John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."

Here's something worth reading in light of Niall Ferguson's remark about Keynes (something about his being gay and therefore childless and unconcerned about the future). Keynes was writing in 1930:

My purpose in this essay... is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?...


When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues…. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease....

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

Hag-ridden. The (unlinkable) OED defines "hag-ridden" to mean: "1. Ridden by a hag; esp. afflicted by nightmare... 2. Oppressed in mind; harassed." Examples:

1684   T. Otway Atheist ii. 18   He's married; plagu'd, troubled, and Hag-ridden....
1702   C. Mather Magnalia Christi iii. ii. xxviii. 159/1   He did not allow himself to be Hag-ridden with the Enchantments thereof.
1886   T. Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge I. xx. 246   When she had not slept she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she had been ‘hagrid’.
1891   Spectator 4 Apr. 471/1   Our minds are jaded and hag-ridden, as it were, by the physical fatalities of modern science.

A hag is "A woman supposed to have dealings with Satan and the infernal world; a witch; sometimes, an infernally wicked woman" or "An ugly, repulsive old woman: often with implication of viciousness or maliciousness."

1590   Spenser Faerie Queene i. viii. sig. H4,   A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old....
1712   R. Steele Spectator No. 266. ⁋2   One of those Hags of Hell whom we call Bawds.

Interesting that Keynes pictured "pseudo-moral principles" as female demons.

(Thanks to Meade for turning up that old article. )