Is the future flexible?

Today we suffer disillusion, not because we are poorer than we were — on the contrary, even today we enjoy, in Great Britain at least, a higher standard of life than at any previous period — but because other values seem to have been sacrificed and because they seem to have been sacrificed unnecessarily, inasmuch as our economic system is not, in fact, enabling us to exploit to the utmost the possibilities for economic wealth afforded by the progress of our technique, leading us to feel that we might as well have used up the margin in more satisfying ways.

If you finished that paragraph and thought ‘Gosh, Sutherland has really nailed the contemporary malaise’, you are probably right. Except for two things. I didn’t write it and it isn’t remotely contemporary. John Maynard Keynes wrote it in June 1933.

Having spent the past 30 years at the coalface of consumer capitalism, it is the persistence of our discontent which fascinates me. Even though our material quality of life continues to improve by almost all objective measures, we still feel the system is failing us.

It’s worth remembering that, at the time of Keynes’s writing, there were only two and a half million cars in Britain; a bottle of whisky cost a week’s wages for a working man; foreign travel or washing machines were unimaginable luxuries. In 1950, in real terms, a ten-minute phone call to New York cost more than a one-way transatlantic flight today.

But here’s the rub. We don’t really notice these gains. No one ends a ten-minute transatlantic call feeling £199 richer because it now costs £1 not £200. Contrary to what economists think, the consumer surplus — the difference between what you’d be prepared to pay for something minus what you have to pay — does not produce much happiness or gratitude.