As noted, Keynes wrote that essay during the Great Depression. Americans really were starving then. His focus on first meeting human physical needs with industrialization is understandable given those circumstances.

So,

Keynes’ “needs-satisfaction” paradigm is an impoverished way of thinking about our place in the world.

…isn’t such ‘impoverished thinking’ when you’re hungry. And a lot of people in the United States are going hungry. For example, in 2016 The Atlantic reported:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food security as “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life,” and in 2006, the year before the housing market stumbled, the USDA estimated that fewer than 10.9 percent of American households were food insecure. By 2009, that figure had spiked to 14.7 percent. And now? As of 2014, the most recent year on record, 14 percent of all American households are not food secure. That’s approximately 17.4 million homes across the United States, populated with more than 48 million hungry people. By the time the USDA reports its 2016 figures in September 2017, new food-stamp restrictions could make that number higher.

…

As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis. That fact alone meets any reasonable definition of the word “crisis,” but it is rarely treated like one.

I’m constantly amazed by the disconnect between cheery pronouncements by those hard-line neoliberal entrepreneurial capitalists, people who glibly promote ‘pick yourself up by the bootstraps’ while dismissing the on-the-ground consequences of those policy choices they endorse. Here’s an example by the author here:

Over the course of the next century, technology will lift most people out of poverty as-currently-defined, satisfying the material needs of the global population in creative and more efficient ways. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that true poverty in 1916 was far worse than most “poverty” in the 21st century.

Not withstanding that 1916 took place during the First World War, the underlying presumption here is that automation of consumer goods production will somehow alleviate basic human needs for food and shelter. Those concerns argued as mere ‘impoverished metrics’ of success.

I don’t doubt starting a business is hard work. Risky. And requires considerable smarts to achieve success.

But this self-congratulatory presumptiveness by the ‘successful class’, one that promotes a story that achieving great deeds in the face of continual economic calamity and risk, while ignoring the benefit of family background, university connections, cumulative add-on and network social effects which diminish risk of failure — even mere access to high quality food — this is a pernicious confirmation bias common among the wealthy, and politically powerful, one that has led to policy choices with devastating consequences for real people. It is based upon a Horatio Ager fantasy of never ending optimism, even as squalor and want for the basics by so many is clearly visible yet dismissed as unseen.

It is Objectivist self-congratulatory illusion, courtesy Rand.

The current neoliberal capitalist system is an utter failure. It incentivizes such wealth inequalities that waste of productive capacity and idle labor actually reduces total potential GDP. It incentivizes monopolies that crowd out potential genuine innovation, so that the next technological pet rock can be brought to market. It is a system of incentives that reward a new birth-right to wealth, rather than genuine merit, and as such is nothing more than a form of capitalist aristocracy.

Adam Smith warned of this in Theory of Moral Sentiments. Though a great western economist, he was no fool.

Look, I’m sure you — the author of this essay — is a great guy. And I’d love to share a table drinking martinis. You’re smart. Write well. And I don’t doubt you worked very hard. So this is not personal criticism. I don’t call you out.

I’m saying that persisting down this path burns the social candle at both ends. By consolidation of wealth while simultaneously automating away labor needs across the board, it recklessly diminishes social stability with excessive want and need. It is no economic utopia. Down this path will be mass famine in the west unlike that seen in the twentieth century. It will overshadow Mao’s The Great Leap Forward. Make Stalin’s Soviet famine from agricultural Lysenkoism pale in comparison. A policy failure of epic proportions. Worse than the disasters of communism.

It is time for leaders in this country to recognize their own failure at steering this ship of nation into an economic reef. I don’t offer a solution. Only point to the fact that continuing this status quo will lead to mass starvation and social upheaval.

And no, I don’t promote a basic income either. But for entirely different reasons. I think it would legitimize the current broken system, ensconcing winners and losers in place like steel in cement. Leading to a neo-feudal rentier society where innovation would be entirely squelched.

We need something very different. And that something certainly isn’t communism either. Of that we both agree.