,"text":"He was hungry for it all, for everything, to fill his life. In one essay he defined the human problem as “how to live wisely, agreeably, and well”. And the questions didn’t stop there, more often than not radically inverting the prevailing wisdom. "}],[{"start":319.70000000000005,"text":"What if, as per his suggestion at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to which he was a senior negotiator for the British delegation, instead of placing the burden on the defeated nations as punishment, there should be a general forgiveness of war debts instead? Outrageous and unconscionable, thought some. But so was the agonising slump of the 1920s born largely as a consequence of an impoverished Europe, unstable currencies and sluggish international trade. "}],[{"start":347.20000000000005,"text":"In the bestselling excoriation that followed, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, one of his chief objections to the economic pain inflicted on Germany was that such a settlement was “depriving a whole nation of happiness”. That word again. He considered this “abhorrent and detestable”. "}],[{"start":365.1,"text":"What if, in the 1930s depression, a government did away with convention, and instead of saving and cutting in the bad times, we spent and invested in the downturn instead, lessening the human suffering and also, potentially, saving money long term by arriving at growth earlier? What if governments worldwide finally let go of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the free market and began intervening directly in their economic systems instead? "}],[{"start":392.35,"text":"Keynesianism gets invoked periodically as offering possible answers to present-day ailments. Indeed, there has possibly been no single bigger example of its application than the borrowing of enormous amounts of money by governments to pay their citizens furlough during lockdown restrictions, in the belief that not doing something (Keynes was a big “do something” kind of guy) would cost far more “in the long run”. "}],[{"start":417.40000000000003,"text":"Whether Keynes is the man for this moment or not, where I think he does offer real hope for Andy Burnham’s government is his belief that such momentous events — whether market crashes, global pandemics or foreign wars — shouldn’t be seen exclusively as crises, but also as opportunities. Indeed, perhaps the only opportunities the universe hands you for big, ambitious reforms as the dust settles, and the rebuilding begins. "}],[{"start":442.20000000000005,"text":"It was he who provided William Beveridge with the intellectual and economic framework to get his recommendations over the line: a welfare state, the NHS and more. "}],[{"start":453.20000000000005,"text":"Less well known is how Keynes also used this most perilous of moments to persuade the world’s most indebted nation to start subsidising the making and accessing of art and culture on a national scale, through the creation of the Arts Council in 1945. "}],[{"start":469.40000000000003,"text":"Keynes’s words on this institution — some of his last, before his exhausted heart gave in — speak for themselves. "}],[{"start":476.50000000000006,"text":"“I do not believe it is yet realised what an important thing has happened.” "}],[{"start":482.45000000000005,"text":"“At last the public exchequer has recognised the support and encouragement of the civilising arts of life as a part of their duty.” "}],[{"start":490.50000000000006,"text":"“The artist . . . teaches us to love and to enjoy what we often begin by rejecting.”"}],[{"start":497.05000000000007,"text":"“We look forward to the time when the theatre and the concert hall and the gallery will be a living element in everyone’s upbringing . . . ” "}],[{"start":505.05000000000007,"text":"“Let every part of Merry England be merry in its own way. Death to Hollywood.” "}],[{"start":510.30000000000007,"text":"I have to accept my own bias towards such sentiments here, as a playwright who fully believes that the returns on relatively low public investments in British culture — social, emotional, reputational and fiscal — far outweigh the cost. "}],[{"start":526.8000000000001,"text":"I am aware that painting and poetry are not going to overturn the whole of our national malaise, solve the housing crisis and get the young back into work, but I do suggest — as proposed not by a bohemian guru but a level-headed genius economist — that, in our disconnected communities full of isolated people whose potential for discovery, enrichment, contribution and surprise is being wasted, a big national project inspired by that 1945 Labour mission to rebuild better could factor in how we might live more happily together, enjoying personal growth as well as the economic kind. "}],[{"start":561.45,"text":"The Age of Keynes that created, according to his advocates, the economic and social booms of the 1950s and 1960s and then ran adrift, according to his detractors, ending with the inflationary misery of the 1970s, may not be right for now, package by package, piece by piece. But his optimistic and widely popular belief in intervening during the dark times with ambition and — most importantly — humanity may be part of the answer. All we have to do is ask the right question. "}],[{"start":592.5500000000001,"text":"James Graham’s ‘The Standard of Living’ is playing at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket until December 12"}],[{"start":599.9000000000001,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":615.5,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1791017448_7136.mp3"}