The next of my holiday reads deserves a couple of posts. It was Tristram Hunt’s [amazon_link id=”075381983X” target=”_blank” ]Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City[/amazon_link]. As someone who believes the UK economy is over-centralised around London, to the detriment of the whole economy including the capital, the era from the early 19th to early 20th centuries when many other major cities were growing rapidly is obviously intriguing. The UK stands out globally now for the extreme degree to which the economy depends on the capital – see for example the maps at the Geographically-based Economic Data website. France used to compete but there has been a significant devolution of both political power and economic growth (they go hand in hand of course) since the 1980s.
[amazon_image id=”075381983X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City[/amazon_image]
Tomorrow’s post will discuss the economics. Today is for philosophy.
Hunt has a fascinating section about the intellectual currents of the 19th century, and in particular the romantic reaction against industrialisation and the growing dominance of what Thomas Carlyle described as the cash nexus. Carlyle wrote: “We call it a Society, and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war named “fair competition” and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash payment is not the sole relation of human beings.” He was one among many – prominent among the other anti-market, anti-economics intellectuals of the day was John Ruskin, whose [amazon_link id=”0140432116″ target=”_blank” ]Unto This Last[/amazon_link] is one of the books I love to hate. And this tradition continues today, the charge led by Michael Sandel’s [amazon_link id=”0241954487″ target=”_blank” ]What Money Can’t Buy.[/amazon_link]
I was interested to read in Hunt’s account that the Utilitarians, particularly Bentham, were held to blame for the spread of market (im)morality. That’s not too surprising – after all, the utilitarian calculus was about counting and calculating, as caricatured by Dickens in the person of Mr Gradgrind in [amazon_link id=”014143967X” target=”_blank” ]Hard Times[/amazon_link]. Sandel is no fan of utilitarianism either, whereas modern economics still rests in principle on the notion of ‘utility curves’.
There is, though, a paradox in the fact that today’s ‘well-being’ or ‘happiness’ economics, which makes much of the idea that money and markets should not be the sole drivers of public policy, is rooted in a version of utilitarianism. Here is Richard Layard in 2009 making this explicit:
“[E]very human being wants to be happy, and everybody counts equally. It follows that progress is measured by the overall scale of human happiness and misery. And the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness in the world and (especially) the least misery.”
This is the utilitarian calculus, measured in quanta of happiness rather than money. For all that its advocates do not believe economic growth is the path to progress, the happiness approach would certainly fall foul of the belief of Carlyle and the other Romantics in the pre-eminence of emotions, institutions and tradition in society.