John Ruskin was one of the great intellectual figures of the 19th century. He was born in London in 1819, the only child of deeply devoted parents. His father was a hugely successful, and immensely respectable, wine merchant. From an early age Ruskin wrote beautifully and powerfully about the arts; he was a tireless teacher and advocate of all that he thought was missing from rapidly developing economies of the mid 1800s. As he aged he moved from art criticism to social criticism. The essays that make up this book were first published, across six months in 1860, in The Cornhill Magazine — one of the grandest and most prestigious periodicals of the era. They were so hated by the readers that the editor (who rather admired them) had to terminate the series. The plain cover of the first edition, in which the essays were collected as a book, gives no hint of the fireworks of the text. Uncontroversially, economics is the study of the production and distribution of ‘things of value’: money being only an instrument that facilitates these more fundamental activities. Ruskin’s step is both obvious and yet extremely dramatic: he asks about what we value. Suppose, he says, a society, in the grip of a superstition, elected to put all its resources into building an immense pyramid of gold — perhaps to appease a vengeful god — neglecting education, their homes, the welfare of the elderly, the quality of their diet and the elegance of their cities. An economist would have no problem with this; it’s what these people happen to choose, the concern would only be to help them accomplish it as efficiently as possible. To Ruskin, this demonstrates a monstrous outlook. Such a society is tragic and disastrous — and it is, Ruskin hinted, a version of our own. What we should value isn’t such a mystery, argued Ruskin. In another book, he describes his first visit (around 1840) to the quiet French town of Amiens. The streets are all pretty; the people are dignified but friendly, the shops are ‘uncompetitive’: over generations they’ve evolved to sell what the local people need; there’s no advertising; everyone works productively, but not too much; there are few people who could be called rich and even fewer who could be described as poor. There are no ugly suburbs: the town proper simply gives way to small farms; no-one is striving to build a fortune (why would they) and there’s never any lack of work for someone able to milk a cow or carve a statue. Ruskin intuited that a very great number of people would like to live this way and was aghast that ‘modern economics’ had not focused on helping us to reach this form of contentment — but rather talked only of maximising the production of steel or lowering the price of shoddy trinkets. We kill ourselves to grow the GDP but don’t judge the worth of what anyone spends their money on. We’ve unnecessarily embraced economic theories that make a point of ignoring our true longings. And so, in an abundant world, we feel anxious about our resources, dislike our work and live in ugly places. Ruskin understood with shocking clarity problems we’re still only at the beginning of managing to make sense of in our own times.
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