I've been finishing off a book of essays by J.B.Priestley, Delight. They're about all the little things that please him, and were first published in 1949. (It bears some similarities to Philippe Delerm's The Small Pleasures of Life, albeit the small pleasures of an elderly Yorkshireman differ from those of a middle-aged Frenchman.) This argument, in an essay titled 'Fountains', struck me as a good moral for our own austere times:

“What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains? Expensive? Their cost is trifling compared to that of so many idiotic things we are given and do not want. Our towns are crammed with all manner of rubbish that no people in their senses ever asked for. By all means let us have a policy of full employment, increased production, no gap between exports and imports, social security, a balanced This and a planned That, but let us also have fountains.”

I think J.K.Galbraith (“private affluence, public squalor”) would heartily approve.