Making a Living.

Suzman also criticizes Keynes for thinking that economic elites would lead us to the "promised land", yet in his own account, the power of "ambitious CEOs and money-men" mostly fades into the background. When Keynes "first described his economic utopia", Suzman points out, "the study of hunter-gatherer societies was barely more than a sideshow in the newly emerging discipline of social anthropology." On the contrary, as the economist James Crotty has shown, Keynes styled himself in the tradition of Mill as a "liberal socialist": What he imagined might come after the onset of economic stagnation was a barrage of public investment, which would displace private investment as the primary engine of economic stability. For Suzman, anthropological insights into our pre-scarcity past lend support to a post-scarcity tradition in economics, which he associates with the work of John Maynard Keynes. [Extracted from the article]