Part One

There Ain’t No Such Thing As…

“…the economic problem… the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and an unnecessary muddle. For the western world already has the resources and the technique, if we could create the organisation to use them, capable of reducing the economic problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance… [after] our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.”

– John Maynard Keynes

Essays in Persuasion

(Volume 9 of The Collected Writings, MacMillan, London, 1972), p.xviii