“We are suffering just now from a bad attack of pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down ; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade ahead. I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us.” So wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1928.
Actually, the pessimists had a point, since 1938 found many countries still on the cusp of recovery from the Great Depression. But that is to niggle: Keynes’s main point, that “we are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing pains of over-rapid changes,” stands today. Proved by any dispassionate look at what we will see when we emerge, blinking, into the “broad sunlit uplands” that Winston Churchill foresaw during another period in which the future looked grim.
