"The Permanent Problem of the Human Race": Yglesias, Keynes, Lindsey; the Quest for Valued Identities & Societal Roles; & How to Move from "Abundance" to "Flourishing"
We cannot successfully outsource the solutions to the problem of how to live wisely and agreeably well to markets, bureaucracies, & parasocial algorithm-driven media feeds. We need, rather, societies of abundance in the service of human-scale connection and purpose to have what is in any sense a good society…
Matt Yglesias focuses here on a fact: People’s well‑being jumps when they change status from “unemployed to “retired”. Spinning out the implications of this for an increasingly rich society is an important task for public reasoners here in the century of the 2000s. If we don’t figure this out, we may well wind up in what Brink Lindsey calls a “middle flourishing trap” of mass abundance without mass happiness. For the modern institutions we have built that enable our prosperity and power—markets, democratic states, ideologies, and now algorithmic systems—are extraordinarily productive but structurally inhuman, dissolving the intermediate associations that people who live at human scale need to believe that they are leading lives worth living.
The important thing is not to be rich or even to be working, but rather to have a valued social identity. Smart from Matt Yglesias:
Matt Yglesias: 100 Years of Increasing Leisure <https://www.slowboring.com/p/100-years-of-increasing-leisure>: ‘What happens to unemployed people when they reach retirement age…. They experience a large upswing in well-being…. Te social identity of an unemployed person is much worse than the social identity of a retired person, and so shifting from “unemployed” to “retired” is a big win…. In American culture… even people who inherit large sums of money and don’t need to work tend to want to be seen as working hard at philanthropy or whatever else instead of just chilling.
Keynes perhaps missed this because… he would have grown up in a world where it was considered perfectly respectable for a gentleman to have no occupation and just live off of family money. But, again, I think retirement shows the limits of this American culture of hard work. If you’re affluent and in your 60s and want to stop working and just golf or whatever else all day, nobody thinks there’s a problem with that. And you can see that around 15 percent of men seem to retire early….
It’s not true that “Keynes was wrong” and human lust for material prosperity knows no limits and people will just work and work no matter how productive we become. The idea of people sitting around not working strikes most people, at least in America, as kind of depressing. But it’s clear that when you reframe it around a widely understood social identity like “retirement” that it becomes much more acceptable.
It’s at least plausible that we are on the corner of a big labor-displacing surge in productivity…. [But] I don’t want people to see it exclusively through a lens of threat. Keynes’s positive, optimistic framing of productivity growth is an important way of looking at the world…. [An]other nuance… is that a decent amount of people’s time is spent on unpaid household labor… drudgery. [But] since Keynes’s time… washing machines and dishwashers,…
I do think Matt gets two things wrong here. The first is this:
Matt Yglesias: 100 Years of Increasing Leisure <https://www.slowboring.com/p/100-years-of-increasing-leisure>: ‘In American culture… even people who inherit large sums of money and don’t need to work tend to want to be seen as working hard at philanthropy or whatever else instead of just chilling. Keynes perhaps missed this because… he would have grown up in a world where it was considered perfectly respectable for a gentleman to have no occupation and just live off of family money…
Matt claims that Keynes did not see this. But he did. Keynes does have remarks—pointed remarks—about the behavior of British upper class twit heirs and heiresses:
John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren <http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>: ‘To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been set them…
He believed that the upper-class twits were, by and large, drunkards, gamblers, and whoremasters: that they were definitely not living “wisely and well”, but rather suffering from boredom, ennui, wasting their powers in trivial pursuits, suffering from social emptiness and restless status competition.
He believed that the upper-class twits were facing such a problem precisely because humanity had hypnotized itself into overvaluing work:
For most of human history, survival required constant labor.
Thus moral systems that survived valorized industriousness because scarcity demanded it, and successful societies find ways to boost pro-social behavior by adding inner mental to external material-organizational impulses.
A world in which scarcity would no longer be our master would, Keynes thought, administer an enormous moral-psychological shock to humanity.
We will solve this—if we do—by creating other slices of life besides “retirement”, “schooling” (and “re-schooling”), and raising children that are sources of internal purpose and of external respect. Keynes does not see this solution as easy. It is, in fact, as he stresses, the permanent problem of the human race:
John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren <http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>: ‘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…. To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet—until they get it…. Man will [then] be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well…. There will be no harm in making mild preparations for our [future] destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as the activities of purpose…
And that ought to bring me to one of the now fifty-seven urgent TOP PRIORITY intellectual tasks confronting me on my IMMEDIATE TO DO NOW!!!!! list: my review of my friend Brink Lindsey’s new book The Permanent Problem <https://academic.oup.com/book/10.1093/oso/9780197803967.001.0001>.
I made a down payment on my review a month ago when I posted on it <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/assessing-brink-lindseys-the-permanent>, reacting to Brink’s anguish at two notably bad reviews—by Jonathan Rauch and Michael Strain, both falsely making Brink out to be some post-liberal weirdo.
In fact, Brink is the furthest thing from a post-liberal:
Brink Lindsey: Life Under “An Immense & Tutelary Power” <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/life-under-an-immense-and-tutelary>: ‘I reject this post-liberal position completely and unreservedly…. [While] there are totalitarian tendencies in modernity…. the dominant tendencies… [are the] liberating and humanitarian… dramatic uplift in material living standards… explosion in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities… mass literacy… governments subject to popular control… rule of law… the stigmatization of war… embrace of… universal human dignity… [Post-liberal] thinkers[’ ideas have]… profoundly anti-human implications…
Brink merely sees human flourishing as requiring more than Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms:
Freedom from want—material plenty.
Freedom from fear—not being subject to arbitrary oppression and domination.
Freedom of religion—or, more broadly, freedom to decide what your life is for.
Freedom of speech—not having to hold your tongue, but actually having a say.
Brink sees human flourishing—living wisely and agreeably and well, as Keynes put it—as also requiring a society of:
close relationships (family, friends, community),
meaningful projects (work or nonwork efforts that demand skill and conscientiousness),
rich experiences (the cultivated ability to attend to the world’s “miracle of consciousness”).
inclusiveness (dense webs of belonging and status),
dynamism (the capacity to explore, experiment, and innovate, and to turn new capabilities into better lives).
And Brink’s major diagnosis of the ills of modernity is that the society we have built while an absurdly rich society is also a terrifying mass society: we confront it as producer-cogs in labor markets, as consumer-cogs in product markets, and as parasocial information- and entertainment-consumers who then find themselves without agency to affect anything at all worthwhile. All human associative groups and markers of cohesion and particularity have been steamed away.
We have market economies with their price signals and their equilibria. We have states—democratic states, for now at least—setting-up rules of interaction and issuing commands via what really is a tremendously efficient bureaucratic order. We have ideologies creating and enforcing common values and orientations and operating procedures to a degree that the Prussian General Staff college dreamed of but never managed to attain. And we always have the possibility of a charismatic personalist dictatorship, law-abiding or not, giving mass society direction. on the other—whether by a market equilibrium, a bureaucratic command, an ideological conformity-enforcement, or an overmighty authoritarian personalist dictator.
All of that is necessary for us to be extraordinarily productive as we are.
Yet these societal-scale institutions squash the individual: liberate us from material scarcity and personal hierarchical domination and empower us to control nature and organize ourselves on the one hand, but subject us to the dominion of extraordinary strong powers—market systems, bureaucratic systems, ideological systems, and now algorithmic systems—that seem arbitrary and alien. They seem so because they are. They make us their playthings, controlling us by making us offers we dare not refuse, for refusing them hobbles our very valuable extraordinary material prosperity.
And so none of that is at the human scale we need for autonomy and agency, and thus for human flourishing:
Brink Lindsey: Links & Some Thoughts About Early Critics <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/links-and-some-thoughts-about-early>: ‘What once was a complicated, often convoluted amalgam of overlapping and competing hierarchies and authorities and loyalties resolves into an undifferentiated mass of subjects under a single rationalizing central authority…. All the intermediate institutions that lend structure and coherence and solidarity and workable consensus… are in decline.… The result is progressive atomization, as people’s connections to anything other than the market and state loosen and fray. Under these circumstances, as the bottom-up structures of mass society disintegrate, the only thing holding the social order together is top-down control…
The things our society does not produce are:
positive freedom in the sense of the ability to form groups,
groups at human scale,
so that we can do things that matter to us,
both individually and communally.
That, in a nutshell, is, I think, the point that Brink Lindsey is trying to make in his The Permanent Problem. Perhaps the best way to grok it is to see it as the Second Coming of Alexis de Toqueville <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville>, deploying Tocqueville’s concepts of the “tyranny of the majority” and “aristocracy of manufactures” as descriptions of our societal pathologies today—the pathologies internal to our liberal democratic capitalist order now in transition from the globalized value-chain to the attention info-bio tech economy.
What do I think of Lindsey’s diagnosis, assessment, and project?
A month ago I said I would have to leave that for another time. I do have a day job, after all.
And today I have to repeat the same thing—I still do have a day job.
References:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Assessing Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. February 9. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/assessing-brink-lindseys-the-permanent>.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1930. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion. London: Macmillan. <http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>.
Knabe, Andreas, Ronnie Schöb, & Clemens Hetschko. 2012. “Identity & Wellbeing: How Retiring Makes the Unemployed Happier.” VoxEU/CEPR. May 4. <https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/identity-and-wellbeing-how-retiring-makes-unemployed-happier>.
Lindsey, Brink. 2026. “Links & Some Thoughts About Early Critics”. The Permanent Problem. February 5. <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/links-and-some-thoughts-about-early>:
Lindsey, Brink. 2026. The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. <https://academic.oup.com/book/10.1093/oso/9780197803967.001.0001>.
indsey, Brink. 2023. The Permanent Problem. August 29. <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/life-under-an-immense-and-tutelary>.
Yglesias, Matthew. 2026. “100 Years of Increasing Leisure”. Slow Boring. March 7. <https://www.slowboring.com/p/100-years-of-increasing-leisure>.