The purpose of Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s How Much Is Enough?, a well-written and fascinating book, is to persuade the reader that the good life does exist and can be known, and that we ought to strive to live it. In the introductory chapter the authors explain that this also has consequences for economic policy, since its main goal – economic growth – does not necessarily contribute to the good life – quite the reverse: growth does not make us happier and is environmentally disastrous. But the most important objection is that economic growth is senseless. The authors therefore argue against insatiability.

<- Lord Robert Skidelsky: You can't cut your way out of a slump; you have to grow your way out.

According to the Skidelskys, environmental concerns cannot be the primary reason for limiting economic growth, as it is not self-evident that global warming requires us to abandon growth. The more fundamental reason is a positive one, namely that satiability is necessary for preservation of the good life itself. But if we are to recover an understanding of what it means to have enough, we must relearn to ask the question: what is living well?

The authors propose a list of basic goods that form the good life: health, security, respect, personality, harmony with nature, friendship and leisure (defined as that which we do for its own sake). These goods are plural: lack of one cannot be offset by abundance of another.

I largely agree with the message of the Skidelskys. Yet, I have quite a number of questions. The first is about work. Although the Skidelskys admit that working may have similar characteristics as leisure, I doubt whether securing the basic goods requires working substantially less hours. While working too much certainly crowds out the good life, a good balance between work, family life or friendship does not require a shorter than standard working week. In this regard, it would have been helpful if the authors had benefited more from Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue theory, because MacIntyre’s notion of internal goods of practices (and the virtues one needs to develop them) gives ample room to the intrinsic value of working in the context of practices.

The authors therefore would have don better to focus on how to raise the quality of work (rather than to reduce working hours to three days a week) in order to increase the share of leisure-like work.

Another question is to what extent the Skidelskys think it is possible to reduce positional competition. As they state themselves, it is part of human nature to compare oneself with others. We might change institutions in order not to inflame this kind of competition, but realistically it will not be possible to ban it. The Skidelskys themselves note that it was Herbert Marcuse’s error that he closed his eyes to the obvious fact of original sin, but it seems that they partly fall into the same trap, although they rightly note that moral discipline is important here.

Regarding the basic goods that the Skidelskys propose, a question that pops up is whether we can safely conclude that Western welfare is sufficient to meet them. Some of these goods, such as health, are related to income per capita. Health is a continuous variable that increases with income as more income makes it possible to live a healthier life. Recent cross-country happiness research confirms that happiness increases with income, also in rich countries. Therefore, it is not obvious that preservation of basic goods requires elimination of economic growth. I would argue that it requires selective economic growth that raises the quality of life rather than harming it (J.J. Graafland, The Market, Happiness and Solidarity. A Christian Perspective, London, Routledge, 2010).

Finally, regarding the concrete policy proposals, I think the weakest one is the provision of a basic income. The disincentive effects are potentially extremely large. The Skidelskys only focus on receiving a basic income, but hardly pay attention to the other side of the picture, that other people should provide for the financial means to finance the basic income. From a justice point of view, one can seriously doubt whether it is fair to let others work and pay for the basic income of those who want more leisure.

The reason was that the level of activity - output and employment - depended on the level of aggregate demand or spending power. If spending power shrank, output would shrink. In this situation it was the government's job to increase its own spending to offset the decline in public spending - that is by running a deficit to whatever extent necessary.

It was Friedrich Hayek (*) , who represented the orthodox theories which Keynes attacked. According to Hayek the main cause of slumps was excessive credit creation by the banks leading to overspending. The boom was the illusion; the slump the reality. The situation following an injection of money by the banking system would be similar to that of a people on an isolated island, if, after having partially constructed an enormous machine… they found they had exhausted all their savings before the new machine could turn out its products. They would then have no choice but to abandon, temporarily, the work on the new process and to devote all their labour to producing their daily bread without any capital.

That is, go back to growing their own food - much as the Russians did when their economy collapsed in the early 1990s. Keynes was scathing in his comment on Hayek's book, Prices and Production, which he called "one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read". "It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end in Bedlam."