In 1928, seven years before the appearance of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes predicted, in a lecture on "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," that abundance would bring the work ethic into discredit. "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." In the future, the acquisitive impulse—"the love of money as a possession, as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life"—would be recognized as a "somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."
Abundance, Keynes thought, would assure a "decent level of consumption for everyone" and make it possible to devote "our energies" to the "noneconomic interests of our lives." Automation would eliminate drudgery, reduce the hours of work, and provide men and women with plenty of leisure. The economic virtues would be relegated to a subordinate place in the hierarchy of values; art and learning would come into their own. The idea that the state should confine its attention to "utilitarian and economic" questions would be recognized as the "most dreadful heresy, perhaps, which has ever gained the ear of a civilized people." Now that the world was no longer haunted by the specter of scarcity, it was possible to appreciate the importance of the state's patronage of art and education, the role it might play in raising the general level of taste. "The day is not far off," Keynes wrote in 1924, "when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and ... the head and the heart will be occupied ... by the real problems—the problems of life and human relations, of creation and behavior and religion."
The "behavioral" problems Keynes had in mind included "birth control and the use of contraceptives, marriage laws, the treatment of sexual
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