Consumption and Happiness

John Quiggin:

Lots of conversation these days about the dangers of consumerism, but few know this history. How then do we live with a quantum shift that began 300 years ago?

First up is Tomas Sedlacek’s Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning From Gilgamesh to Wall Street (Oxford University Press, 2011), a surprise best seller in the original Czech and with a glowing foreword by Václav Havel. More than half of the book is devoted to the economic views of the ancients, starting with the Sumerians, but Sedlacek’s closest engagement is with Adam Smith.

A primary concern is what Joseph Schumpeter called “Das Adam Smith problem.” That is, how to reconcile the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations—the advocate of the benefits of self-interest celebrated by Adam Smith clubs, Adam Smith tie pins, and the like—with Adam Smith the advocate of sympathy as the foundation of social order in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is a problem that has been tackled from many angles but never before, I suspect, based on an interpretation of the epic of Gilgamesh.

The core issue is not so much evil in general but the desire for more of everything, traditionally stigmatized as “greed” or “avarice” in Christian thought, but viewed more positively as “aspiration” in modern times. Sedlacek inclines to the Christian view and even more to that of the Stoics, that “we have to be satisfied with what we have, and that happiness can be found precisely in that.”

But, as he observes, that is hard advice to live by, and even more so in the modern world. Views about life and its possibilities, about good and evil, are fundamentally altered in a society characterized by economic growth as compared with the essentially static economic possibilities of the ancient and medieval worlds. Arguably, it is precisely the experience of economic growth that distinguishes the economists of the Enlightenment era (most notably the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave us Smith) from their pre-modern forebears.

From early times—say, 2,000 years before Christ—down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average person living in the civilized parts of the world. Ups and downs, certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no big progressive shift. Some periods perhaps 50 percent better than others—at the utmost 100 percent better—in the 4,000 years that ended roughly in AD 1700.

The realization that life had changed fundamentally was reflected in the 17th- and 18th-century disputes between advocates of the ancients’ values and those of the moderns. Supporters of the ancients, represented most effectively by Jonathan Swift in his “Battle of the Books,” scored some rhetorical points but couldn’t obscure the evidence of intellectual and scientific progress. By the middle of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was under way, and the era of economic growth had begun.

Sedlacek’s book is fascinating, but it leaves us with more questions than answers. His discussion of premodern thought persuades us that the willy-nilly pursuit of more of everything is misguided. But he fails to convince us that “being satisfied with what we have” is an adequate goal for modern humanity. In a world where change, both good and bad, is inevitable and pervasive, cultivating a position of stoical detachment, and an ideal of stasis, seems something of a cop-out.