Donald Winch Wealth and Wellbeing A Talk given at University College London, 21 June, 2010 I Wealth and Wellbeing is such a grandiose juxtaposition that it seems bound to arouse suspicion. I’d be wary of anyone who presented themselves as an expert on this subject without further explanation. My fear would be that they were either about to sell me something or trying to convert me to a new religion capable of increasing my wealth and wellbeing at the same time. Neither of those is part of my intention. I’m also bothered by words that have been so successful in hoovering up all the positive connotations that they don’t appear to have any precise antonyms. What about ‘illth’ and ‘ill-being’ then? To which my response has to be that those terms have not exactly caught on widely yet, though ‘illth’ has been around for a century and a half. Economists rightly claim to be able to understand the processes that underlie the generation of wealth and its distribution. They have also made claims to understand, in the words of one of the founding fathers of welfare economics, Arthur Cecil Pigou, ‘that part of social welfare that can be brought directly or indirectly into relation with the measuring rod of money’.1 The relationship of economic welfare to total welfare has always been more problematic and claims by economists to understand what constitutes wellbeing are much rarer -- or rather I should now say used to be much rarer -- certainly more hedged around with caution and modesty. 2 In the first part of this talk I’ll stick to my last as an intellectual historian by reminding you of an episode in the history of economics that rested on an ambitious attempt to measure wellbeing in relation to wealth. I say ‘remind’ because the economics of the exercise is far simpler than the historical circumstances that made it seem important to take up that specific 1 Economics of Welfare, p. 11 2 To quote Pigou again: ‘The real objection then is, not that economic welfare is a bad index of total welfare, but that an economic cause may affect non-economic welfare in ways that cancel its effect on economic welfare.’(p.12). 1 challenge in the first place. Speaking as someone who gave up economics for intellectual history a long time ago, the difficult bit will come at the end, when I try to suggest what light the episode sheds on the modern revival of interest in the political economy of happiness or wellbeing. II Coming from someone who published a book last year with the highly immodest title, Wealth and Life, these opening apologies may strike you as a late attack of false humility. But as most students of nineteenth-century cultural debates will recognise, the book’s title is merely an echo of a famous slogan originally propounded in 1862 by John Ruskin in Unto This Last, the place where ‘illth’ was coined at the same time: ‘There is no Wealth but Life: life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.’ Ruskin was borrowing from William Wordsworth, who had written in The Excursion that ‘We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love’; and both of them were invoking a higher conception of wellbeing to trump estimates based on material wealth. Staking claims to the moral high ground by asserting the inferiority of mere wealth as the source of human wellbeing is one of the oldest moves in an ancient game. One has only to recall biblical injunctions about rich men, camels, and the eyes of needles. But it’s also worth noting that warnings concerning the moral pitfalls of individual wealth have often been coupled with commendations of charity and public spirit, signs of recognition of the communal advantages of wealth, not least in the building of churches, schools, hospitals, libraries, and other forms of public monument. In deference to Adam Smith, I like to call these examples of ‘durable magnificence’, where his contrast was with non-durable forms of luxury expenditure as in the case of lavish hospitality. When applied to goals that serve a collectivity -- a city, region, or nation – durable wealth of this kind might have only positive 2 moral connotations for wellbeing. Adam Smith, long supposed to have been an upholder of an ethic of acquisitive individualism, a stern advocate of private frugality, was much in favour of the indirect benefits of durable magnificence and the classical-renaissance view of communal enrichment which it embodied. I shall not have time to deal with this subject properly, so let me commend the discussion that surrounds the following conclusion in Book II of the Wealth of Nations. ‘Noble palaces, magnificent villas, great collections of books, statues, pictures, and other curiosities, are frequently both an ornament and an honour, not only to the neighborhood, but to the whole country to which they belong. Versailles is an ornament and an honour to France, Stowe and Wilton to England.’ (WN, II.iii.39) There may be something here that is relevant to what I want to say later, but first let me revert to Wordsworth and Ruskin. Although they were not the first to take the high moral line on the disjunction between wealth and wellbeing, they were doing so within a cultural and intellectual context that lent support to the idea that, individually and collectively, England’s industrial wealth had been acquired at the expense of wellbeing. A romantic political and moral vision had been pitted against that embodied in the writings of political economists and utilitarians, secular and theological. If political economy stood for material wealth, moral economy stood for a higher conception of wellbeing. Robert Malthus, a theological utilitarian and the author of the most significant work on political economy since the Wealth of Nations, became the butt of attacks by the Lake poets throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century, with Robert Southey, Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge taking turns to administer his punishment. The cudgel was then passed to Thomas Carlyle and to his disciple, John Ruskin, who used it against political economy for the next three decades. Carlyle coined three well-known phrases that sum up key aspects of the attack: the ‘dismal science’, the ‘cash nexus’, and the ‘condition-of-England’ debate. The first two were meant to characterize the impoverished nature of the economists’ world, while the last of them provided a label under which the so-called ‘industrial’ novels of the 1840s and 50s by Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, 3 Charles Kingsley, and Dickens could be gathered. Dickens’s contribution to the genre, Hard Times for these Times, was dedicated to Carlyle. It may not be the best of his novels, but it supplied an enduring symbol and caricature of political economy and utilitarianism in the shape of one of the leading characters, Thomas Gradgrind -- a caricature that continues to be recycled, often inappropriately, in condemnations of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. By the 1880s Arnold Toynbee in some famous lectures on the Industrial Revolution seen as social catastrophe could sum up and declare victory by saying that ‘the bitter argument between economists and human beings has ended in the conversion of the economists’.3 One could take issue with this on historical grounds by pointing out that Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, long before Ruskin had appeared on the scene, had respectively drawn attention to the moral drawbacks associated with the division of labour and the ecological consequences of espousing economic growth as the chief means of raising living standards. Toynbee’s judgement that the quarrel was over by the 1880s was also decidedly premature. Ruskin enjoyed a revival of interest at the end of his life which coincided with the turn of the century. Despite Ruskin’s description of himself as ‘a violent Tory of the old school’, replete with many of the authoritarian opinions of Carlyle, he acquired new disciples such as John Atkinson Hobson and Richard Tawney, with New Liberal and Labour sympathies respectively. These self-styled ‘economic humanists’ ensured that the joint critique of economics and modern economic life was sustained before and after WW1. It didn’t end there. Many people of my generation will recall the impact made by Raymond William’s book on Culture and Society in 1958, a book that lent its name to the entire tradition and proclaimed that the values embodied in the debate were still worth fighting for under the banner of a new kind of socialism that was morally superior to mere Labourism and to a Fabianism that was fatally tainted by its association with Benthamism. Williams was later to join forces with a fellow Leavisite, E. P. Thompson, who was engaged in a similar quest in his books on William Morris and the making of the English working class. III 3 (137) 4 I have hastily sketched this background because it helps to explain my interest in the conflict between the political economists who studied wealth creation and the self-appointed spokesmen for life or human wellbeing. You won’t be surprised to learn that I retain sufficient loyalty to my upbringing to reject the tendentious characterization of this conflict as one involving human beings versus economists.