As prophecies go, the one made by John Maynard Keynes in his short 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ must rate as an economic ‘Peace in our Time’.
“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” he wrote optimistically; “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” It didn’t turn out like that and this book, by economist father Robert Skidelsky and philosopher son Edward, explains why and what we can do about it.
Keynes’ economic prediction was actually rather accurate: real income per capita increased pretty much as he expected. It was his forecast for the average working week – 15 hours instead of the 35 or so we currently endure – that was badly wrong. We are indeed far richer today than we were in 1930, but wealth does not equate to leisure. Quite the contrary, in fact: today, as the Skidelskys write, “consumerism figures as a sop to workers deprived of the leisure they crave.”
Underlying Keynes’ big mistake was a much bigger one around the confusion of wants and needs. Keynes used the two interchangeably, assuming that once our material needs were met we would cease striving, sit back and enjoy the good life. We didn’t. Human nature, it seems, is naturally insatiable. Worse, that insatiability has been mercilessly provoked by the great fat carrots that consumerism dangles before us, while being let off the leash as traditional concepts of the ‘good life’ were abandoned in favour of ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’, altars before which we now instinctively genuflect. As the authors point out, “having discarded the concept of the good life, modern economics can make no sense of the distinction between needs and wants.” Accordingly, “if there is no right place to be, it is best to be ahead.”
Consequently, avarice became self-interest, greed became ambition, virtues became values, morality became moralising, the West got richer and people found themselves trapped on a hedonic treadmill, spending money they don’t have, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t know.
The Skidelskys are aware that they are not alone in these criticisms of contemporary capitalism. Two of the strongest chapters in the book are dedicated to appraisals of the most prominent critiques of the way we now live: happiness economics and sustainability. The former argues that we need to change because we are getting no happier, the latter because we are exhausting our natural resources. While antipathetic to neither argument, the authors dismantle both.
Happiness economics, they argue, is little more than ‘old wisdom’ dressed up in spurious scientific robes. Not only is defining and measuring happiness treacherous but happiness in itself cannot be a supreme good. “Our proper goal…is not just to be happy but to have reason to be happy,” they write wisely.
Green economics suffers similarly: the right idea (we cannot grow forever) is dressed up in scientific garb that disguises a quasi-religious body of thought which, at its worst, in its ‘deep ecological’ formulation, seeks to minimise or ignore the human in a way that is not only wrong but incoherent.
In their place, the authors advocate a return to a form of virtue economics, seeking to embed capitalism (of which they are certainly not enemies) within a moral framework shaped by the idea of the good life. This is where the book gets most interesting – and most contentious, as delineating the good life for a society mired in the pluralism and supposed neutrality afforded by liberalism is not easy.
They do a valiant job, outlining seven goods – health, security, respect, personality, harmony with nature, friendship, and leisure – and explaining why each should be ‘basic’ to any political and economic system. Few will disagree that these seven are goods, of course, but the real question comes in whether they are basic enough to merit embedding into the very foundations of society. That could mean, as they point out in the final chapter, reducing advertising, limiting working hours or, most controversially, providing everyone with a basic minimum income. These suggestions are not made lightly and the authors are alert to, and often address, counter-arguments, but it is in the nature of books like this that one is left with a sense of incompleteness: would these ideas really work, even assuming they were politically feasible?
How Much is Enough? is an intelligent and provocative book. It is generous and wide-ranging, drawing on Catholic Social Teaching just as much as on Aristotle and Keynes. It can be witty and manages (just) to avoid the baffling technicalities of so much economic writing.
Above all, it is refreshingly, gloriously sane. It is not fashionable to write “equality is founded on fraternity, not vice versa”, or “too often, the ‘intuitions’ of modern philosophers simply repeat the platitudes of early twenty-first century liberalism”, or “it is only with death that the overall shape or meaning of a life comes into view” Nor is taking the idea of the good life seriously – so seriously as to inform the way we shape society – liable to win you friends today. The Skidelskys are to be congratulating for doing so. Nevertheless, they, and those of us who share their views, clearly have a mountain to climb.
Nick Spencer
How Much is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky is published by Penguin (2012)
