Our productivity journey has allowed us to see the benefits of productivity growth. We have also seen the complications of its measurement. We have looked at the debates over the causes of productivity growth and the extent to which productivity has a dark side. In Chapter 4 we argued that the past cannot be a guide to the future. Now, having explored some of the variety of actual productivity experiences, we can also see more clearly why we need to think beyond the conventional views of productivity growth as the solution to global problems.

This was the point that Tawney, whom we quoted in Chapter 1, made a century ago. Productivity is a means, not an end, and it is a means that can also be part of the problem that it is said to cure. Tawney was not alone in thinking this. In a 1930 essay, the economist John Maynard Keynes talked about what he called “the economic possibilities for our grandchildren”. He was confident that the productivity successes to come would release them from the need to look for never-ending productivity growth. Already by 1930 he had problems with those who wanted to argue that “jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam to-day”. This argument would look even more foolish in “a hundred years [when] the economic problem would be solved”. In this future world we would have so much that we would need to use fewer inputs, not least our labour. “Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week … three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!” (Keynes 1931 [1930]: 370). In a new world of leisure, we would have the opportunity to do many different things. Today we are the grandchildren that Keynes wrote about. Some people reading this book will be the great grandchildren, perhaps the great, great grandchildren of those alive in 1930. Keynes was right. We have achieved the miraculous levels of wealth in the rich world that he thought would release us from need and the focus on ever more material wealth.