Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and CapitalismConclusionAside from the serious flaws in the evidence used in the‘science of happiness’, the fundamental problem withbasing policy on subjective well-being is that it is – quiteobviously – subjective. One man’s luxury is another man’snecessity. There is much about the ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’movement that resembles back-to-the-land romanticismand knee-jerk anti-consumerism. The movementconsists of a peculiar assortment of environmentalists,socialists, Malthusians and aristocrats who are nostalgicfor pre- industrial society. In their own ways, each of themseeks to subsume the choices of the individual with theirown subjective preferences. They demand coercion of themasses ‘for their own good’, starting with what they considerto be the horror of mass consumption.Politically, the well-being lobby tends to be left-leaning,but it is a strange kind of leftism in which the optimismof early socialism has been replaced by pessimism aboutwhat they once saw as progress. The desire to liberate theworking class has been replaced by a misanthropic viewof workers as materialistic sheep. The poverty of ambitionamong this influential section of the left is striking. As apolitical stance, worrying about the ennui of the affluentand complaining that shops offer customers too muchchoice is a far cry from telling workers that they have nothingto lose but their chains. In contrast to the early tradeunionist John Burns, who complained that ‘the tragedyof the working man is the poverty of his desires’ (Harrisand Seldon 1959: 62), a vocal section of the modern left has118