How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life.

• Author: Schuker, Stephen A.
• Position: Book review

* How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life

By Robert Skidelsky, and Edward Skidelsky

New York: Other Press, 2012.

Pp. x, 243. $24.95 cloth.

Robert Skidelsky is the renowned author of an admiring multivolume biography of John Maynard Keynes; his son Edward is a moral philosopher. Together in How Much Is Enough? they seek to define the prerequisites of "the good life" and to explain why the capitalist system of advanced industrial states militates against its achievement. Drawing heavily on Aristotle but providing also a learned survey of two millennia of ethical thought, they propose a list of indispensable basic goods that every rational individual requires. Those goods include health and vitality, though not necessarily longevity; respect from one's fellows, which may imply personal achievement; ties of affection and friendship; harmony with nature; security from major economic or social upheaval; autonomy to design a life of one's choosing; and sufficient leisure to undertake activity for its own sake rather than because it generates income. A beneficent state can create the material conditions in which the basic goods are produced, but the goods themselves are not primarily economic. Although people in middle-income countries tend to have more life satisfaction than those in poor countries, wealth above a certain level does not correlate in any straightforward way with happiness, however one defines that elusive concept. In fact, the Skidelskys argue, the quest for economic growth under capitalism creates an insatiable demand for superfluous material goods that advertising induces people to want in place of those they need. This system is morally repugnant: it promotes greed, envy, and avarice; it offends our sense of justice; and it leads us away from the good life.

The Skidelskys take as their starting point John Maynard Keynes's famous 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." Keynes pointed out that living standards in developed countries had increased fourfold since 1700. At the projected growth rate, they would multiply another eight times over the next century. At that point, the distributive conflicts between classes and nations will end. No longer feeling the pressure of economic necessity except to arrange the just distribution of resources and avoid technological unemployment, his compatriots will be able to reduce the working day to three hours and devote themselves to the creative use of leisure and the deeper...