Michael Prowse, columnist for the Financial Times, cites two relatively new books (The Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot and Happiness by Richard Layard) to make arguments so bad they deserve to be quoted at length.
“Yet this relentless competition [for ?success?] is socially
destructive because the total amount of status is fixed: if my standing
rises, yours must fall.??Natural selection has bred into us a concern with our social
standing. ? Monkeys are happier and healthier when at the top of social
hierarchies: their brains produce more serotonin.??Economic production per se ? does not address, and in many ways
exacerbates, the profound tensions raised by inequalities in wealth,
status and power. We need to tailor policies to combat the collectively
self-defeating race for status. This means [you knew this was coming]
taxing top incomes at higher marginal rates and, where possible,
avoiding incentive structures such as performance-related pay that
invite social comparisons.??Darwin used to be invoked in defense of market inequalities. The
irony is that he has switched sides. Today, neo-Darwinist biology
supports egalitarian social policies. The ?don?t mind the gap? slogan
of market liberals is not just socially insensitive. It is bad
science.?
Applying Darwin to public policy was a bad idea a hundred years ago and helped lead to World War II.
The policies Prowse recommends have been tried and abandoned because
they provide neither economic nor social welfare. But maybe the Soviet
Union wasn?t bound to fail or North Korea is sealed off from the world
because its people are so happy that Kim Jong Il does not want to be
overrun by South Koreans.
