Economics and Wittgenstein's Ladder

Keynes on economics, art and the state

Cezanne’s L’Enlèvement (1867), first owned by the novelist Emile Zola, and later acquired by Keynes

On more than one occasion economist friends have told me that while they are 'Keynesian' in their approach to economic questions, they find Keynes himself ‘very difficult’. Indeed, few, if any, have actually read Keynes. There are likely many reasons for this. First, there is Keynes' style. It is the view of Deirdre McCloskey, probably the world's foremost authority on the 'rhetoric of economics' that Keynes' gigantic influence has been largely due to his powers as a writer. I think there is something in this and Keynes’ mastery of language means that we all speak 'Keynesian' from time to time, often without knowing it ('Animal spirits', 'paradox of thrift', 'liquidity preference', etc...). These examples are taken from the General Theory, a text which contains many of the high peaks of Keynesian rhetoric, as well as some of its most notorious obscurities. For a less familiar text which is still dense with examples of Keynes’ beautifully turned sentences, I recommend the Harrod-Keynes correspondence, in particular the letters from the late 1930s on the nature of economic methodology. Consider, for example:

'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world'

Or

'[in economics] it is as though the fall of the apple to the ground depended on the apple's motives, on whether it is worth while falling to the ground, and whether the ground wanted the apple to fall, and on mistaken calculations on the part of the apple as to how far it was from the centre of the earth'

The Keynesian style is characterised by a much richer idiom than we are used to today, and for someone who has been trained on a diet of contemporary economics research papers where a more utilitarian style is demanded, it must seem foreign and, in places, incomprehensible.

Another problem is that Keynes was frequently engaged in debates about matters of concrete policy which have since lost most of their significance for modern readers. The feasibility of the post-Versailles reparations schedule, the prospects for the gold standard, the optimal strategy for funding a war economy - these are matters of ancient history to today’s working economist. He may as well read Xenophon. Technological change and successive social revolutions have carried us further from Keynes than simple 'clock-time' would suggest and economics, Keynes repeatedly tells us, is an unusually time-bound science. As he put it in his memorial essay on Alfred Marshall, the modern economists 'must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis'.

The language problem and the contextual-historical problem are what I would call hermeneutical issues - i.e. those relating to questions of right interpretation - and it is these that have caused most of the controversy among Keynes scholars, who continue to dispute the true meaning of the General Theory almost 90 years after its first publication. As a rather devoted reader of Keynes, I believe there is another, deeper, problem to do with how Keynes thought about economics in its relation to different systems of knowledge and of value.

Unlike most economists today, Keynes clearly thought of economics as a problem that could be definitively solved and then done away with altogether. Indeed, Keynes seems to speak as though the world will be a better place when economics has vanished as both a profession and a live concern for mankind. To borrow an image from his friend Wittgenstein, economics is a ladder that should be thrown away once it has been used. This idea appears in many different places in his writings - probably the best known is the great essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930):

'[...]Those countries are suffering relatively which are not in the vanguard of progress. We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem.'

And further

'I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not - if we look into the future - the permanent problem of the human race.

Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because - if, instead of looking into the future, we look into the past - we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race-not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.

Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature-with all our impulses and deepest instincts-for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.

Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.'

This could hardly be further from our world, where the most dependable political slogan is still Jim Carville's 'It's the economy, stupid'. The wisdom of Carville’s dictum lies in the way it captures the easy identification of the common good with material welfare that we hear from contemporary civic moralists across the political spectrum. For us the good life is a foot on the property ladder, two cars, a collection of up-to-date technological gadgets and ready access to modern amenities. While I do not necessarily go all the way with Keynes, when I read about the current obsessions with growth, I wonder whether he was right to warn against the temptation to 'overestimate the importance of the economic problem, or sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater and more permanent significance'.

For Keynes, matters of more ‘permanent significance’ generally meant great works of art. He was an avid picture collector, and visitors to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge are likely to encounter at least one painting from Keynes’ private holdings. For a time his baronial seat at Tilton in Sussex hosted paintings from Sickert, Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, Renoir and Degas, as well as excellent pieces by his friends Duncan and Vanessa Grant. Another paper that has been largely ignored by economists is Keynes’ ‘Art and the State’, originally published in The Listener magazine in 1936. There are two parts to the essay, the first of which traces the emergence of what Keynes calls the ‘dreadful heresy’ - namely, the belief that the ‘economic ideal’ is the ‘sole respectable purpose of the community as a whole’. This, Keynes tells us, has been joined to a ‘perverted theory of the state’ conceived as a sort of bureau for planning with no other function than to ensure that all public expenditure conformed to strict business arithmetic. The powerful influence of the ‘dreadful heresy’ meant that the position of artists in modern society was increasingly untenable. What was needed to restore dignity both to the state and the artist, was a ‘responsive spirit of the age’, something that cannot be mandated by policy, but has to be cultivated by what Keynes, in a letter written around the same time, describes as a careful conservatism for ‘everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and action’.

The second part of the essay concerns the proper role of the state in relation to art, taking as its focus recent proposals to rebuild the London south bank. This is not the place to go into the details of Keynes’ own plans for urban renewal in London. The point I want to bring out here is that the real ‘difficulty’ with Keynes for the modern reader is the fact that he - uniquely among economists - thought ‘business’ was a diversion from the real core of life, and that nothing brought us closer to that vital centre than art. Economics was a way to furnish the community with a necessary fund of means - it was his settled and final faith that no one but the artist could ‘translate into actual form our potentialities of social wealth’.