John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ is celebrated today as both an important transitional work in his economic theory and for its famously optimistic prediction of a distant future age of leisure, made against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Despite the essay’s acclaim and subsequent scholarly analysis of its arguments, comparatively little attention has been given to the history and context of its composition. In this paper we explore the intellectual origins of ‘Economic Possibilities’ by introducing evidence of its parallels to a similar utopian message in H.G. Wells’s obscure didactic novel, The World of William Clissold (1926). Drawing upon archival evidence from Keynes and Wells’s own contemporary exchanges, we bring to light a largely unnoticed intellectual dialogue between the two authors that took place from roughly 1926 to 1934 through their published works, letters, and public and private conversations. The context provided by this dialogue sheds light upon the authors’ shared interests in the “scientific” ordering of society, and in particular a vision of the future that relied heavily upon proactive eugenic planning. These findings point to an under-acknowledged eugenic dimension to Keynes’s essay that emerges more openly from his contemporary exchanges with Wells as well as in several unpublished works and letters by both men. In addition to contextualizing a number of the intentionally vague predictions and prescriptions in ‘Economic Possibilities,’ these findings establish deeper eugenic commitments in Keynes’s beliefs than previously thought and extend them into the mature phase of his economic writing.

中文翻译：

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约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯、HG 威尔斯和一个有问题的乌托邦

约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯 (John Maynard Keynes) 1930 年的论文“我们孙辈的经济可能性”今天被认为是他的经济理论中的一项重要的过渡性著作，也是在大萧条的背景下对遥远的未来休闲时代的著名乐观预测。尽管这篇文章广受赞誉并随后对其论点进行了学术分析，但相对而言，对其构成的历史和背景给予的关注相对较少。在本文中，我们通过引入证据证明其与 HG Wells 晦涩的教学小说《威廉·克利索德的世界》（The World of William Clissold）中类似的乌托邦信息相似，从而探索了“经济可能性”的知识渊源。借鉴凯恩斯和威尔斯自己当代交流的档案证据，我们揭示了两位作者在大约 1926 年至 1934 年期间通过他们已发表的作品、信件以及公开和私人对话进行的一场很大程度上未被注意的智力对话。本次对话提供的背景揭示了作者对社会“科学”秩序的共同兴趣，特别是一种严重依赖积极的优生计划的未来愿景。这些发现表明凯恩斯的文章中存在一个未被充分承认的优生维度，这一维度更公开地出现在他与威尔斯同时代的交流中，以及两人未发表的几部著作和信件中。除了将“经济可能性”中的一些有意含糊的预测和规定置于语境中之外，