What I've Been Reading

How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky. The first six chapters are sprinkled with age old wisdom distilled into contemporary format and also, they (rightly) bash both extremes - the religion of invisible hand and environmental fear mongers of climate change. But in the disappointing final chapter (a.k.a remedies), the authors retract to the extreme left wing rhetoric... if only...

Adam Smith thought that “frugality” was part of self-interest, and that laws restraining luxury spending were therefore unnecessary. What he failed to foresee was that, in affluent societies, the competitive spending on luxuries previously confined to the very rich would become universal, resulting in the endless postponement of plenty.

Seven basic criteria's for a good life:

• Health - Health means a happy obliviousness of one’s own body, as of a tool perfectly fitted to its tasks. In the words of French physician René Leriche, it is “life lived in the silence of the organs.” Health looks outwards. Illness throws one back upon oneself.
• Security - An individual’s justified expectation that his life will continue more or less in its accustomed course, undisturbed by war, crime, revolution or major social and economic upheavals.Those who cannot find work locally are urged to relocate, those whose talents have become redundant to “retool.” This is to get things precisely backwards. It is not human beings who need adapting to the market; it is the market that needs adapting to human beings. That was the guiding principle of the early twentieth-century social liberals, whose enlightened efforts to minimize the insecurities of capitalism have now largely been jettisoned.
• Respect - Suppose (what is not too implausible) that persistent unemployment were to lead to the division of society into two hereditary castes, a working majority and a jobless minority. It would then be all too easy to enshrine this de facto distinction in law, with differential civil and voting rights. Democracy as we know it would cease to exist. It is also important for mutual respect that inequality not exceed certain bounds.
• Personality - Personality implies a private space, a “room behind the shop” as Montaigne called it, in which the individual is at liberty to unfurl, to be himself. It denotes the inward aspect of freedom, that which resists the claims of public reason and duty. A society devoid of personality, where individuals accepted their social role without tension or protest, would scarcely be human. It would be more like a colony of intelligent social insects, of the sort envisaged in certain science-fiction films.
• Harmony with Nature - A sense of kinship with animals, plants and landscapes is hardly a Western peculiarity. The abundance of nature poetry in Sanskrit, classical Chinese and other languages around the world is sufficient proof of that.
• Friendship - Why do we speak of “friendship” instead of “community,” a word that has become horribly popular in recent decades? Our concern has to do with reification. It is all too easy to talk about the “good of the community” as though this were something over and above the good of its constituent members. The term “friendship” is not open to this kind of abuse. If we could learn to think of communities in this fashion, as networks of friends, one notorious source of political oppression would be removed.
• Leisure - In contemporary parlance, leisure is synonymous with relaxation and rest. But there is another, older conception of leisure, according to which it is not just time off work but a special form of activity in its own right. Leisure in this sense is that which we do for its own sake, not as a means to something else. The philosopher Leo Strauss wrote of his friend Kurt Riezler that “the activity of his mind had the character of noble and serious employment of leisure, not of harried labor.”

Money is the one thing of which there is never enough, for the simple reason that the concept “enough” has no logical application to it. There is perfect health and happiness, but there is no perfect wealth.
We do not want to banish the engineers of growth only to see them replaced by the engineers of bliss.