Chartbook 322: "Can We Consume Our Surplus?" or John Maynard Keynes on "The Influence of Furniture on Love"

John Maynard Keynes was an aesthete in the most capacious sense. Questions of beauty and artistic creation were at the heart of his ethical and political thinking.

My co-presenter of the podcast, Cam Abadi picked this up as the somewhat off-center approach to Keynes that we took at our recent live recording in NYC. You can hear the episode here.

In the course of my reading for the show, I came across a variety of very interesting writings about Keynes and aesthetics, notably the essay by Gilles Dostaler on "Keynes, art and aesthetics." in the collection Keynes’s General Theory After Seventy Years. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010 edited by Robert W. Dimand, Robert A. Mundell and Alessandro Vercelli.

Dostaler made reference to a fascinating-sounding essay that Keynes contributed in 1909 as a young man to the Apostles society with the intriguing title: “Can We Consume Our Surplus? or The Influence of Furniture on Love”.

In the recording last week in New York, I quoted from this essay indirectly, provoking both mirth and disbelief. Can it really be true that Keynes wrote about sex and furniture?

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