Enough by Design · Chapter One

The Year on the Letter

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter One of Enough by Design: Scarcity, Abundance and the Art of Living Well.

Abstract

In the autumn of 1930 John Maynard Keynes put a date on a letter to people he would never meet. He told them that the economic problem of the human race, the old struggle for subsistence, might be solved within a hundred years. "I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day." He was writing a year into the worst slump the industrial world had yet known, and he wrote it anyway. The hundred years end in 2030. That is the first reason for this book, and the plainest. The letter Keynes wrote is nearly at its date, and the people it was addressed to are the readers of this page: leaders of teams and firms, and the adults of households, living in the richest societies that have ever existed. Some of what Keynes forecast has arrived. Some of it has not, and the part that has not is not mainly a matter of output. It is a matter of hours, of habit and of a feeling about money that the output did not change.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989349

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). The Year on the Letter. In Enough by Design. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989349

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  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {The Year on the Letter},
  booktitle = {Enough by Design},
  chapter   = {1},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989349},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/enough-by-design/01-the-year-on-the-letter/}
}

References

  1. Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic possibilities for our grandchildren. The Nation and Athenaeum, 11 and 18 October 1930; reprinted in Essays in Persuasion (1931). Quoted from the Norton (1963) reproduction, pp. 358–373, read at econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf (fetched 19 October 2026). The essay is a forecast and an argument; it contains no measurement.
  2. Huberman, M., & Minns, C. (2007). The times they are not changin': Days and hours of work in Old and New Worlds, 1870–2000. Explorations in Economic History, 44(4), 538–567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2007.03.002
  3. Robbins, L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan. First edition, p. 15, read from the Mises Institute scan; the Preface is dated February 1932. A definition of a discipline; it makes no empirical claim about how scarce anything is.
  4. Corrado, C., Hulten, C., & Sichel, D. (2009). Intangible capital and U.S. economic growth. Review of Income and Wealth, 55(3), 661–685. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4991.2009.00343.x

Every chapter of Enough by Design

  1. Chapter OneThe Year on the Letterdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989349
  2. Chapter TwoA Letter to the Grandchildrendoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989350
  3. Chapter ThreeWhere Abundance Overreachesdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989351
  4. Chapter FourWhat a Person Is Able to Bedoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989352
  5. Chapter FiveThe Balance Sheet Cannot Seedoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989353
  6. Chapter SixOpening the Librarydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989354
  7. Chapter SevenThe Hours Keynes Promiseddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989355
  8. Chapter EightThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989358
  9. Chapter NineHow to Know It Workeddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989359
  10. Chapter TenThe Hard Conversationsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989360
  11. Chapter ElevenEnough at Homedoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989363
  12. Chapter TwelveThe Art of Life Itselfdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989364
  13. AppendixThe Workbookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989367

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.