"Correctly anticipating the rapid growth of living standards, moreover, Keynes predicted that within a century people's material wants would be satiated, and so per capita consumption would stop growing. People would work less, but only because their need for income, and more important their desire for it, was less. And then the challenge to society would be the management of unprecedented voluntary leisure. This was a popular 1930s theme--think of Huxley's Brave New World--but it underestimated the ability of business to create new wants, and new goods and services to fulfill them."
React to this quote
More by Richard Posner
See allResonant Thoughts
"The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyag…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"Offending people is better than no reaction at all."
— Matthew Bellamy"It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come t…"
— Claude Debussy"It looked as though the people we thought we knew best carried secrets that they didn't even know themselve…"
— W. Somerset Maugham"All these young millionaires were anarchists, of course: when a man possesses everything it is the supreme …"
— Romain Rolland"The Eating and Drinking Reformation is at the foundation of all the good that would be produced in society."
— Joseph Brotherton"The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I…"
— Erich Fromm