Mal Fletcher comments on the 2015 Budget and Sunday shopping

Mal Fletcher

'History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict,' wrote B. R. Ambedkar, chief architect of the Indian Constitution, 'victory is always with economics.'

The Budget statement, handed down by George Osborne, features a call for Sunday shopping hours to be extended across England and Wales. In doing so, it may well add support to Ambedkar's dictum.

The major argument offered in support of the change is a purely utilitarian one. There are profits to be made by hard-working store owners, it insists.

Surely, boosting the sales of hard-working retailers while funnelling money into government VAT coffers is desirable?

This is a seductive case in a consumerist age, in which we are dealing with the pressures of austerity. Yet there are also important questions about human values and ethics to be considered.

This argument suggests that the only real value of any day of the year, or hour of the day, may be found in its economic worth. However, some of the world's leading ethicists are warning us of the dangers inherent in attaching price-tags to everything in life.

For example, Professors Michael Sandel and Deborah Satz, of Harvard and Stanford universities respectively, insist that the true value of some of life's most precious experiences and possessions can't be measured in purely financial terms.

Once we reduce everything to dollar values, they say, we encourage an economy that defines us rather than serving us. Arguably, that kind of thinking is what led us to the Great Recession - it needs to be avoided at all costs.

We need to stop thinking about certain days of the year, such as holidays and weekend days, in terms of sales or savings and see the other benefits they bring.

As things stand, we have precious few opportunities to gather face-to-face with family and friends. In our highly mobile age, families often lead quite distracted, if not fragmented, lives during the week.

At the same time, many of our closest friendships are increasingly mediated through digital gadgets. A study a few years ago suggested that the average Brit has around three or four 'real' friends, and 140 Facebook friends.

In her excellent book 'The Village Effect', psychologist Susan Pinker shows how face-to-face contact is vital to our education, happiness, resilience and longevity of life.

From birth to death, she says, human beings are 'hard-wired to connect to other human beings', via realtime, offline connections which bring health and happiness.

Our online lives seem often to discourage the development of face-to-face contact - or, at least, distract us from it. Indeed, the internet, for all its undoubted benefits, is as Andrew Keen has described it, an 'ecosystem of distraction'.

When reading a printed page, I may consult a footnote but this won't normally lead me to drop what I'm doing and head for the local bookstore to purchase that source material.