John Maynard Keynes on Indigenous Wealth: A Conversation About Repair and Risk
Interviewer: Lord Keynes, you once said that the difficulty lies not in new ideas but in escaping old ones. If you were advising governments today on Indigenous wealth, where would you begin?
Keynes: I’d begin with honesty.
You can’t speak of Indigenous “wealth creation” as though we’re starting from zero. The wealth already existed — it was simply transferred, often violently, to others.
So the first task isn’t invention; it’s restitution. But restitution alone won’t carry the future. Once the account is balanced, you must decide what kind of economy you wish to build next.
Interviewer: Governments tend to rely on grants, purchased assets, and cautious programs. They prefer safety to risk.
Keynes: Yes, they believe they’re avoiding error when they’re really avoiding movement.
Safety is admirable for surgeons, less so for nations.
If all your capital sits idle in low-yield projects, you may preserve dignity but not autonomy.
The trick is to pair state support with enterprise — to use the public balance sheet as the springboard for private imagination.
Interviewer: You make it sound almost mechanical.
Keynes: Economics is mechanical — until it isn’t. It has its laws, but they bend under psychology. Confidence, hope, belief — these are as real as credit.
When a dispossessed people begins to invest in itself, it’s performing a psychological revolution. That’s far more powerful than any subsidy.
Interviewer: Some would argue that asking Indigenous nations to take risk after centuries of exclusion is cruel.
Keynes: It’s certainly unfair. But fairness isn’t the measure — vitality is.
Without risk, there is no future, only administration.
Think of Britain after the war — rationed, bankrupt, exhausted — yet compelled to rebuild. We did so by borrowing outrageously on tomorrow’s faith. Perhaps Indigenous nations need the same audacity, supported by the State that once denied them.
Interviewer: What about those loss-making farms governments bought to promote self-sufficiency?
Keynes: Those are examples of expenditure without imagination. The intention was noble; the design was bureaucratic. They were built to avoid scandal, not to create surplus.
A farm, like a nation, must be allowed to experiment, to fail a little. Without that freedom, there’s no discovery — only accounting.
Interviewer: So the government should take more risk?
Keynes: Not more, but smarter. It should guarantee the first risk so that others may take the second.
Public money is the yeast; private energy is the dough. You need both for bread.
Interviewer: You seem to see this less as charity and more as economic design.
Keynes: Precisely.
Charity exhausts itself. Design endures.
The aim is not to spend for justice alone, but to spend creatively — to give back not only what was lost, but the means to generate anew.
Interviewer: You’ve been accused of believing that governments can engineer prosperity.
Keynes: Only if they’re willing to take the long view.
You can’t turn dispossession into wealth overnight. The process may span generations.
But with steady public investment, patient risk-taking, and a belief that enterprise belongs to everyone, a new capital class can emerge — Indigenous not only by blood, but by ownership.
Interviewer: And what happens if it fails?
Keynes: Then we try again. The alternative is moral insolvency — a society content to keep some of its citizens as perpetual dependents.
Failure at least implies motion.
Interviewer: So, in the end, you’re optimistic?
Keynes: I am what I have always been — conditionally hopeful.
History can’t be undone, but it can be compounded differently.
Wealth, like interest, grows through time and trust. The question is whether we have the courage to invest in both.
Sebastian Vanderzeil is Director of Strabo Rivers, an economic consultancy specialising in infrastructure, water, and investment strategy. This essay reimagines a conversation with John Maynard Keynes about Indigenous wealth, repair, and the art of taking risk.