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How Much Is Enough?
Book

How Much Is Enough?

Money and the Good Life

Other Press, 2012 more...

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8

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  • Innovative

Recommendation

Do you have enough? If you are like most people in the industrialized world, you don’t think you do. This isn’t your fault. Capitalism makes you feel that way by bombarding you with constant messages telling you that what you have is insufficient. No matter how much you work, you will never accumulate enough to be satisfied. While you are working and buying more, life passes you by. According to economic historian Robert Skidelsky and his philosopher son, Edward, society should offer a better alternative. They present an unconventional – some would say utopian, at best, and totalitarian, at worst – path to “the good life.” getAbstract recommends their intelligent, impassioned, provocative treatise to those who wonder if materialism is necessary to the good life.

Summary

No One Has Enough

People in developed nations have an insatiable appetite for material gain. Enough is never enough. This degree of turbocharged acquisition is a function of capitalism, a double-edged sword that has “made possible vast improvements in material conditions” but at the cost of advancing “some of the most reviled human characteristics, such as greed, envy and avarice.”

Developed nations focus on increasing their gross domestic product (GDP), which should provoke their citizens to ask two questions: “growth for what?” and “growth of what?” Shouldn’t giving everyone the opportunity to live “the good life” be society’s most important goal? Most developed nations already have “too much GDP”; that is, they have money and material to supply everything their citizens need to lead the good life.

“The Basic Goods”

In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” economist John Maynard Keynes envisioned a future golden society in which technological advances would permit people to work less and to enjoy life more. Keynes speculated that between 1930 and 2030 the typical workweek would gradually decline to just 15 hours. He asked, “...

About the Authors

Robert Skidelsky, professor emeritus of political economy at the University of Warwick, is an award-winning biographer of economist John Maynard Keynes. Edward Skidelsky is a lecturer in aesthetics and moral philosophy at Exeter University.


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