They are in thrall not to John Maynard Keynes, sage of the Depression, but to his Cambridge contemporary, Frank Ramsey, a precocious polymath who made his contributions in the prelapsarian 1920s.
In the 1920s they moved to California, where they started a movie theater and a hotdog stand, but they eventually went bust when the Great Depression came around.
During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.
As a student, he worked odd jobs to help his family get through the tail end of the Great Depression, including delivering sandwiches in Manhattan, a far cry from his dreams of writing sci-fi novels.
As a result, they have lost the parachute they once had in times of financial setback - a back-up earner (usually Mom) who could go into the workforce if the primary earner got laid off or fell sick.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.