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Hoeveel Is Genoeg? Geld En Het Verlangen Naar Een Goed Leven (2012)

by Robert Skidelsky(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

908542464X (ISBN13: 9789085424642)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

De Bezige Bij Antwerpen

review 1: I’m sympathetic to the main argument of the Skidelskys’ book: that the pursuit of money (and economic growth) for its own sake is not only socially and environmentally destructive but also absurd. Without any social consensus on what money is for, we settle for perpetually chasing more of it, assuming this will enable us to achieve our individual (and widely varying) notions of fulfillment. The means has become the end, and there is no longer a place for the concept of “enough”. The Skidelskys combine their backgrounds in economics and philosophy to look at how this state of affairs has come about, using an obscure essay by John Maynard Keynes as a trigger for the discussion (Robert Skidelsky is a noted scholar on the work of Keynes).The most interesting part of th... moree book, from my perspective, is the review in the first few chapters of how pre-modern concepts of “the good life” and strictures against avarice became dissociated from developments in economic thinking and marginalized from public discussion. They propose a number of goods that comprise “the good life”, based on conceptions of it found in different religions and wisdom traditions from around the world. Eventually, they arrive at policy recommendations that many would consider radical, including a guaranteed basic income, heavy restrictions on advertising, and a large-scale consumption tax among others.I welcome the Skidelskys’ contribution to this important discussion, especially their effort to reconnect economic growth with social objectives. I agree with much of what they argue, but I find that often their characterization of opposing or merely different views is simplistic or unrepresentative. For instance, about environmentalists, who they seem to largely equate with “climate radicals”: “If current fears about global warming turn out to be baseless, climate radicals will not abandon their opposition to long-distance flying and four-by-fours; rather, they will find new arguments to justify their austerities.” This seems quite ungenerous. Additionally, I find the Skidelskys dangerously sanguine about the environmental costs of growth. They repeat mainstream economic rationales for the time discounting of adjustment costs, for example, even though this methodology is precisely what ecological economists have made strong arguments against. It seems strange to me that they believe an abstract idea about the good life is ultimately more compelling to incite change than evidence of environmental limits. They dislike arguments made in neutral, secular terms that avoid controversy over subjective differences.Contentious views are revealed at other points as well, as when they imply that marriages are less stable now because of “sexual freedom”, or when they suggest that legal sanctions against gay marriage in other countries would not affect the capacity to achieve the good life. For a discussion of this scope, it is probably inevitable that some of the authors’ general views will clash with readers’.The Skidelskys exhort Western intellectuals to be more “confident” in their non-coercive paternalistic prescriptions: personally, I find their response to post-modern critiques of “objective” standards to be only partially convincing. I agree with them that society needs to take a stand on what is enough and to support an idea of the good life, but I feel much more uncomfortable imposing my ideas of those things than it seems are the Skidelskys.In the end, as the Skidelskys report that Keynes once said, “it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong”; I think the Skidelskys are roughly right.
review 2: This book would seem right up my alley, and in most ways, it was. It is written by two philosophers, so it didn't suffer from the usual problems I find with popular-consumption econ books (though perhaps a philosopher reading it would find an analogous set of problems!).Skidelsky pere is the author of the preeminent biography of Keynes, and the motivation for the book is a well-known essay by Keynes in which he speculated on the economic future. Based on his projections of the growth of income, he figured that by around now, people in developed countries would only need to work about 10 hours per week to meet their needs. Famously, his growth projections were remarkably accurate, but his conclusion was not. Given increasing incomes, people on the whole have chosen to work the same amount (or more) and consume more rather than work less and consume the same. The authors' argument is an interesting one, which has much in common with Alasdair MacIntyre's argument in "After Virtue" (which the authors note). In traditional societies, including ancient Greece, there was a conception of "the good life" as a fairly objective thing to be aimed at, consisting in a finite set of reasonably well-defined things, chief among these, time for philosophical contemplation and public service. (I am not sure how much of a caricature this is. My sense is that people may have disagreed about the specific constituents of the good life, but that the existence of such a thing was not especially in question.)One problem with this concept was that, due to the structure of these traditional societies, "the good life" was off-limits to most people. Eventually, the forces of capitalism came forth to offer what the Skidelskys very elegantly characterize as a "Faustian bargain": by unleashing self-interest and acquisitive impulses from the bounds of tradition, it spurs economic development toward the point where most people will have the resources needed for a basic "good life"; yet by unleashing these forces, the capitalist economy also erodes away the mental and spiritual basis of the enjoyment of the good life. The competitive market can produce "enough" for everyone, but as competition comes to play a dominant role, our concept of "enough" withers away.So far, so good. The authors take some interesting digressions into conceptions of the good life in various Eastern traditions, and into the modern field of happiness research. (They are quite leery of this field, for interesting reasons.) They put forward their own subjective list of the elements of the good life: things that are hard to argue with, such as health, respect, relationships, etc. This list didn't seem very gripping to me, but also seemed fairly reasonable.What really bugged me, though, was their concluding essays at possible government policies to encourage people to cultivate the good life. After an entire book of discussing these issues, they focus on a couple of specific policies: a universal basic income, where the state would provide an unconditional cash grant to each citizen, and a consumption tax (similar to the European VAT's, although oddly they do not discuss these). The economic basis of each of these policy proposals is clear: given a basic income, people will be more free to devote their time to fulfilling pursuits; a tax on consumption will incentivize people to substitute away from consumption (for example, to more leisure time). And yet...the very logic by which these policies are intended to work is the same market-based logic that the authors call out as the very basis of the Faustian bargain! It was astonishing to me that they did not focus their policy proposals more on direct government provision of basic goods, as with a single-payer healthcare system. The fungibility of things like UBI would seem to make them relatively easy for competitive, capitalist values to withstand.I am in agreement with the authors on many points, but am not sure where I stand on appropriate responses beyond an individual or household level. It may be overly pessimistic to say that nothing can be done beyond this level. For example, I think that changes to policies around parental leave, or changes to structures that create "cliff effects" between full- and part-time work could be beneficial. But it seems somewhat wrong-headed to me to envision the state being able to "nudge" people toward the good life (or even being capable of maintaining any coherent conception thereof). If changes in attitudes are going to come, I think that they are much more likely to take root based on the actions of smaller units, from families to churches to online communities to individual companies. I think conceptions of the good life are much more likely to be driven by the availability of positive examples than by policy innovations.Over this past weekend, Elise discovered a blog that I read, called "Mr. Money Mustache," and has really been enjoying it. Despite the silly name, I this blog (and the online/IRL community around it) is a strong and vibrant proponent of something like the good life described by the Skidelskys. I have always appreciated the anarchist line (not sure of the exact attribution) that a new society must be built "in the shell of the old." I think something like MMM is a modest but powerful instantiation of that idea, and gives me much more inspiration than the Skidelskys' policy ideas. less

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