The Economics of Enough_ How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters - Diane Coyle [13]
Here, Ruskin explicitly includes well-being, or happiness, as a target. The Romantic themes have been picked up again recently by Richard Bronk. In his book The Romantic Economist he advocates a new emphasis in economics on imagination: “The Romantics stressed the central role of the imagination in creating and envisioning the future, and in forging our own identities and aims out of the incommensurable and conflicting values and discourses we face.”8 This perspective ties in with the argument that measures such as GDP are an inadequate way to assess economic progress; that we can’t capture it in monetary terms.
These are only two examples plucked out a vast literature highlighting the adverse cultural and social consequences of economic growth. Each economic crash, following a period of boom and excess, has brought a new surge of criticism. Karl Marx was inspired, if that’s the right word, by the financial crises of Victorian Britain such as the railway manias and stock price crashes of the 1840s and the mid-nineteenth-century banking collapses. But the reaction was perhaps most dramatic in the 1930s, when the inevitable result of the Great Crash and the Depression was to encourage many different attempts to reimagine the fundamental purposes and aims of the economy. Some of the reactions, as we know with hindsight, had profound and terrible political and historical consequences.
If fears for culture and the importance of human relationships have a long history, the last issue in the Slow triad, the environment, has much greater resonance today than in the past. The explanation obviously lies in climate change, which is the subject of the next chapter. The environment has always been affected by economic growth, but only now does that impact threaten to be both irreversible and catastrophic. With a global population of more than 6 billion, forecast to peak at 9 billion by the mid-twenty-first century, it isn’t surprising that environmentalists argue that the planet cannot sustain ever-growing levels of resource use and consumption. As Nicholas Stern, author of the 2005 Stern Review for the UK Government, and the follow-up book Blueprint for a Safer Planet, puts it:
The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay. Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century. The problem and the response must be a collaboration on a global scale.9
IS HAPPINESS THE RIGHT GUIDE FOR LIFE?
From the dawn of capitalism to present-day environmentalists, then, there has been a tradition of suspicion about growth. So why is growth still so central as a policy goal? How is it related to the welfare of society?
The reason is not just that economists have a stranglehold on government policies. Economics asks how best to use the available resources in a society in different activities. Most often economists are interested in questions of efficiency, or how to get the most out of a certain amount of resources. Sometimes economists also look at questions of distribution, or how income is shared between members of society. Less often still, economists consider questions about social welfare by asking more fundamental questions about what the available resources should be used to produce, and how to reach such decisions collectively in the interests of everyone, as well as questions about the share-out between the different members of society. But