Brad DeLong: preference

Transcript context

…Yes, now, earlier than now. What exactly did Keynes get wrong in your opinion? Obviously a very smart man. Yes. I really do not know. I’m tempted to follow Richard Easterlin and say that modern economic growth is not a triumph of humanity and technology over material want, but of material want over humanity and technology. I now have an 18-month-old laptop, and I find myself annoyed that it’s not as fast as another laptop I could get. I’m using a slightly — well, not a slightly improved — I’m using a significantly improved process of turning sand into something that can come dammed close to think with parts four nanometers on a side in the most complicated human manufacturing and division of labor process ever accomplished. So complicated that in fact, there are only two productive organizations, each of which is absolutely essential for it, one of which is the one in the Netherlands that makes the extreme ultraviolet machines, and the other one is the one in Taiwan that knows how to actually use the extreme ultraviolet machines to carve paths for electrons to flow in stone made of sand. Most of the time, I should be aware that materially, I’m very quite sated. When I do spend a lot of money on a dinner out and on a bottle of wine, I have a nagging worry that suppose I were to take this money and buy 20 McDonald’s gift certificates and go down to a local childcare center and hand them out to harassed single mothers who are having difficulty making ends meet. Wouldn’t the smiles on their faces be better, make me happier than actually drinking this stuff? It’s a question. Yet, as you say, I work pretty damned hard, and I work pretty damned hard in large part because I like my work, but also because I am somewhat of a status-seeking individual. It’s something like Liaquat Ahamed’s review of Slouching towards Utopia in Foreign Affairs this morning — the idea that someone as smart and accomplished and as knowledgeable as him thinks I actually belong in his company. That really does send me over the moon. Is that a bad thing? Is that me living my best life? Would Keynes say that I am no longer in the kingdom of necessity, that in fact, I have outgrown the community of those hagridden by the vices of avarice, usury, and precaution — which we pretend are virtues because they’re socially useful — and I’m now living my best life wisely unwell? Or would I be better off simply taking things off and going down and hanging out at my cousin’s place in Malibu? Was Schumpeter correct about the bureaucratization of the large business firm?…

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