Have you ever met someone who measures happiness solely by wealth? Neither have I, but the imaginations of my Left-wing friends teem with such people. Indeed, they often assume that I must be one of them — that conservatism is a kind of mental deficiency that leaves me unable to appreciate the good things in life.
I try to explain that, in 15 years as a right-of-center politician, I have yet to come across anyone who thinks that you derive more pleasure from a large bank balance than you do from, say, playing with your kids, or listening to Beethoven or going for a walk in the countryside. But I see that familiar look of skeptical boredom creeping across their features.
The problem has to do with a confusion between ends and means. Wealth is not an alternative to the good things in life; it’s their enabler. The best way to think of economic growth is as a series of time-saving advances. As productivity increases, so does leisure. It’s because we no longer have to work for seven days simply to feed our kids that we can play with them on weekends. It’s because we can drive to the office, instead of waiting for several buses, that we have time to lose ourselves in the second movement of the Seventh Symphony. It’s because we no longer have to do the washing-up by hand that we can press a button and go for a walk.
These observations might seem banal, but think how many people make the same arguments at a macro level. The leaders of the Church of England last week railed against what they call “rampant consumerism.” The Pope calls us away from “materialism.” Shelves groan with books telling us that we’re trapped into wanting purposeless designer items, and so distracted from more important things, such as friends, family and acts of kindness. Our politicians, we are told, should be less interested in gross domestic product, and more interested in gross domestic happiness.
Well, find me a politician who is against friends, family or acts of kindness. The argument isn’t about what makes us happy; it’s about what governments can do about it. As the brilliant 18th century conservative, Samuel Johnson, put it:
Small doesn’t mean insignificant, of course. We expect the government to uphold civil order; to prevent crime; to ensure that children receive a decent education; to defend our borders; to maintain a functioning judicial system. These things don’t guarantee happiness, but they create circumstances which allow us to achieve it. Thomas Jefferson, Johnson’s contemporary and ideological rival, understood this, which is why he cleverly put the bit about “pursuit” into the Declaration of Independence.
Every generation has made the same argument against materialism. The eco-protesters and the Occupy crowd are advancing a case that hasn’t substantially moved on since Seneca. What has moved on, though, is the standard of living. On every metric, from literacy to longevity, from infant mortality to calorie intake, markets have made us wealthier.
It is here that the “GDP isn’t everything” mongers make their error. We can all see the pointlessness of throwing money away on fashion items or ostentatious parties. A dislike of waste is in our genome. But today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s staples: that’s the real miracle of open competition.
When I was born in 1971, millions of people in Western countries had no televisions, no indoor plumbing, yet the intellectuals of their day were arguing that they had plenty. Go back a generation further and, even in the United States, plenty of rural homes that were not hooked up to the electricity grid, and it took a day simply to do the washing, and another to do the ironing. Go back to the nineteenth century and you are in a world of constant exhaustion, illness and dirt. Yet Victorian moralists breezily asserted that people had never had it so good, and that society had lost its sense of what really mattered.
Why assume that ours is the generation that has finally reached saturation point? Why should we be the ones who get to draw the line?
Ah, you say, but we’re not talking basics like housing and medicine; we’re talking about the unnecessary opulence of the modern consumer. Well, fine, but where do you think the housing and the medicine come from? It’s our “obsession with GDP” that is raising up the destitute. In 1990, 36 percent of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than a dollar a day. Today, that figure has fallen to 9 percent, and the drop has been sharpest in the places which have opened up to global markets, above all in Africa.
There can be reverses, of course. We saw one following the 2008 crash, when socialists got precisely what they had said they wanted: less consumption, lower GDP, a retreat from materialism. They also got more equality, since the income of working people fell by more than that of people on benefits. Yet, in the event, they complained more bitterly than ever.
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it creates conditions in which happiness can be achieved. Which is why, contrary to popular belief, surveys show a strong correlation between economic growth and self-defined contentment. Wealthier countries are happier places. If you doubt it, ask yourself this: Would you rather be poor in North Korea or South Korea?
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament.
