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The Good Life Edited by Ian Christie and Lindsay Nash Open access. Some rights reserved. As the publisher of this work, Demos has an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content electronically without charge. We want to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible without affecting the ownership of the copyright, which remains with the copyright holder. Users are welcome to download, save, perform or distribute this work electronically or in any other format, including in foreign language translation without written permission subject to the conditions set out in the Demos open access licence which you can read here. Please read and consider the full licence. The following are some of the conditions imposed by the licence: • Demos and the author(s) are credited; • The Demos website address (www.demos.co.uk) is published together with a copy of this policy statement in a prominent position; • The text is not altered and is used in full (the use of extracts under existing fair usage rights is not affected by this condition); • The work is not resold; • A copy of the work or link to its use online is sent to the address below for our archive. By downloading publications, you are confirming that you have read and accepted the terms of the Demos open access licence. Copyright Department Demos Elizabeth House 39 York Road London SE1 7NQ United Kingdom [email protected] You are welcome to ask for permission to use this work for purposes other than those covered by the Demos open access licence. Demos gratefully acknowledges the work of Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons which inspired our approach to copyright. The Demos circulation licence is adapted from the ‘attribution/no derivatives/non-commercial’ version of the Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons licences go to www.creativecommons.org Contents On the good life Perri 6 & Ian Christie 3 More than money Robert M Worcester 21 Found wanting? Tim Jackson & Nic Marks 31 Sources of satisfaction Michael Argyle 41 Good relations Penny Mansfield 51 Culture on the couch Francis Hope 59 Do the right thing Roger Scruton 63 Do we mind the gap? Will Hutton 71 A modest proposal against inequality Bob Holman 77 A Grossly Distorted Picture Alex MacGillivray 83 Runaway world David Goldblatt 89 Think global, buy local Helena Norberg-Hodge & Adrian Henriques 97 Against the addictive society Helen Wilkinson 107 Shop while they watch Neil Barrett 113 The gene genie Caroline Daniel 119 Demos 1 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess The Good Life Timeless values Geoff Mulgan 125 Private lives Perri 6 133 Juggling the good life Geraldine Bedell 143 Small is bountiful Nicholas Mellor 149 Good business Charles Handy 155 Trade fair Simon Zadek 165 Cures for ‘affluenza’ Judy Jones 171 Senior services Tessa Harding & Mervyn Kohler 179 Friendly society Ray Pahl 185 Communities of good practice Bronislaw Szerszynski 191 Virtuous realities Marianne Talbot 199 Bookmarks 209 2 Demos This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess On the good life Perri 6 and Ian Christie make the case for returning the idea of the good life to public debate and policy. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ is how the American Declaration of Independence sums up the elements of the good life. The pursuit of happiness is rarely spoken of in public life today. Instead, we talk mainly of economic growth and higher consumption. But the notion that ‘growth’ is the fundamental aim of public policy, and a proxy measure for progress in quality of life, is now challenged on many fronts. Increasingly, other goals and yardsticks of progress are seen as being just as vital to society, if not more so: buttressing social capital, making a transition to an economy that is environmentally sustainable, creating a more ‘inclusive’ society. Many of the contribu- tors to this Demos Collection consider these ideas and use them to pose a challenge to the prevailing conception of the good life as an individualist project, whose object is the maximisation of personal sat- isfactions, and whose main yardstick is that of material success – the accumulation of material goods and status. Its ethos is brutally summed up in the message of an American bumper sticker – ‘the guy with the most toys when he dies wins’.More subtly, it is embedded in the ways in which our politics has come to express its values and make decisions: the bedrock value is that of economic measurement, and the decision-making procedures are geared to the present, or at best the short-term future bounded by the next election. We are fixated on the procedures through which we generate the resources for the good life, not on its content. Demos 3 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess The Good Life The contributors to this Demos Collection pose a challenge to this inflation of the good life and individualised economic growth. They focus not only on the means of pursuing happiness but also on the nature of the outcomes we seek individually and collectively. They raise questions, in short, about the possibility of our pursuing the good life, understood as a life that not only brings personal satisfactions but is also decent and ethically lived. It is time to bring the idea of the good life back into the foreground of our public conversation. A sign that this is happening is the burgeoning interest in new forms of social and environmental indicators of progress in achieving desired outcomes and avoiding known ills, and the mounting critique of standard meas- ures of ‘progress’ in economics, business reporting, and investment. The avoidance of the nature of the good life in political debate will not be viable in the next century.A number of powerfusl forces will see to this, and they are explored by the authors in this Collection: First, the evidence is conclusive that, beyond a certain point of affluence, the achievement of ever higher levels of material well-being and of income does not lead to increased happiness. The consumer society is chasing a rainbow, as Bob Worcester shows in his article; growth, money and what they can buy us is necessary but very far from sufficient for well-being.‘Having it all’ is impossible; the attempt can turn, as discussed here by Helen Wilkinson, into addiction and compulsiveness. Second, the search for self-fulfilment associated with satiation or disillusionment with the joys of material affluence does not only point us towards modern remedies such as therapy (see Francis Hope’s essay) or a better understanding of what psychology can tell us about the sources of happiness, as discussed by Michael Argyle. It also directs us towards a rediscovery of old ideas about the good life – the ‘timeless’ values explored in this volume by Geoff Mulgan; the satisfactions of relationships of family and friendship, explored respectively the balance amidst 4 Demos This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess On the good life the muddle of multi-stranded lives considered by Geraldine Bedell; the idea of ethical education examined by Marianne Talbot; the concept of communities based on ethical lifestyles discussed by Bron Szerzynski; the value of the experience of the old (see the essay by Tessa Harding and Mervyn Kohler); and the ancient virtues discussed by Roger Scruton. Third, the pollution accompanying growth as we have known it, and the globalisation of industrial production and consumption, are now acknowledged to generate severe strains on the ecosystems which support our societies and economies along with all other life. The good life as lived by the USA, with its gargantuan appetite for fossil fuels, throwaway packaging, cars and roads, and what Charles Handy in this Collection calls the ‘economy of useless things’, is simply not exportable to the whole planet. As argued by David Goldblatt in his essay, the stress on the world’s climate and resources from a globalisation of the consumerist good life would be unsustainable. But we cannot expect developing countries to shrug their shoulders and resign themselves to relative deprivation: they have an unanswerable moral claim to a greater level of affluence. This means that prevailing patterns of consumption in the rich West must be changed – away from energy and material intensity, and towards a focus on services and intangible goods – as discussed here by Tim Jackson and Nic Marks, Alex MacGillivray and Charles Handy. It also places a new emphasis on the localisation of economic life, as argued by Helena Norberg-Hodge and Adrian Henriques. The rising awareness of the unsustainability of ‘business as usual’ consumption in the West inevitably raises the issue of judgement about more sustainable forms of the good life. Ethics are inescapably part of the politics of sustainable consumption, and of any conception of an environmentally viable good life, as Simon Zadek and Judy Jones remind us. Demos 5 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess The Good Life Linked to this is the debate about sustainable well-being. Does my enjoyment of the good life ultimately depend on a reasonable level of equality in society? This argument, associated in particular with Richard Wilkinson, is pursued here by Will Hutton, and with a Christian Socialist dimension by Bob Holman, who calls for a clear remoralisation of policy on income and deprivation.

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