“Our work will at least have distracted us, … it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.” Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
“… stockbrokers and bookmakers often lead comfortable and happy lives, and it is difficult to see how the world is richer for their existence. Is there any sense in which I can claim that my life has been less futile than theirs?” G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology
According to the economist Ha-Joon Chang, economists are not to be trusted. Described as a maverick, perhaps even he might not have had the following thought in mind: it is crucial that we question the universal doctrine that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) needs to rise to ensure our well-being.
What we really need is an economic recession across the western world. Apologies if this sounds negative, but I don’t think it is really. ‘GDP’ is indeed an important measure of happiness … Global Diminishing Product, that is. We need to have less, work less, travel less, and be more. Only with such a revolution in the aspirations of the western world can a sustainable future for us, and a large proportion of the world’s animal and plant species, be a realistic outcome.
Slowly, but surely, it is possible to make such statements without inviting ridicule. Monday’s announcement of a Nobel prize for the behavioural economist Richard Thaler is a case in point – even the community of academic economists now widely accepts the flaws in the classical version of their own discipline. We have openly challenging individuals such as Chang and Kahneman, the psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, who are respected today whereas a few decades ago their criticisms of mainstream economics might have been dismissed.
But we have much further to go. We need to challenge many of the assumptions that are still routinely trotted out in the media to ‘explain’ economic growth. Here are a few:
1) Jobs depend on growth
Traditional argument: without growth, people lose their jobs. We create growth by being economically active – buying stuff, property, services and travel, investing in new capital enterprises via our pensions and equity ISAs. This creates money in the economy, which pays our wages.
Well there can be no doubt that if we spend less, then there is less money in circulation. Indeed that makes it harder to pay people without borrowing. Does that mean people lose their jobs? No, not if the situation is handled with care; but we need to become better at sharing. We can decide as a society to work a little less (four days a week?), earn less and have less, and allow a smaller pool of money to be distributed more widely. And thereby be reminded that what ‘being rich’ really means is having time for the people and activities that matter to us.
But didn’t Keynes, our greatest twentieth century economist, advocate high levels of government spending? Let us put to one side the general point that classical economics is built on shaky foundations, and assume that Keynes broadly got things right in his lifetime and would do so again. Keynes was living and writing in a very different time – the time of the Great Depression – and his message was really one of the importance of a government taking counter-cyclical action, to stop a vicious circle becoming more vicious. In his case, it was more unemployment leading to less spending leading to more unemployment leading to … and the counter-cyclical behaviour was for the government to borrow and spend. It is doubtful he would have advocated unbridled consumerism in today’s world, particularly if he had been aware of what we now know – that our consumption patterns are ruining the biosphere and creating dangerous and potentially catastrophic climate change.
And surely it would help if we could stop defining people by the jobs that they do. People matter; jobs, often, do not. Hardy’s words sound cynical, even misanthropic, to our ears, because our values are imbued with the Protestant work ethic. As such, we cannot easily criticise a person’s profession without appearing to pass a negative judgement on them as an individual. Yet if Hardy were writing in 2017, he would have a much larger range of apparently useless jobs at which to take aim.
Jobs keep us busy, and the busyness of business is supposed to keep us sane. If we are not working, then our psychological health deteriorates, or so it is alleged. But even if that is often true in the case of unemployment, is there not a difference between not working at all, and working less feverishly than most of us spend our lives doing? Any change in lifestyle takes time to adjust. We need to practise doing less because doing less is difficult, important, and we are not good at it. We think we are ‘wasting time’ if we are not rushing about: outside work, this means manic shopping, travelling, complex cooking, eating out, going to shows and football matches, not wasting time by staying in …
In 1982, Michael Ramsay wrote Be Still and Know, a study in the life of prayer by a former Anglican archbishop. In a secularized interpretation of Michael Ramsay’s message, we may not expect to encounter God but still have a desperate need to “be still and know”. This is not meant literally: physical exercise, or at least being outside in fresh air, helps to support a sense of inner calm. Ramsay’s injunction is about a state of mind, not an order to stay in bed; and ironically, most of the manic rushing about uses a lot of energy from fossil fuels but does not entail burning many calories ourselves. To be still and know in Ramsay’s sense, we have to confront ourselves, our fears and our own mortality; this is not easy and even those of us who do not believe in God could benefit from Ramsay’s book.
2) The NHS depends on growth
Traditional argument: the National Health Service is funded through taxation: with increased growth, people earn more, pay more tax, and the NHS is better off.
Let’s challenge that. In the UK, we spend around 7% of our GDP on the NHS (£1.94 trillion – or billion in old English – GDP and £0.133 trillion spent on health in 2016). Let’s suppose we halve GDP by living more simply. If we further assume that we need to keep the spending on the NHS the same (I think this is a generous assumption: there’s a serious ethical question as to whether we should be spending as much as we do on invasive end-of-life procedures, an argument made persuasively by Atul Gawande in Being Mortal), then what? Does the NHS collapse in this extreme scenario? Can we not prevent this disaster by doubling the proportion of our income that we spend on the NHS, up to 14%? With a new mind-set that puts less value on new cars, large homes and the latest iPhone, perhaps that will not be so difficult? Seems like a challenge worth the effort.
3) If GDP falls, the poor suffer
Again, this is largely a problem of distribution. The US is still the ‘richest’ large country, but has a high level of poverty (about twice the percentage rate of the UK according to official government statistics in the two countries); the ‘evidence’ that increasing GDP eradicates poverty is pretty suspect. Surely the way forward is not to buy more stuff or a bigger house than we need, but to inculcate a greater sense of social responsibility. We can be collectively poorer but fairer, and still reduce poverty.
The merits of work
This is not to deny the importance of work. We cannot just sit and meditate: most of us are naturally restless and want to ‘achieve something’. But we really need to be taught, and to practise, stillness. That doesn’t mean getting used to being idle. It means building up – gradually, over time, allowing for setbacks – a sense of inner peace and strength that we cultivate even when we are physically active. And when we are striving to achieve something in our ‘work’ that genuinely matters to us – not what we pretend matters in order to justify our daily routine and mask a secret fear of the insecurity that a loss of employment would entail.
So what matters, or should matter? I think this is fairly clear to most of us when we think about it; and it doesn’t include lots of money or possessions. And jobs can matter, even if they are often useless or worse. Most jobs – despite the obvious implication of Hardy’s words – have the potential to be valuable, if undertaken with care and a sense of responsibility.
Too often, though, it seems that we work precisely to avoid a sense of responsibility. We would be able to do more good, we tell ourselves, if only we had the time and energy – but our jobs force us to work all hours, travel long distances, and so forth. We abdicate moral responsibility to the largely amoral demands of the workplace.
A striking instance of this cultural tendency to pretend jobs are an affliction beyond our control, like an incurable disease, can be found on carbon trackers: tools on the internet that can calculate the greenhouse gas impact of our personal lifestyle. There is for instance a very good one of these published by the World Wildlife Fund, found here: footprint.wwf.org.uk. As you respond to the questions, it says to leave out business-related emissions including business flights on the basis that they are “part of your employer’s footprint, not yours“. But who took the decision to do your job? And how often has the suggestion been made to your employer that perhaps a conference call or video conference could suffice in place of a business trip? Those of us who spend most of our waking hours working should not pretend that the moral and environmental impact of what we do is the sole concern of our employer.
Work is perhaps too important to emphasize its quantity ahead of its quality. If we could do less and do it better, maybe we and the world around us could start to recover?