ment," Keynes concluded, would "prove the only means of approximation to full employment." Government spending would put people to work, stimulate consumption, and forestall the need for a more radical attack on the problem of inequality. It would provide an alternative to a redistribution of income, in other words, even if many businessmen still found it difficult to distinguish "novel measures for safeguarding capitalism from what they call Bolshevism."

Orthodox economists had exaggerated the value of thrift, according to Keynes. They thought of the "accumulated wealth of the world as having been painfully built up out of [the] voluntary abstinence of individuals from the immediate enjoyment of consumption," when it should have been "obvious that mere abstinence is not enough by itself to build cities or drain fens." The expectation of profits, not abstinence, was the "engine that drives enterprise." Profits in turn presupposed a rising standard of living in the population as a whole and a general desire for a more abundant existence. Thrift was a miserly virtue, as Keynes saw it, appropriate only to conditions of scarcity. Money was meant to be spent, not hoarded. It had no value in itself. The morality of saving and hard work betrayed a lack of faith in the future, whereas "enterprise" required "animal spirits" and optimism. Keynesian theory elaborated the discovery already proclaimed by the advertising industry in the I920s, that "prosperity lies in spending, not in saving," in the words of Earnest Elmo Calkins, one of the first advertisers to grasp the principle of "artificial obsolescence." ^*

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A Keynesian avant la lettre, Calkins distinguished between goods "we use" and "those we use up." Whereas Adam Smith had argued that economic expansion would be impelled by a growing demand for "things more durable" than the wasteful pleasures of the wealthy, Calkins interpreted the revolution of rising expectations as a demand for goods designed to be "used up" as quickly as possible. "Artificial obsolescence" meant the continual redesign of products, "entirely apart from any mechanical improvement, to make them markedly new, and encourage new buying, exactly as the fashion designers make skirts longer so you can no longer be happy with your short ones." The taste for "better things," as another advertising executive pointed out, thus demanded an "ideal of beauty ... which happens to be current." No doubt Keynes had a more exalted ideal of beauty in mind when he welcomed the liberation of aesthetic appreciation from puritanical repression. But it was not always easy to distinguish the

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