 I have, I come with a text, and that is my book that I wrote with my son, my elder son. I'm sort of an economist, and he's a philosopher, and we joined together in a very harmonious collaboration to produce How Much is Enough, which, How Much is Enough, The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life, and it is being published in Dutch today, I think. So I'd like to talk a bit, I'd like to explain a bit about the ideas of that book, and hope they will interest you. Now, the starting point of it was a little essay Keynes wrote, John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, wrote in 1930 called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, 1930, and it was at the depth of the Great Depression, and what Keynes is best known for, of course, is as the inventor of depression economics, but in this essay he invited his readers to take wing into the future and look beyond the depression, what would be the prospects for humankind a hundred years from now? His essay was written in defence, this is an important point, of capitalism, though not in terms that most of its admirers would have much appreciated. Following Max Weber, Keynes described capitalism as a motivational system rather than as a structure of production relations, and the motive on which it was based was something he called love of money. Love of money was useful, indeed crucial, in getting humanity from poverty to plenty. At the same time, it was despicable. Moralists throughout the ages had condemned it. For Saint Augustine, it was the chief of the deadly sins, and in basing its social and economic system on love of money, Keynes argued that humanity had made a Faustian bargain. The devil promised people untold riches but at the cost of their immortal souls. As Christ himself had said, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Keynes, like many before and since, thought he saw a way out of the trap. Once the devil had made society rich, we could dispense with his services. He was no longer needed. What is more, the riches he had created would enable humanity for the first time to avoid God's curse to Adam. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. The return which Keynes promised was not to the ground, but to the garden of Eden where the fruits of the earth need only to be picked. How is this to be? He had this wonderful idea. He ended his little essay with this wonderful flight of rhetoric which combined the New Testament and Aristotle. He said, I see us free to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue. That avarice is a device that the exaction of usury, he liked the word usury, is a misdemeanor and the love of money is detestable. That those who walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom are those who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more, this is after we had sent the devil packing because we were rich enough to dispense with his services, we shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well. The delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things. The lilies of the field who toil neither do they spin, who neither toil nor do they spin. So that's how it ended. But how could this be? How could this come about? Well, Keynes's hypothesis was startlingly simple. Extrapolating from existing rates of capital accumulation and technical progress, he predicted that barring large population increases in major wars, living standards in the progressive part of the world would be four to eight times higher in a hundred years than they were in 1930 when he wrote his essay. And that meant that the economic problem would be solved. Humanity in the developed countries would be able to satisfy all their material needs at a fraction of their existing work ethic, effort. Hours of work had been steadily falling since the mid-19th century and Keynes extrapolated, extrapolated from that to say they would go on falling steadily till we reached a point, and we're not far off that point in chronological time, when we'd only have to work three hours a day. I ask you, invite you to turn to chart one, which is right at the beginning of the handout. And this was Keynes's prediction. The blue line is the rise in national income per capita, and the red line is hours of work. And you can see that, you know, you get a five percent even more increase, a five times increase in GDP per capita, and the hours of work are falling, are falling to well under 20, and, you know, eventually, not so far ahead, towards zero. Well, how did he get this? Well, he made a simple linear extrapolation on hours of work. Hours of work would continue to fall at the same rate as they had in the 50 years or so up to 1930. In fact, they did continue to fall, though at a slower rate in the post-war period. But towards the end of the last century, something odd happened. Hours of work started to stabilize at levels far above 15 hours a week. So what's the explanation of Keynes's mistake? Well, one obvious one, and I want to highlight it straight away, and I come back to it later, was he believed that human needs were limited, and given steady progress in technology or productivity would therefore be progressively satisfied with less and less work effort. So I want to consider some explanations, and I group them under three heads, the three W's I call them, work, welfare, and wants. Like all classical economists, Keynes thought of work as a cost incurred to get a bundle of goods. In technical terms, it was a disutility, the sacrifice of time and effort to get what one wanted. But perhaps in today's world, work shouldn't be treated as a cost but as a benefit. So that's one possible explanation. In our book, we call this explanation for the failure of hours of work to fall, the joys of work. Now let's look at explanations connected with welfare. What's happened to welfare? Our habit is to measure the growth of welfare by the growth of GDP per capita. That's what we normally do. But this is simply, GDP per capita is simply the mean average of incomes. One cannot say what is happening to welfare until one knows how income is distributed. Now Keynes, another, I'm criticizing this great economist, and it's only a 12-page essay. He couldn't deal with every single objection to what he was saying, and it's later academics to point to all the holes in the argument, and I'm doing that at the moment. He failed to distinguish between needs and wants. He used the two terms interchangeably, and he took the reasonable view that needs were limited because they were absolute. The relative character of wants forces up consumption beyond needs, and to consume more and more, people need to work longer hours than they really need to in order to satisfy their needs. Now sociologically minded economists have distinguished between different forms of consumption lust. Let's call it consumption lust. Lust. Most famous is Thorstein-Wablin's conspicuous consumption. Consumption designed to show superior status. Always a very, very important motive for consumption throughout history. Great palaces, great cathedrals, any monuments which the rich have erected, and in fact we're grateful to many of them exist, were designed to show conspicuous consumption. They were designed to display the fame of the builder and the fact that the builder had a lot of money. Then there is snob consumption, which is very important, especially in the modern world. Consumption designed to show superior taste. Then there is bandwagon or envy consumption, wanting things because others have them, very strong in children, and that's where a lot of it starts, of course, and parents indulging, he's got something, why can't I have that? That kind of envy consumption. Snob and envy goods are not mutually exclusive. Many good snob goods mutate into bandwagon goods, leading to their abandonment by true snob. As soon as something gets too popular, the true snob moves somewhere else. Finally there's oligarchic consumption, which was identified by economists Roy Harrod and Fred Hirsch. The argument is that there's only a limited number of top goods, like places at elite universities, so competition for them intensifies as the general social condition improves, and it is characteristic of position goods, that they deteriorate the more people have them. We say that the purpose or end of human striving should be the good life for all, and we identify seven basic goods, which we believe constitute the good life. Let me, let's just turn to the next chart, the penultimate one, which is the basic goods. Thank you. Health, security, respect, personality, harmony with nature, friendship and leisure. So we now answer the question, how much is enough? The answer is enough to lead a good life. Individual preferences will determine the ranking of these goods in our own minds, but enough of them all must be present for a person to be said to be leading a good life. That's our argument. Now, my last point, and I'm coming rapidly to an end, I'm sorry I've gone on to say long, the last chart, policies for realizing the basic goods, limitations on hours of work to which I've added in my own text work sharing, basic citizens income, a progressive consumption tax and curbs on advertising. Would such a reorientation of policy we ask require the support of religion? Possibly. The basic goods as we present them are not logically dependent on any religious doctrine, but their realization is probably impossible without the authority and inspiration that only religion can provide. Most of the liberal reformers of the 19th and 20th century were Christians. Others among them, others among those who, as Cain said of himself, were those who destroyed Christianity, but yet had its benefits. So lapsed Christians, but still part of a certain way of thinking about the world, could a society entirely devoid of the religious impulse stir itself to pursue the good life? And that's the question of which we end the book. Thank you. Thank you very much.