Abstract
Economics was invented to deal with material scarcity, and is therefore biased towards increasing materially production. Many of the world’s current problems, however, are caused by excessive use of the resources of the natural world, often driven by an excessive desire to accumulate the money that stands proxy for them. In order to respond to these, then, we need to return the concept of ‘enough’ to the centre of moral and social, and therefore political and economic, thinking. ‘Enough’ for an individual turns out to be concretely contextual and intrinsically relational. At the same time, it has objective boundaries, set not least by ecological limits combined with justice, both local and global. Therefore we need both good judgement and healthy societies to be truly satisfied, as individuals, with enough. One of the factors that exacerbates our weakness for excess is the monetarisation of goods. Economists, I suggest, might need to be attentive to the importance, the specific complexities, and the risks of quantifying ‘enough’.
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Notes
- 1.
Skidelsky [in this volume]. See also Wincewicz-Price (2021).
- 2.
The wise and profound discussion of wealth in Aristotle’s Politics 1.8-10 provides the bedrock and background of this critique, and is highly relevant to the whole topic of sufficiency in economic thinking.
- 3.
Summa Theologiae 1.2.30.4; Ecclesiastes 5.9, quoted in Summa Theologiae 2.2.118.8.
- 4.
Cf Summa Theologiae 1.2.30.4 (although Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s example of medicine and health as a possible example of infinite desire is - to me at least - obscure).
- 5.
I owe this distinction between the way avarice and consumerism works to Edward Hadas. Cf. J. K. Galbraith (1958, 127): ‘Were it so that a man on arising each morning was assailed by demons which instilled in him a passion sometimes for silk shirts, sometimes for kitchenware, sometimes for chamber pots, and sometimes for orange squash, there would be every reason to applaud the effort to find the goods, however odd, that quenched this flame. But should it be that his passion was the result of his first having cultivated the demons, and should it be that his effort to allay it stirred the demons to ever greater and greater effort, there would be question as to how rational was his solution. Unless restrained by conventional attitudes, he might wonder if the solution lay with more goods or fewer demons.
- 6.
I assume here the point well-argued by the Skidelskys in their book that we cannot determine what is enough without a rich picture of what counts as a good life.
- 7.
There are immaterial goods, of course, that you cannot have too much of, such as charity and peace; that at least is a standard theological claim, which St Thomas uses to explain why the theological virtues, unlike the cardinal virtues, which relate to this life, do not relate to a mean (Summa Theologiae 1.2.64.4).
- 8.
See Braybrooke (1987), especially ch. 2.
- 9.
Summa Theologiae 2.2.150.1 ad 1.
- 10.
Miller (2012) provides a thoughtful account of the relative and objective dimensions of societal needs.
- 11.
Summa Theologiae 2.2.141.4 ad 1.
- 12.
Summa Theologiae 2.2.141.6.
- 13.
See Atkins (2003).
- 14.
A comment of Malcolm Schofield’s on the description of the best constitution in Cicero’s Republic 2.57 is pertinent here: ‘The reiteration of “sufficient” is particularly indicative. It implies that how exactly such matters are to be determined will be a task for judgement, in the light of circumstances as assessed from a vantage point of practical experience, custom, and the actual realities of class and power, not of theory alone. In other words, a proper theory of the best constitution cannot remain a matter of “pure” theory, or a precise formula valid for all time, but must grant a crucial role to experience and judgement’ (Cicero 2021, 81–82).
- 15.
Following Herbert McCabe, I prefer ‘temperateness’ to ‘temperance’; the latter word is coloured by its associations with the suppression rather than the moderation of desire, and that commonly in the narrow context of alcoholic drinks!
- 16.
Cf. Blum (1998).
- 17.
Carbon Footprints offer one way of measuring ‘enough’ for part of our lives; I doubt that anyone living in Britain, according to these, is using no more than their share of what is available for the planet; Berners-Lee (2019) offers a wealth of practical suggestions; MacKinnon’s The Day the World Stops Shopping (2021) imagines how we might respond positively to a sudden decrease in 25% of our overall consumption, which he argues is the sort of figure that might make a serious impact on global warming. Less attention has been paid to what might be a fair share of products that damage ecology in other ways, such as non-durable plastic or inorganic pesticides. David Wiggins (2005, n.32), discussing pesticides and the precautionary principle asks: ‘If we can bring about so much in seventy years, what shall we have done in a hundred and seventy?’. The whole long footnote is pertinent and sobering.
- 18.
Cf. St Francis de Sales: ‘Hélas! Philotée, jamais personne ne confessera qu’il soit avare; chacun désavoue cette bassesse d’ame: on s’excuse sur le nombre des enfants, sur la prudence qui exige qu’on prenne les moyens de s’établir: jamais on n’en a trop. Il se trouve toujours quelque bon motif d’en avoir davantage; et même les plus avares, non-seulement n’avouent pas qu’ils le soient, mais encore en conscience ils ne pensent pas l’être: non, ils n’y songent pas; car l’avarice est une fièvre qui tient du prodige.’ Thanks to Edward Hadas for this citation.
- 19.
The chapter headings of Sandel’s (2020) are telling: they include ‘Winners and Losers’, ‘The Rhetoric of Rising’, ‘Credentialism: the Last Acceptable Prejudice’, ‘Success Ethics’ and (on the elite universities) ‘The Sorting Machine’.
- 20.
The numbers need not stand for money for the same disastrous effect to occur - league tables for schools and hospitals work similarly. Such tables in effect turn the genuine good of respect into the pseudo-good of status.
- 21.
Such competitiveness exists at the national as well as the personal level, and with potentially disastrous effects: ‘Growth became a matter of national pride. It was important to win the “race” with the other rich countries,’ Bannerjee and Duflo (2020, 236), on the 1980s.
- 22.
Quoted by the Skidelskys (2013, 76).
- 23.
The wine example is discussed in Ko and Busselato (2021), ch. 2.
- 24.
Consequently, ‘The most important question we can usefully answer in rich countries is not how to make them grow even richer, but how to improve the quality of life of their average citizen’ (Bannerjee and Duflo 2020, 166). The Skidelskys argue for a general consumption tax (2013, 204-207) to counter competitive consumption, arguing that ‘in a dynamic economy the prohibition or taxation of particular goods is ineffectual, as well as arbitrary, since individuals determined to show off their wealth can always find alternative ways of doing so.’ This seems to me to miss the point that different ways of spending money have very different impacts, socially and environmentally.
- 25.
I focus here on the voluntary choices of individual, families and groups within civil society. I offer some reflections on how these might relate to political choices in Atkins (2022).
- 26.
For a fuller discussion see Atkins (2003). Gill (1983, 138) makes the converse point: ‘For, don’t you see, in the Leisure State, people won’t really love the ‘good things’ they will enjoy in such plenty. They won’t love them in the sense that they will see them and use them as holy things, things in which and by which God is manifest. In reality they will despise everything. Things will be made only for passing enjoyment, to be scrapped when no longer enjoyable .... It is all a great illusion’.
- 27.
See his delightful book, From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of the Imagination (2021), which is full of examples of joy-filled simpler living. MacKinnon’s (2021) equally creative and hopeful The Day the World Stops Shopping (see n. 23) is subtitled How Ending Consumerism Gives us a Better Life and a Greener World.
- 28.
See Sermon 357.2.
- 29.
Bannerjee and Duflo (2020), provides a model of examples of such cautious, attentive, research, including a wealth of examples in their comprehensive overview.
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This paper is dedicated to the memory of Professor Rosemary Mitchell, a dear friend and former colleague who was taken ill unexpectedly and died while it was in preparation. A comment of hers on a recent related paper of mine provides a profound and apt reflective context for my argument: ‘The problem also seems that where we should understand finitude (e.g. natural resources), we act as if are limitless – while we marginalise goodsGoods which ARE actually limitless (e.g. poetry). For me, part of the problem is our failure to recognise in ourselves that which is mortal and finite, and that which is not, the God-given. Insufficient humility and insufficient adoration .…’
Robert SkidelskySkidelsky, Edward and Edward SkidelskySkidelsky, Edward’s superb, How Much is Enough? MoneyMoney and the Good Life (2013) has been both an invaluable aid and a dialogue partner in preparing this paper. Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources (2013) is basic reading for anyone wanting to return sanity to mainstream economic thinking.
I am grateful to Edward Hadas and Malcolm Schofield for very helpful comments on this paper.
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Atkins, M. (2024). What Is ‘Enough’?. In: Róna, P., Zsolnai, L., Wincewicz-Price, A. (eds) Homo Curator: Towards the Ethics of Consumption. Virtues and Economics, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51700-6_3
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