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By Root 1647 0

ourselves. The political legitimacy of alternatives will build only slowly. Even though elected politicians are not held in high esteem, being elected remains an important source of legitimacy. But expertise and a clear sense of public purpose are sources of legitimacy too. After all, this is why some think tanks and academics already hold great sway over policy debates. Those of us who care about the challenges set out here can and will engage in the response. It will probably look messy, and it will be hard to identify a single “right” answer. In complicated modern economies, a wider portfolio of institutions is likely to be needed, and we should get out of our heads the few, simple categories of organization we’re used to thinking about.

However, the most important changes will be the changes in our attitudes as individuals, and in the way we influence each other. The key attitudes will be acknowledging the future and acknowledging that our individual choices affect other people. In other words, we need to internalize a sense of responsibility to others, including those not yet born, in order to restore the moral fiber that is needed for market capitalism to deliver social well-being.

So, for example, each of us will need to combine our enjoyment of higher incomes and all that we can buy with them with the need to save more. Growth can and should continue but must be more sustainable. Higher savings are needed to fund greater investment in green technologies as well as continuing innovation in other industries. Innovation will help sustain a rate of growth sufficiently high to help ease some of the challenges of Enough. People in many OECD economies will also find that they need to save more to pay for some things their governments used to provide through the tax system, notably pensions. The scale of the implied public pension debt is too large for future taxpayers to finance it.

We will find ourselves rethinking the role played by the state in many cases too because of the rising share of our incomes that will need to go to services often provided by the government, including education and health. There isn’t really a difference between buying education services and buying entertainment services in terms of the underlying economics. This means that people in some countries will probably have to discover a greater sense of self-reliance than they have been used to, and also points to the need for a debate about when the shared experience and opportunity arising from state provision is so important that a service ought to remain in the public sector. Education will through this lens look very different from old age care; it matters that everybody in a community has a similar knowledge base and set of attitudes and cultural values arising from similar educations, and investment in education is important for the whole economy, a public good in which people individually would not typically invest enough without public spending. Providing meals and nursing care for seniors is something any civilized and prosperous society will care about, but does not need for society’s well-being to be a shared, common experience in the same way.

THE FIRST TEN STEPS

This book has had a large canvas, and the implications its conclusions have for policy decisions and the structures of government are wide. It’s always easier to diagnose than prescribe when it comes to economic and social ills. So I want to end with some specific proposals for governments to help get started on the challenges of Enough.

1. Launch a Measuring Progress exercise, where none is yet carried out. Undertake extensive public consultation about what indicators the government should use to supplement GDP statistics. Commit to annual publication of the selected indicators, and a high-profile occasion on which the government will comment on the results, such as the presentation of the government’s annual budget.

2. Ensure official statistical agencies have the resources and make the commitment to developing and publishing statistics on intergenerational