1. Introduction

See pages 19 and 79 for definition of counter-elite.

It sums up the role of government in two sentences: “The rationale for intervention… can be based on ensuring markets work effectively e.g. ensuring pollution is accounted for by business, or to achieve distributional objectives e.g. to promote fair access to education. Alternatively, this could involve providing goods generally not provided by market mechanisms e.g. defence” (p. 12). The guide allows for “strategic objectives” other than the correction of market failure (p. 20), admits the importance of “health, relationships, security and purpose” to well-being (p. 23), admits the limitations of marginal analysis techniques (p. 28), but still defines economic efficiency as being obtained “when nobody can be made better off without someone else being made worse off” (p. 20).

These included Nestle’s $11.8 billion takeover of Pfizer’s baby food business from which he personally made €2.8 million. Investment banking may seem more polite than the New York property market, but as Macron himself put it to The Wall Street Journal, the job was a form of prostitution and the skill was seduction.

The term ‘well-being’ is used in several ways in the literature and in public discourse. In this book I use it in two ways: first, in an entirely abstract sense, to refer to the state produced by living a good life whatever that may be (‘good life’ is also a neutral term), and in Chapter 3 to refer to the state that is measured in subjective well-being surveys, typically including questions such as ‘how satisfied with your life overall are you?’ ‘Flourishing’ refers to a particular form of well-being in both senses.

The Sanders campaign is often contrasted with the top–down Clinton campaign. The problem with Clinton’s campaign was precisely that it wasn’t top–down: it was just top.

This is an easy definition, but begs the question where the boundary of the elite lies. This, and the concept of the counter-elite, is explored in Chapter 4.