Abstract
As first suggested by Keynes (1930), much thinking about the future of consumption starts with claims about future income, technology or demographics, perhaps concocted in a growth model, and then considers what consumption will look like, as a separate question, given those priors. A different approach starts one step further back with inquiry into the type of institutions that would produce such evolutionary growth. You then ask how those same institutions would shape consumption. I argue that the future of consumption depends on income and innovation, which themselves depend on the evolution of institutions. I suggest that this is an evolutionary economic approach to the future of consumption.
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Notes
The consumption function argument was to be part of Keynes’s later General Theory, although the implicit form presented in Keynes (1930) is actually closer to Milton Friedman’s ‘permanent income’ version.
Consideration of status is not necessarily as an argument in the utility function, but as a ranking device that determines success in the non-market sector (Cole et al. 1992).
In that working hours, or labour participation have not fallen systematically in the way predicted. However, we can square this prediction with observation if we will interpret leisure sufficiently broadly to include all classes of welfare (dole, disability support, pensions, parental leave, etc.), and even more-so if we will also interpret some of the growth of public sector work as a form of leisure (see Graeber, www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).
Keynes also introduced the idea of ‘a new disease, of which some readers will not have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in years to come—namely technological unemployment’. He reassured, however, that ‘that is only a temporary phase of maladjustment’.
Keynes himself, we should note, reputedly possessed legendary skill in such arts, and we must assume that he only wanted that those who came after him should experience no less. He makes a point of criticizing the lifestyles of the elite rich at the time.
I thank an anonymous referee for clarifying this logic.
‘The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact.’ (Wilson 1978: 167)
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Potts, J. Institutions hold consumption on a leash: an evolutionary economic approach to the future of consumption. J Evol Econ 27, 239–250 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-015-0437-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-015-0437-1