The elements of the good life
The Skidelskys see seven “basic goods” as essential to a good life:
- Health, by which they mean all that is necessary to vitality, energy, and alertness.
- Security, the expectation that one’s life will not be disrupted by war, crime, revolution, unauthorized government surveillance, or social and economic upheavals.
- Friendship, in a broad sense that encompasses family, lovers, workmates, and others.
- Respect, which means that others indicate, by some formality or otherwise, that one’s views and interests are worthy of consideration, even if they don’t agree with or like them.
- Personality, sometimes called autonomy, which means the ability to frame and execute a plan of life according to one’s tastes, temperament, and conception of the good.
- Leisure, not just rest and relaxation, but activities that we pursue for their own sake, not for the sake of obtaining something else.
- Harmony with nature, which they do not define as clearly as the others.
On the whole, I like the thinking behind this list of basic goods. I agree with its rejection of the notion that pursuit of the good life consists of nothing more than accumulating an ever greater quantity and variety of material goods and paid services—the lifestyle so aptly mocked in the bumper sticker that reads, “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.”
The Skidelskys are not the first to grapple with the question of what constitutes a good life. They consider what several other thinkers have had to say, ranging from Aristotle to John Rawls. For some reason, though, they omit one of the best known treatments, one with close parallels to their own: Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In its simplest version, it includes five categories of basic needs:
- Physiological needs, such as food, shelter, and sleep
- Safety needs, including protection from threats of nature, crime, and war
- Belongingness needs, which can be satisfied in relationships with family, friends, workgroups, and communities
- Esteem needs, including self-respect and respect from others
- Self-actualization, a special term of Maslow’s that encompasses all aspects of fulfilling one’s potential through personal growth, creativity, and peak experiences. Maslow emphasizes that the specific content of self-actualization will vary greatly from one person to another.
These needs are hierarchical, in the sense that the next one cannot take priority until the previous one is substantially satisfied.
Most of the Skidelsky’s seven needs fit easily into Maslow’s hierarchy: Health is an outcome of meeting physiological needs, security and safety needs are the same, friendship is an element of belongingness needs, and respect is necessary to meeting esteem needs. Both personality and leisure, as defined by the Skidelskys, are necessary conditions for achieving what Maslow calls self-actualization. Really, it would not be too much to say that the Skidelsky’s list of basic needs is little but a reinvention of Maslow’s scheme, which social scientists of all stripes have been debating, criticizing, and putting to daily use for seventy years in applications from clinical psychology to sales training.
True, “harmony with nature” does not fit neatly into Maslow’s hierarchy, but then, it does not fit very well into the Skidelskys’ list, either. The fact that it is the only one of their seven basic goods for which they provide no definition is one indication. It is also hard to reconcile harmony with nature as a basic need with the Skidelskys’ view of mainstream environmentalism as essentially nonrational and romantic. Somewhat condescendingly, they write that
the covertly religious character of the Green movement is often viewed, by friends and foes alike, as an embarrassment, a scandal, even. . . That is not our view. We respect and share the religious feeling at the heart of environmentalism. But we believe that this feeling is best expressed openly rather than hidden under the fig leaf of science.
Yet later, in laying out the criteria for selecting their basic goods, they consider but then reject religion, on the following grounds:
Now, while we might consider a culture devoid of religion or aesthetic experience to be impoverished, we would not call an individual who lacked either of these two things seriously harmed. There are many people who are simply “tone deaf” to art or religion but lead otherwise healthy, flourishing lives. . . our own goal . . . requires us to treat as basic only those goods whose lack constitutes a serious loss or harm.
Very well, but since there are also many people who are “tone deaf” to harmony with nature, why not dismiss that on the same grounds, especially after going out of their way to equate environmental and religious values? On the Skidelskys’ own terms, it makes no sense to consider harmony with nature a “basic need.” By comparison, Maslow’s more flexible framework allows people to fulfill the need for self-actualization in a variety of ways—through aesthetic experience for some, through religion for others, and through harmony with nature for others still.
The case against growth
Let’s turn now from psychology and philosophy to economics. The first question is, how much economic growth do we need to attain the good life?
The Skidelskys have a straightforward answer to this question: None.
The continued pursuit of growth is not only unnecessary to realizing the basic goods; it may actually damage them. The basic goods are essentially non-marketable: they cannot properly be bought or sold. An economy geared to maximizing market value will tend to crowd them out or to replace them with marketable surrogates
They follow this up with examples of ways in which growth has failed to contribute to achievement of the basic goods, or has seen them decline. Many of their examples are unconvincing, however. For example, they concede that life expectancy has increased. However, they say that the increase owes little to growth, but rather, to advances in medical technology and infrastructure. Are we to understand that economic growth has nothing to do with advances in technology and infrastructure? They cite increased divorce rates as evidence of a decline in friendship, without considering whether greater ease in escaping the domination of a spouse might facilitate women’s (and occasionally men’s) search for personality and autonomy. They lament the advance of industrial farming but sneer at organic food and farmers’ markets as “middle-class baubles.”
Details aside, however, there is one point on which I do agree with the Skidelskys. If we are concerned with making our lives better, we need to be concerned with the quality of growth, not just the rate of growth— “Growth for what, not of what,” as they put it. It is clearly the case that in many respects, the content of economic growth, as recently experienced, is not helping us get any closer to the good life, at least as far as anyone whose thinking has advanced beyond the “most toys win” stage understands it.
One problem is the bias of recent growth trends toward the already wealthy. (For some numbers to back this up, check out the clever interactive chart that you can find here.) For the already wealthy, added income goes largely toward buying positional goods, those that are valued mainly because they demonstrate one’s wealth relative to that of others. Even if we grant that moving up the positional goods ladder (for example, by ownership of one’s own jet rather than mere time-share access to a jet) helps satisfy a basic need for respect or esteem, not everyone can become relatively richer at the same time. Instead of contributing to a better life, then, pursuit of positional goods only adds to stress and subtracts from the leisure needed to pursue self-actualization.
Environmental externalities are another issue that raises the question, “growth of what?” Logically, if what we want is growth of goods, we should subtract growth of bads, like pollution, but conventional GDP accounting does not do that. True, believers in the environmental Kuznets curve will point out that some kinds of pollution, at least, reach a peak at middle levels of GDP and decrease thereafter. As an example, consider that there is now more smog in Beijing than in Los Angeles, the world’s former smog capital. However, the environmental Kuznets curve does not arise entirely from market forces. To the extent that pollution decreases in wealthy societies, it does so because of increasing demand for public policies that internalize the externalities through regulations, taxes, emission trading, or whatever. China has so far been willing to accept the smog in return for keeping its export order book full, but now that it is getting richer, it is experimenting with pollution control policies, too.
The bottom line: Economic growth is not a sufficient condition for progress toward a good life as philosophers and psychologists see it. For countries that are already wealthy, it is probably not even a necessary condition.
Can public policies promote the good life?
The Skidelskys are clear-headed enough to understand that the state cannot force people to live a good life. They concede that any such attempt would be self-defeating, since personal freedom, autonomy, personality—whatever term you want to use for it—is itself one of the basic goods. However, they do think certain policies might nudge people in the right direction.
- Despite the frequently leftist bent of their rhetoric, they are strongly in favor of private property as a bulwark of both security and personal autonomy.
- They favor French-style limits on hours of work, at least for most occupations. (The self-employed and creative elites would be exempt.) Short of legal limits, they favor policies that make it easier for employees to negotiate part-time or flex-time work arrangements.
- They are fans of a basic income—an unconditional, non-means-tested grant for all citizens sufficient to provide a person’s physical needs. They acknowledge the possibility that some recipients might spend the grant on drugs or designer clothes, but they consider that worth the risk if it would allow some to take more leisure and others to pursue more rewarding occupations.
- They like consumption taxes, whether in the form of a VAT or of an income tax with full deductibility of all saving. They think they would discourage consumption and encourage leisure, although, ironically, the most ardent supporters of consumption taxes see them as a way to promote more saving and faster growth.
- Like many before them, they would like to suppress advertising, which they blame for people’s insatiable appetite to consume. (Really? I seem to remember that people in the blissfully ad-free Soviet Union smoked more Kazbeks than the number of heavily promoted Lucky Strikes consumed by Americans at the time, but maybe that is an isolated example.)
- Finally, they seem inclined to think that we could help people in less developed countries achieve a better life by refusing to trade with them. “No country has become rich under a free trade regime,” they write. That proposition could be disputed, but it is too big a subject to go into here.
Is there any hope?
The Skidelskys are determinedly skeptical that individual free choice within a capitalist market economy could possibly allow any outside an elite of academics and creative artists to achieve a good life. Everyone else, they think, is doomed. They see workers as forced to accept long and inflexible hours if they want to escape outright unemployment. They see consumers as sheep, easily manipulated by marketers into buying things that they don’t want and don’t need. They see the rich as workaholic automatons pursuing positional goods that bring no real fulfillment. There is some truth to each of these stereotypes, but I see some hopeful trends, too.
One is that some cracks are beginning to appear in the model where the bosses unilaterally dictate all conditions of work other than pay and make as few employees as possible work as many hours as they can. In reality, as the Families and Work Institute reports, we see some incipient trends toward greater workplace flexibility:
- Employers allowing at least some of their workers to change starting and quitting times are up from 68 percent in 2005 to 77 percent in 2012
- Employers allowing some paid work at home are up from 34 to 63 percent
- Percentage allowing employee control over paid or unpaid overtime hours are up from 28 percent to 44 percent
- From 1997 to 2008, there was a decrease of three hours, from 11 to 8, in the number of weekly hours of work at all jobs that exceeds the worker’s ideal weekly hours.
Another hopeful trend is that consumers are increasingly asking for, and getting, food choices that are more consistent with the Skidelskys’ basic goods of health and harmony with the environment. True, organic foods still account for only 4 percent of total food sales in the United States, but they are steadily increasing their market share. Interestingly, contrary to the farmers’ market image, more than half of all organic food is sold in mass-market retail outlets, according to the Organic Trade Association.
These trends do not mean that we are about to enter an end-of-growth utopia, but they do suggest that a market economy is capable of supplying the elements of the good life. The responsibility for demanding them is up to us as individuals.