Zach Carter: belief

Transcript context

…In a famous essay, as you know, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” — I think it’s 1930 — Keynes predicted we — I’m not sure who the “we” is here — would be working 15 hours a week. What did he get wrong? Or was he just off by a few decades? Well, Benjamin Friedman, I think, did the analysis most recently. Bob Solow did one 2007–2008. If you take living standard to be something like GDP per capita, then the actual productive output of society was pretty close to what Keynes is talking about in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” but the distribution of that output is not egalitarian. The answer that I put in my book — that I think is basically right — is that most of these gains are captured by people at the top. As a result, we have people working all the time. But median family income in the US is now still past the range where Keynes would have predicted 15 hours of work a week, right? Uneven distribution, but median wage in Keynes’s time was pitifully low. And now, it’s still pretty high.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.