Polly Toynbee suggests policy makers turn their sights from the cruder economic measures to happiness. “Imagine if they abandoned all other targets and adopted just the one — to increase the sum of national felicity. Budget day would no longer be the big event, it would instead be replaced with hedonic measurement day.”
Her column is based on lectures this week by economist Richard Layard. PDFs of the three lectures are available from the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance.
I know from my government policy work, incidentally, that the subject of happiness is interesting a lot of policy wonks close to Downing Street. It’s tied to the pursuit of ideas about social capital, popularised by Robert Putnam. One of the key issues is finding effective ways to translate understandable objectives — like increasing happiness in society — into concrete policy actions. Layard seems to have provided some valuable suggestions.
At this year’s Davos meeting, there was a session entitled, How Much is Too Much, about executive pay. When people at the Forum were still listening to me, I suggested it be retitled, How Much is Enough, since everyone knows that the ridiculous sums paid to most CEOs are too much. Needless to say, they didn’t change the title.
My thoughts stray back to this on the reports that Frank Quattrone, the former CSFB Silicon Valley banker, raked in $200 million for his endeavours from 1998 to 2000. I’m not usually one to rail about fat cats and executive greed, but that sort of sum is obscene for a corporate advisor. I don’t begrudge the fortunes of people who actually create new businesses and industries, but too much is too much. Shouldn’t people be content with enough?
My experience may be atypical, but I can’t recall meeting any truly talented person that was motivated by money. Ambition, yes. Power, yes. Challenge, yes. Ego, yes. For all the good people I’ve known, money was just a byproduct of success. It wasn’t the key factor that led them to excel. Don’t you think that most people in commanding positions — CEOs or, like Quattrone, heads of major banking operations — would do the job just for kicks (and some reasonable sum, so they could live in a nice house and take nice vacations). I can’t see the CEO of any major corporation walking away from the job because he or she wasn’t paid multimillions.