Greetings my friends.

I have been giving some thought, as might be expected of the advocate of utilitarianism, to the issue of happiness. According to recent research, gross domestic product (GDP)in Britain has all but doubled in the the last thirty-five years, whilst a ‘Life satisfaction index’, which purports to measure levels of happiness, has hardly shifted. The relative encrease in wealth since my own demise, some one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, must be significantly greater than that recorded by this research over a much shorter period, but I would not be surprised to find that people were not that much happier than they were in 1832. The question, over whatever time-scale, remains: if wealth is the source of happiness, why hasn’t encreasing wealth made us happier?

That wealth was a source of happiness I never doubted: of two individuals, he who possesses the most wealth will posses the greatest happiness, or chance of happiness. However, long before modern economics gave it a name, I identified diminishing marginal utility, and applied it to wealth. As a young man, I doubted that a King was five times happier than a poor labourer; towards the end of my life I doubted that multiplying an individual’s wealth ten thousand times would so much as double their happiness. Accordingly, I remain unsurprised by the stubborn immobility of the life satisfaction index in the face of encreasing wealth.

My contentment at seeing the developing body of empirical evidence for my own ‘axioms of mental pathology’ was cut short by the disquieting realization that the psychological foundations of my theory took it for granted that human beings typically wished to encrease their wealth, and that the acquisition of wealth delivered more, and more lasting, pleasure than its actual possession. While I had no doubt that the maximization of happiness, not of wealth, was the proper end of legislation, and while I appreciated that human beings desired many things other than wealth, I did think that growing prosperity brought true happiness. The important point was not so much to be rich, as to be_come_ rich_er_. The universal desire materially to improve one’s economic position, which I adopted without qualification from Adam Smith, did entail that encreasing wealth, or abundance, was a legitimate goal of state policy—albeit a lesser one than subsistence or security, and one best achieved through the latter, in the form of liberty under law. In my day, neither the potential exhaustion of the resources of the globe, nor calamitous climate change resulting from human actions undertaken in pursuit of growing wealth, entered the utility calculation.

I note that this situation has radically altered, and could wish that I were alive now, so that my genius could grapple with these issues. True, the first condition for the investment of effort or industry by individuals was hunger, but subsistence had natural limits, and once bellies were full, the natural aversion to the pains of labour could only be expected to be overcome by the anticipation of rewards in the shape of growing personal wealth, the hope of which was to my mind the greatest of all blessings. There was simply no limit to the bounds of wealth, meaning simply instruments of enjoyment, while the pursuit of happiness by means of the pursuit of wealth seemed to me a psychological datum of human beings. My own instinctive view was that a state or economy which self-consciously eschewed growth, what young John Mill would later go on to delineate in terms of some approbation as a ‘stationary state’, would be an unremittingly miserable place, in which economic life would be what modern theorists, I believe, call a zero-sum game, where every gain in wealth for one person entailed a loss of wealth for another, so that competition for ownership of resources threatened to become not so much ‘dog-eat-dog’ but ‘man-eat-man’. I may have been realistic about the actual benefits—as regards happiness—consequent upon the possession of wealth, but I remained convinced that the hope of encreasing one’s wealth, and thereby one’s happiness, was the engine that drove civilization forwards, even if that hope was in fact sustained by a misapprehension about the relation of wealth to happiness. Further thought needed here I think: perhaps I should email young Layard …

Yours ever,

J.B.