Tag Archives: money-illusion

Would Keynes’ Grandchildren Please Stand Up?

“I wish I would have drunk more champagne,” – final words of John Maynard Keynes.

Former priest, Nelson Bolles once remarked he had been with many people at the end of their life, but never heard anyone say “I wish I had done more work.” This sentiment is familiar – yet our lives remain organised around work as if the opposite were true.

Keynes final words reflect a similar belief.

In his famous essay written in 1930, Keynes predicted that technological progress would gradually free humanity from the need to work long hours. The economic problem — the struggle for subsistence — would, he believed, come to an end. The real challenge would then begin: how to live well with the time that abundance made possible.

Today, that prediction is usually treated as a failure. The fifteen-hour week has not arrived. The rhythm of working life — mornings, commutes, deadlines — still structures our days.

But this judgement depends on how we measure the outcome.

Keynes was not wrong

Over the past century, productivity has increased dramatically. At the same time, life expectancy has risen, without a corresponding increase in total lifetime work. The additional years of life have largely appeared as time outside of work — IE. retirement.

In this sense, the reduction in work that Keynes predicted has occurred. It has simply taken a different form to what he expected: not a steady shortening of the working week, but an expansion of life beyond it.

The lifetime picture, however, is not the same as the lived one. For those in the central decades of working life — with careers, mortgages, raising families — the daily reality has changed much less. Lifetime work statistics point in one direction; the lived experience of work life points in another. That gap raises significant questions.

Why work still dominates

If less work is possible, why does it not show up in everyday life?

The answer lies in how access to life’s needs is organised.

Food, shelter, education, care — are not simply available. They are accessed through income. And income, for most people, comes from work. As a result, the amount of work people do is not determined primarily by what is technically required to meet human needs, but by the need to earn in order to access them.

Housing provides the clearest example. In countries such as Australia, securing a place to live increasingly requires decades of financial commitment. For younger generations in particular, this often means working longer — not to live better, but simply to gain access to something basic. In effect, this becomes a transfer of income across generations, reinforcing the central role of work.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Education is extended and often debt-funded. Childcare is purchased in order to make paid work possible. Even as productivity reduces the labour required to produce what we need, the structure of access keeps work central to everyday life.

When more efficiency creates more work

This raises a deeper question: if we can meet our needs with less effort, why do we continue to devote so much time to work?

Part of the answer lies in how those needs are defined.

In areas such as housing, the cost and complexity of meeting basic needs have increased over time, shaped by regulation, professionalisation, and rising standards. Many of these changes bring real benefits. But they also appreciably raise the amount of work required to access those benefits.

This is not purely a technical necessity. It shows up clearly in the choices people make when alternatives exist — some people who move to countries such as Thailand, where traditional building methods and lighter regulation remain viable, often find they can live comfortably on a fraction of the income. The same basic need, met with far less work. What varies is not what people need, but what the system requires in order to provide it.”

There is a deep irony here. When the cost of meeting basic needs rises, the result is often counted as economic success — more work is created, more income flows, output increases. Yet this also represents a greater claim on people’s time. What appears as growth may, in part, be the absorption of potential leisure into additional work. We count it as progress because it generates more money. But more money circulating is not the same as more human wellbeing. This is one of the places where the confusion between money and real wealth is most visible — and most costly.

Work in the wrong places

The pattern becomes clearer when we step back further — from individual lives to the global economy as a whole.

People in poorer countries work significantly more hours than those in richer ones. Part of this reflects lower wages. But it also reflects how the global economy directs labour.

Production flows toward where money is, not where need is greatest. As a result, large amounts of human effort are devoted to goods and services with marginal benefit, while more basic needs remain unmet elsewhere.

At the same time, globalisation links these systems together. Workers in richer countries are increasingly connected to those in poorer ones through shared production and competition. This creates pressure that limits how far reductions in work can occur in one place without being reflected elsewhere.

The result is not simply inequality, but misalignment. The problem is not that too little work is being done, but that the work being done is not directed toward what is most needed.

Money and the organisation of life

At a deeper level, all of this reflects the role of money — and a confusion about what it is.

Money is not the food, the house, or the time itself. It is a system of claims on those things. But once access to life is organised through those claims, the need to earn and maintain them comes to shape how life is lived.

As Alan Watts observed, there is a tendency to mistake the measurement for the thing measured. When that happens, the system begins to organise itself around the maintenance of the measurement rather than around what the measurement was meant to serve.

In modern economies, this can be seen directly in how work is sustained. We work not only to produce what is needed, but to maintain the flow of income, employment, and financial claims that structure access to life itself. The monetary necessity of work has come to be experienced as if it were a material necessity — as if the work itself were what stood between us and survival, rather than the way access to survival is organised. Because we do not make that distinction, we cannot easily see the less-work option, even when our productive capacity has already made it possible.

Conclusion

Keynes’ prediction has not simply failed. The reduction in work he anticipated has largely occurred. But it has not taken the form he expected.

The capacity to work less exists. Yet the way we organise access to resources, define our needs, and direct human effort continues to keep work at the centre of life.

The question is no longer whether we can work less.

It is why, having gained that capacity, we do not.

Anatomy of the Blind Spot

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” – Epictetus


The influence that money has over our lives is profound. Money is the driving force behind so many of the choices and decisions we make. In fact, it often feels like there is really no choice. Money controls where we can live, how we live, and what opportunities are open to us. Although we know it is a human invention—that we can’t eat it or live in it—we experience it as one of the most real constraints we face. For most of us, its absence is equivalent to the absence of food, shelter, energy, and care themselves.

This is the great tragedy of our time. We have essentially solved the problem of physical survival. We have the food, the technology, and the capacity to care for everyone with relative ease; yet we don’t. This is something deeper than a simple misunderstanding. It points to the presence of a blind spot — not just an error in thought, but something closer to a collective hypnosis that shapes how we act and respond without our being fully aware of it.

At the core of this blind spot is a failure to distinguish between money and the wealth it represents. Money is a symbolic system we have developed: a way of recording claims, coordinating production, and distributing access to goods and services. It is not those goods and services itself. But in practice the symbol and the reality are treated as if they were the same. Where money is absent, we experience a lack — even where the material capacity to provide what is needed remains.

This essay asks what happens when the fiction becomes so complete that we no longer see it as such. When the symbol replaces the reality it represents, and the distinction between them disappears from view.

This blind spot is not sustained at a single level. It is reinforced across multiple layers of human life.

At the systemic level, money operates as an abstract system of obligation — binding people into relationships that are numerical and impersonal — relations of credit, debt, and obligation that are detached from direct human exchange. It is abstract, but its power over everyday life is concrete. Access to resources is mediated through these structures, and so the symbolic system acquires real force.

At the cultural level, the system requires continual expansion. As David Bentley Hart observes, capitalism must not only meet existing desires, but generate new ones. Consumption must extend beyond natural need in order to sustain the system. Desire itself becomes shaped by the requirements of accumulation. What counts as “enough” is continually deferred.

At the social level, the system is enforced through shared behaviour. As D.H. Lawrence describes in his poem ‘Money Madness’, the fear associated with money is not simply fear of money itself, but fear of other people — of exclusion, humiliation, and deprivation in a world where worth is measured monetarily. Even if one individual were to see through the system, they remain subject to the actions of others who do not. The result is a form of collective reinforcement: we act as if money is the ultimate reality because everyone else does.

At the psychological level, these structures connect directly to the human survival drive. Because access to basic needs is mediated by money, money becomes associated with survival itself. This activates powerful motivations — fear, competition, anxiety — and embeds the system deeply within individual behaviour and conditioning. Even where material scarcity has been reduced through technological development, the experience of scarcity persists.

Taken together, these layers form a self-reinforcing system. Abstract structures shape social behaviour; social behaviour shapes individual psychology; individual psychology reproduces the structures. Within this system, the distinction between money and real wealth becomes difficult to perceive, not because it is conceptually complex, but because it is embedded in the conditions of everyday life.

This is not just a theoretical point. The blind spot can be seen in many everyday situations. Most of the time it operates quietly below the surface, but there are moments where it surfaces; unmistakable in its absurdity.

A simple example is paying to access something that already exists in abundance. A digital film can now be reproduced at near zero cost, yet access remains restricted. The frustration is not really about the price, but the sense that the constraint no longer fits the reality. The extreme version of this is captured in the joke that “human existence is moving to subscription only”.

Similar patterns appear elsewhere — empty houses alongside homelessness, food waste alongside hunger, or rising productivity alongside continued dependence on paid work. In each case, the capacity exists, but access is limited by how it is organised.

These moments of seeing through are brief, but they reveal something of great importance: the limits we experience are not always material. They are often institutional — and they point to a world that is already possible but not yet realised.

This helps explain a central paradox of modern economies. Technological development has dramatically increased our productive capacity. In many areas, we are capable of producing more than enough to meet basic human needs. Yet insecurity, competition, and the sense of “not enough” persist. The limitation is no longer purely material. It lies in how access to what is produced is organised — and in the assumptions through which that organisation is understood.

The blind spot, then, is not just that we mistake money for wealth. It is that this mistake is sustained by a system that shapes how we perceive, what we desire, how we relate to one another, and how we secure our survival. Because it operates across all of these levels, it is not easily seen from within.

To see it clearly is not merely to adopt a different opinion about money. It is to recognise that a symbolic system has come to define the boundaries of what is considered possible — and that those boundaries may no longer correspond to the underlying reality.

Alan Watts’ Insight

I want to acknowledge Alan Watts and his essay Wealth Versus Money as the original inspiration for the ideas explored on this site.

In the essay, Watts pointed to a fundamental delusion that we share: the mistaking of money for the wealth it represents. Money, he argued, is a symbolic system created to organise production and exchange, much like inches are used to measure length. Yet when the measuring system begins to define the boundaries of reality rather than simply describing them, the tool starts to dominate what it was meant to serve.

The following passage captures the essence of his argument. He starts off using an analogy of the Great Depression as a building site:

…it was just as if someone had come to work on building a house and, on the morning of the Depression, the boss had said, “Sorry, baby, but we can’t build today. No inches.” “Whaddya mean, no inches? We got wood, We got metal. We even got tape measures.” “Yeah, but you don’t understand business. We been using too many inches and there’s just no more to go around.”

A few years later, people were saying that Germany couldn’t possibly equip a vast army and wage a war, because it didn’t have enough gold.

What wasn’t understood then, and still isn’t really understood today, is that the reality of money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters, grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself.

The full essay can be found here.

Written more than fifty years ago, some details are dated — Watts discusses the gold standard, for example, which is no longer used as it once was. However, the core insight has only grown in relevance. The first half of the essay is where the essential argument lies; after that it is very much a product of its time.

Work, the Monetary Constraint, and how it prevents us from living to our full potential

Modern economic life is constrained by a conceptual confusion so ingrained that it usually goes unnoticed.

Money – a symbolic system we have developed to organise production and exchange in complex societies, is a very useful tool. But over time the symbol has come to be treated as if it were the wealth itself.

Consider money and survival. Within our economic worldview they are practically speaking, the same thing. Without money, I won’t survive — even when the material means to provide food, shelter, energy and care are not just present, but present in abundance.

This confusion becomes especially visible when we look at the role of work in modern economic life.

In economic thinking, jobs are treated as an inherent good. Governments strive to create them, economists measure the health of the economy by them, and unemployment is treated as a problem that needs solving.

But this view overlooks an important distinction — one that ties directly to the confusion between money and wealth.

There are three main reasons why people work.

First, we work to produce the goods and services needed for life: food, housing, transport, energy, healthcare and the countless other things that sustain us.

Second, we work for fulfillment. Many forms of work provide meaning, creativity, participation and connection with others. So satisfying a basic human need.

Third, people work to earn a living. In this case work functions as a way of gaining access to what the economy produces.

The first two of these reasons for working arise directly from human life itself; we are physical beings who need food and shelter and we are psychological beings who need meaning and connection. But the third reason is of a different kind. Working to earn a living is not a fact of nature, but is a system we have developed. Like the rules of the road, it exists because people created it to deal with a particular situation. Essentially it is a means of distributing the fruits of our collective labour.

For much of history this arrangement made good sense. Production was labour-intensive and resources were limited. Under such conditions linking income to work was a practical way of coordinating both production and distribution. But technological development has gradually altered this situation.

Over the past two centuries the productivity of human labour has increased enormously. Machines, automation and digital systems now allow a relatively small amount of human effort to produce vast quantities of goods and services.

Historically, societies responded to this increasing productivity in two main ways. Part of it was used to produce more goods and services. But part of it was also translated into shorter working hours.

Between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century the average working week in industrialised countries fell dramatically. Reduced working time was widely understood as one of the primary benefits of rising productivity.

In recent decades this dynamic has stalled. Productivity has continued to rise, but working hours have stopped falling. In Australia for instance, productivity has risen by over 140% since 1970, but working hours have hardly reduced.

Instead, productivity gains have been channeled into expanding output and increasing returns to capital — deepening inequality and driving production that is often wasteful and environmentally destructive.

At the same time, access to the goods and services produced by the economy remains tied primarily to income earned through employment.

This creates a tension.

Technological progress reduces the amount of human labour required to produce the things we need to live. But if access to those goods depends on having a job, the system must continually generate new employment even when less labour is actually required.

Under these conditions economic growth becomes structurally important, not because more needs to be produced, but because employment remains the main mechanism through which income is distributed.

Meanwhile many basic human needs remain unmet despite the existence of expanding productive capacity and technical know-how. Globally hunger and insecurity persist alongside a surplus of food. In spite of actual evidence, we act as if there were not enough.

This brings us back to the conceptual confusion at the heart of the issue.

Money is a tool for coordinating economic activity. It records claims, measures prices and facilitates exchange. But it is not in itself the food, housing, energy or care that people need.

When monetary limits are mistaken for real limits, existing productive capacity can go unused.

This does not mean that all constraints are illusory. Ecological limits are real, and coordinating complex economies is never simple. Institutions cannot be redesigned without consequences.

But the extraordinary productive power of modern civilisation raises a question that we rarely stop to ask.

If technological progress makes it possible to produce essential goods with less human labour, how should that possibility be used?

One response is to continue expanding production indefinitely. Another is to translate part of that productive capacity into greater leisure, security and freedom.

The challenge facing modern economies may therefore not be simply how to produce more, but how to organise and distribute what we can already produce.

In that sense the frontier before us is not technological. It is perceptual. And recognising the difference between money and the real wealth it represents could mark a turning point in the evolution of our civilisation.