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Economics, leisure and the good life

by Robert Teitelman | Published June 22, 2012 at 11:06 AM

A few days ago, I posted on Edward Conard's controversial "Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Heard About the Economy Is Wrong." Conard articulates a powerful, if narrow, economic vision. What's most disturbing about it to me is less his basic economic logic and more how he ascribes a kind of higher morality to those who engage in investment and innovation (or entrepreneurship) while offering no goal beyond the self-justifying material accumulation of greater wealth. Is economic growth its own reward? Is there anything beyond greater wealth? Conard's book would seem to have little in common with Yale University economist's Robert Shiller's recently published "Finance and the Good Society," but it has a similar murkiness about ends. Shiller argues, in an infinitely more accommodating tone, that many of the bogeymen of current finance, such as derivatives and the banks, can be channeled to produce the bounty necessary to build what he calls a "good society." What is that good society? Well, anything that creates a greater good. He may well be right in his attempt to revive innovative finance, but his ends radically differ from Conard's -- he calls for "the democratization and humanization of finance." He's also more than a little sketchy, if optimistic, about how we'll get there.

Applying morals to economic issues is difficult, unless you're Any Rand. Robert and Edward Skidelsky, the former the noted biographer of John Maynard Keynes, the latter, his son and a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex, recently penned an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education jumping off from a short essay Keynes wrote in 1930. (The piece was excerpted from their new book, "How Much Is Enough: Money and the Good Life"). Keynes' essay posited a world a century ahead, 2030, when technological progress had produced such abundance that no one needed to work that didn't want to. Keynes suggested that this end to scarcity would allow people to have more leisure time and to cultivate what he called, "the good life," that is "to live wisely, agreeably and well." Now to say the least, that Keynesian trifle has mostly been forgotten, even as growth -- despite economic ups and downs -- has insured a semblance of that leisure for much of the developed world. (Yeah, I'm aware times are tough, relatively speaking.) The very reality of escaping "work" seems a fantasy, like world peace or one-world government. In his 2009 reconsideration of Keynes, "Keynes: The Return of the Master," Robert Skidelsky admitted that this concept of the good life "sounds utterly alien to all but the religious, since there is now no generally accepted idea of the good life in this sense. "

"Wealth," he writes in "Return of the Master," has one "powerfully resonant 'moral' argument: It lifts people out of poverty, and this is universally acknowledged to be good, even though traditional religious teachings tended rather to the opposite view. ... The only questions that economists and moralists feel they can ask about wealth are second-order ones: Does it, in fact, make people happier? Has it been justly acquired? Is it fairly distributed? But the relation of wealth to ethical ends is left silent." Given the pressing business of the Great Depression and World War II, Keynes never elaborated further on the good life in an era of abundance.

As the Skidelskys take up Keynes' case, the underlying question really comes to: "What is wealth for? How much money do we need to lead the good life? This might seem an impossible question. But it is not an impossible one. Making money cannot be an end in itself -- at least for anyone not suffering from acute mental disorder." This conclusion is overly harsh. Some folks (Warren Buffett?) make money not to accumulate it, but to play the game, to keep score; it's an activity he revels in. There are other reasons, none of which are necessarily sociopathic or pathological: to gain power and status, to build something from nothing, to keep yourself occupied, to give it away. With the exception of the latter, none of these are notably "moral" or ennobling, except in the sense of creating greater wealth. And the folks who manage to accumulate enough money to give away -- Bill Gates, say -- is relatively tiny and may only succeed in passing the question of "what is wealth for?" to another generation

Is there any way to justify the endless accumulation of wealth? How should we live if we didn't need to make a buck? Like Keynes, the Skidelskys focus on the classical notion of "leisure." This isn't leisure in the sense of shuffleboard tourneys and TV watching. As they write somewhat starchly, "Let us state firmly that we are not in favor of idleness. What we wish to see more of is leisure, a category that, properly understood, is so far from coinciding with idleness that it approaches its polar opposite. Leisure, in the true, now almost forgotten sense of the word, is an activity without extrinsic end, 'purposiveness without purpose,' as Kant put it." Their leisure is modeled after Athenian and Roman citizens, who "while economically unproductive, were active to the highest degree -- in politics, war, philosophy and literature." If we have lost their sense of spontaneous activity, it's because leisure has "degenerated into passive consumption and we throw ourselves into work as the lesser of two evils." That's a fascinating idea, if speculative, but one based on the notion that rationally, if unrealistically, we could all "live" quite well on what the economy produces: that is, on a rough equality of incomes. "In the real world," they write, "extrinsic rewards, including financial rewards, are never entirely out of mind. Still, insofar as action proceeds not from necessity but from inclination, insofar as it is spontaneous, not servile or mechanical, toil is at an end and leisure has begun. This -- not idleness -- is our ideal. It is only our culture's poverty of imagination that leads it to believe that all creativity and innovation -- as opposed to that specific kind directed at improving economic processes -- needs to be stimulated by money."

The Skidelskys mention of the "real world" suggests how idealistic this is, though perhaps that skepticism is part of our consumption pathology too. Athenian and Roman societies weren't exactly beds of roses. It's true: Those societies, in subtly different ways, believed that only those who had left the realm of necessity -- of work or the family -- could play a role in the public sphere. And they had moments that we believe were highly civilized, albeit from a great distance. This attitude toward leisure shaped aristocratic sentiments, famously in Britain, until recently. (And it shaped the university, with its liberal arts and scholarly freedoms, too.) "Gentlemen" did not work in trade. Of course, the dirty secret was that statesmanship, disinterested thought and "genuine leisure" required wealth, and, in Rome, Athens and aristocratic Europe, was built upon slaves, peasants, serfs and retainers. They also lusted after the "status" of public fame. Moreover, what makes them think that Augustinian original sin, the Hobbesian war of all against all, or sloth and slackerdom will simply evaporate, that human imperfections emerge purely from material want? They are, like Shiller, optimistic. The Skidelskys here take refuge in what they call "a declaration of faith," which isn't that far from Shiller's "humanization of finance." Since it hasn't been tried, who knows? It has to be better then endless work for no good end, "otherwise our state is desperate indeed."

There's a utopian element here. Historically, the number of souls really suited for that kind of genuine leisure was quite small. Democracy, even in periods of relative abundance, has never displayed any more propensity for producing them than, say, imperial Rome. (Democracy has always stressed, always lauded -- as did Marx and the socialists -- work and consumption, which raises the question: Is democracy suited to this kind of broad leisure? They blame "the deathly orthodoxy" of academic economics for the tyranny of scarcity and work, which seems overly broad.) It is an ideal, and the world might be a better place if a few more souls attempted it. That's a sentiment, Conard, with his antipathy to liberal arts solipsists and his world of endless labor, would reject. That leaves us just about where we started, between a vision of ceaseless struggle for uncertain ends and a fantasy of enlightened retirement. - Robert Teitelman

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