In a major speech focussing on the government’s plan to revive the post-Covid, Boris Johnson recently promised to “build back better, build back greener, build back faster.” But if the pace of economic growth remains the only measure of success, then “faster” will dominate “better” and “greener," as it has done for years. Building back differently to before will require us to measure the quality of economic growth as well as its quantity.
It also requires us to restructure our psychological landscapes as well as our physical ones. Above all else, perhaps, it requires us to rein in our individual and collective addiction to getting richer. Poverty , after all, does cause misery and those who say that money doesn’t buy happiness often do so from a position of privilege. More wealth will improve the wellbeing of the worst off in society.
But, at the same time, many people have become so addicted to getting richer that they get to a point at which more money will have no effect—and sometimes even a negative effect—on the quality of their life. Some of you reading this may already be aware of this. Perhaps you have been putting in extra hours to get that pay rise or to impress your boss, which has placed a strain on some of your most important relationships. The quality of our personal relationships strongly predicts our happiness, as we can all attest from lockdown. Whatever your own experiences of the past few months, the crisis provides us all with the opportunity to reflect on our personal and professional priorities.
You can use these insights in the decisions you make on behalf of other people. As a business leader or politician, you may already recognise the need for progressive taxes on wealth. Public spending will be vital as we seek to mitigate the harms caused by the lockdown. Additionally, you need to properly engage with people across the range of incomes to help us all overcome our societal addiction to wealth accumulation. This requires interventions analogous to those found to be effective in the treatment of individual addicts, through a two-step process.
Acceptance is the first step of any effective behaviour change. So you must accept that many of your fellow colleagues and citizens are collectively addicted to wealth when they are either already past the point at which it will enhance their experiences or would like to keep getting richer if they were ever to get to that point.
Then we must act. Confronting our addiction to wealth must be an urgent priority. It’s tempting to say let’s first deal with inequalities as we come out of lockdown, and only after that we can try to convince people about their addiction. But helping some people and reining in others are inextricably linked. The preferences and behaviours of all citizens determine what we are all expected to aspire for.
The policy responses to Covid-19 have shaken up the routines of many people and this provides them with an opportunity to embed new patterns of behaviour into their lives. Working from home frees up commuting time, but it also reduces the opportunity costs of working and blurs the boundaries between work and leisure. Hundreds of thousands of people volunteered to help the NHS at the start of lockdown, signalling at least a desire to use more of their time in pro-social ways. It is such a shame that more was not made of this.
Accepting that we can easily become addicted to working long hours and acting to rein ourselves and others in will not only serve us well now but also in the longer term when the world will largely return to a close approximation of its hyper-competitive and wealth-obsessed pre-Covid self—or worse still, a magnified version of it as economies try to make up for lost activity.
The more that people become aware of our addiction to getting richer, the more likely we will be to limit our material consumption. A diminished desire to consume would mean that we are better placed to tackle some of the critical and seemingly intractable collective action problems of our time, such as climate change. There is every possibility that we are creeping towards a sixth extinction, which could even see Homo sapiens become extinct. The chances of this are reduced if we use the current crisis as an opportunity to remind ourselves that ever more wealth—and growth and consumption—will not lead to ever more happiness.
If we can overcome our addiction to wealth, we really can build back better and greener, as well as faster.
