Keynes' 'Good Life' Vision Ignored Colonial Extraction and Unpaid Care — Playwright's FT Profile Omits Structural Roots of Failed Leisure Promise
Original framing: “John Maynard Keynes and the search for the good life” — Financial Times
Indigenous economic systems from the Haudenosaunee Seventh Generation principle to Māori kaitiakitanga (guardianship) define prosperity through intergenerational ecological accountability, not GDP growth or leisure hours. Keynes' vision assumed a separation between economy and ecology that Indigenous knowledge rejects — the 'good life' is impossible on a degraded land base. The potlatch economies of the Pacific Northwest, criminalised by Canadian state policy until 1951, redistributed wealth through ceremonial giving, directly contradicting Keynes' assumption that accumulation precedes redistribution. Contemporary Indigenous economists like Rebecca Adamson and Winona LaDuke demonstrate that post-growth wellbeing requires land back, not shorter workweeks for salaried professionals.
Keynes' 'good life' was always a class-compromise fantasy for the metropolitan professional-managerial strata, subsidised by three invisible pillars: colonial resource extraction, feminised reproductive labour, and ecological drawdown.
Graham's FT profile performs the trickster's inversion — celebrating the questioner while obscuring the structural violence that made his questions possible for the few. The 8-dimensional restoration reveals that the good life is not a leisure quota but a relational achievement: it requires land back (Indigenous), time sovereignty through care socialisation (feminist), biophysical limits respected (ecological), and power redistributed via sectoral bargaining and commons governance (historical). The path forward is not better macroeconomic management but the abolition of the growth imperative itself — replacing Keynes' 'economic possibilities for our grandchildren' with pluriversal possibilities for all grandchildren, human and more-than-human.