Wealth vs freedom

H.L. Mencken once said that a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband. The anthropologist David Graeber takes a slightly different view. When I interviewed him about his wonderful book Bullshit Jobs, he explained that, rather like the Laffer curve, there is an optimal amount of wealth for anyone to have: if you have too little wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money. If, on the other hand, you have too much wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money.

I’d always noticed a similar middle ground with cars. You want a car that’s nice enough not to fret about whether it will start; equally you don’t want your car to be so perfect that you worry about parking on the street. (My colleague Mike Hughes suggested that there is a market opportunity for car-makers here. He suggested introducing the Range Rover Vogue V8 SCE, the SCE standing for ‘Supermarket Carpark Edition’. Otherwise brand new, it would be delivered with a dent to the rear wing and some pre-scuffing to the offside alloy wheels, so you’d never worry about it all that much.)

We never sufficiently consider that there may be a trade-off between wealth and freedom. It is always assumed that more wealth brings more choice, and for the majority of history this was probably true. But sometimes an increase in collective wealth comes at the expense of choice. Because it carries with it the inescapable obligation to compete.

When women entered the workforce, it brought new earning power to the typical household. But it also cost the household 40 hours of discretionary time every week. For people with a newly installed washing machine, an interesting job and no kids, this was an inarguable gain.