The Economics of Enough_ How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters - Diane Coyle [9]
The second part of the book sets out some of the obstacles that make it hard to address those difficult challenges. How can we measure the economy appropriately and in particular make sure measurement tallies with value in an increasingly intangible economy? How should we try to reconcile or weight underlying values that are perhaps mutually incompatible? And in what ways do the institutions governing our economies, in the widest sense of governance, need to change in order to carry the majority of citizens and therefore deliver effective change?
The third part, the final chapter, sketches out a Manifesto of Enough. It would be possible to get depressed about the chasm between the policies and governance we have and where we need to get to within a decade at the outside, so this chapter sets out some first steps along the path. Once we start walking, further steps will become easier and clearer. There has been a serious collapse in trust in the rich Western societies, and that makes it impossible to safeguard the future.
This book attempts two things: a description of the huge and linked economic challenges we face, and the outline of a pathway to more effective politics and policies. More important, it describes the terrain of a much-needed new politics, which will be crucial if there’s to be any hope of shaping economies and societies that will serve people better in future. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, has written that “profit-oriented capitalism has always drawn on support from other institutional values.”9 The policies of the past thirty years have lost their anchor in values outside the market. I hope by the end of this book to have set out some of the initial, practical steps that will be needed to build a future economy based on a true sense of value.
PART ONE Challenges
ONE Happiness
An image of happiness will prompt a warm glow of emotion, a recognisable mental or even physical reaction. If a picture of a dollar bill or credit card, or of the earning or spending of money, stimulated any emotional reaction it would most likely be a negative one.
For many centuries, philosophers have considered the nature of happiness. During the past hundred years, psychologists have accumulated experimental results about the reality rather than the theory of happiness. In just the past decade or so, economists have muscled into the happiness debate.
Figure 1. Happiness.
What on earth can economics contribute and why is happiness the starting point for a book about how to improve the running of modern economies?
The reason is that virtually every society in the modern world has come to be focused on the achievement of economic growth, although with different degrees of success. The purpose of governments is taken to be making their citizens richer. The assumption underlying this focus has always been that greater wealth is good for people and brings greater contentment, or at least enough contentment to help keep governments in power. But some people have started to challenge this presumption. In the richest countries the relevance of growth as the central aim of policy has increasingly come to be questioned. The consumerism of the boom era has generated something of a sense of revulsion; as the economic and financial dust settles after the banking crisis, a sort of existential introspection questioning