Read "How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life” by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky recently. It explores an interesting and profound question as the world continues to race towards globalization with the economies of all the nations getting intertwined leading to changes in one part of the world affecting the rest. It starts off nicely with a discussion of a 1928 lecture delivered by John Maynard Keynes in which he foretold a future that will require its citizenry to work very little letting them spend most of their time in leisure activities. His thinking was that as the productivity of manufacturing processes improve, there will be diminishing need for workers to put in long hours to maintain the same standard of living. Thus for example, if the world needs 1 billion paper clips a week, once the production process gets automated, same 1 billion clips can be produced with very little need for manual work relieving those workers to lead a life of leisure with the same salary/quality of life. But in reality this idea never came to pass since instead of four paper clip making workers now working 10 hours each, enjoying the rest of the time in leisure activities, our version of capitalism employs one worker for 40 hours a week rendering the other three unemployed..!
The counter argument that the continued workload has brought in so much of new inventions and discoveries that have improved life on the whole has been glossed over a bit. While we can deride inventions like iPod as frivolous, there is a case to be made for meaningful inventions like vaccines and such. But you can still appreciate the overall thought process. If we don't stand back and look at the big picture/trend, what each one does on a daily basis at the microeconomics level will appear right making all the new 'wants' look like 'needs'. While reading the book, I was reminded of a Newsweek issue few months back. Each issue usually carries few pages of full spread photos from that week's news events from different parts of the world. This particular issue showed a bunch of kids on one page from sub-Saharan Africa that were struggling to find food and were subsisting on lot less than a dollar a day. Next page showed a full page photograph of a young socialite that had conceived a child out of wedlock to a heir of a multibillion family fortune while she was his girl friend for couple of months. The photo showed her standing on the Manhattan court steps after she had won a court order granting her $22,000 living expense per month. This is basically for her to do nothing but just raise that child. She can perhaps learn a thing or two from the Amish community that lives an hour away from where we live. Unfortunately the Keynes idea didn't get anywhere close to reality as the want part continues to raise and exotic hard to get wants (private island, personal jet) being created more and more conditioning the rats to run on the treadmill faster and faster.
While the first and last chapters are well written, sections in between often read like stream of consciousness writing, as in "Hegel's dialectic was the perfect intellectual instrument for resolving Marx's ambivalence towards capitalism". It might plausibly be due to different chapters being written by the two different authors. If so, one is quite engaging and accessible while the other is soporific and not so cogent. Authors should read "The History of Western Philosophy" to learn from Russel how to write lucidly even when writing an entire book on topics like philosophy. :-) Still, while the work may not be a page turner from cover to cover, the authors do cover the subject well discussing how to define what is a good life, moral/religious/philosophical/historical views of what is happiness, ethical Vs. utilitarian arguments for protecting the environment and finally how we can structure the society to move towards that Keynes' utopia.
There have been attempts in Europe to reduce the work week to 35 hours, provide more vacation time, etc. But the authors present enough data and charts to show that despite all the improvement in productivity, and all the wealth that has been created in the last 100 years, in developed countries working hours have either stayed the same or actually increased and the wealth has been garnered by an increasingly smaller section of the population. This is indeed quite sad. Their prescription in the last chapter titled Exits from the Rat Race has a lot of top down ideas (i.e. what govt. and societies should do), which made me wonder if the authors were American, would they have tilted towards more bottom up (i.e. individual options) solutions. They propose the following:
- Guaranteeing a basic income for everyone so that people can choose to work as much as they want (this is being done in parts of UAE, but only to a very small section of the population that forms the citizenry leaving the rest who are migrant workers that can never become citizens with no such guarantees),
- Reducing the pressure to consume (reducing advertisements, taxing consumption),
- Filling up the chasm between ultra rich and poor/middle class that has widened considerably in the last few decades (via increased taxation)
- Temporary halt to globalization (they argue that no poor country has entered the free trade regime and become rich),
- Getting societies/political parties to stop focusing on growth and getting them to refocus on basic goods/happiness,
- Reducing working hours in different ways (a 1993 Danish law recognizes people's right to work discontinuously while simultaneously recognizing their right to continuous income thus allowing people to take sabbatical every 4 to 7 years which in turn lets more people be employed to fill those spots).
Not sure if I will see such a turnaround in US policies in my lifetime. :-)
Happy reading to you in the new year.
-sundar.
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