The Wall Street crash was still a year away when in 1928 John Maynard Keynes spoke to an audience of Cambridge undergraduates. The great economist told the students that by the time they were old men the big economic problems of the day would be solved. The capitalist system was capable of delivering such a sustained and steady increase in output that workers would eventually have all the material goods they could possibly want. They would need to toil for only 15 hours a week and could then spend the rest of the time enjoying themselves. Capitalism, Keynes argued, was a means  a rather distasteful means  to this end.

By the time his essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" was published two years later, the world was sliding towards the great depression, extremism and war, but Keynes saw the crash as merely delaying the day when society would be able to meet all its needs with far less effort. In one respect, Keynes was right. Capitalist economies have become more efficient; indeed, the leaps in productivity have been even greater than he predicted. But he was completely wrong in his belief that workers would ever feel satiated by their material possessions, and devote more of their time to painting, reading or watching ballet.

So what would Keynes make of a world in which lavishly paid investment bankers work from dawn to dusk and then decamp at the weekend to country-house hotels where they are waited on hand and foot by a new servant class paid little more than subsistence wages? Not much, according to his eminent biographer, Robert Skidelsky, and his philosopher son Edward, in a book that draws heavily on Keynes's (rather patrician) views of what constituted the "good life". How Much Is Enough? argues that the modern world is characterised by insatiability, an inability to say enough is enough, and the desire for more and more money. Economics, a narrowly focused discipline in which there is no distinction between wants and needs, has driven to the end of a cul-de-sac. As in 1930, the Skidelskys say, the short-term need to get the global economy moving again should not deflect policy-makers from reforms that will lay the foundations of a saner, more stable world.

The book argues that progress should be measured not by the traditional yardsticks of growth or per capita incomes but by the seven elements of the good life: health; security; respect; personality; harmony with nature; friendship; and leisure. "The overall picture is not encouraging for the advocates of growth at all cost. Despite the doubling of UK per capita income, we possess no more of the basic goods than we did in 1974; in certain respects, we possess less of them."

This is perhaps a tad hyperbolic. To be sure, job security is much weaker than it was at the end of the golden age of postwar prosperity and the pressure on the environment has increased. But fewer people die horrible deaths from lung cancer than they did 40 years ago; the bonds of friendship are as strong as they ever were (if manifested differently in a digital age); people are more aware of the need to live in harmony with nature; and in many ways Britain is a more tolerant, respectful place than it was in an era when the London dockers took to the streets in support of Enoch Powell. There is a danger of getting misty-eyed about a time that was not a golden age if you were poor, black or gay.

That said, the main thrust of the book holds true. There is more to life than gross domestic product and it is only recently that growth at all costs has become enshrined as the goal of economic policy. We live in a country divided into workaholics who have more money than they know what to do with and millions of unemployed and under-employed citizens struggling to make ends meet on the proceeds of work in the informal economy or claiming state benefits. In the middle there are the debt slaves, worried about the mortgage and often one pay packet away from penury. When the Skidelskys say that we ought to be able to do better than this, it is hard to disagree with them. They favour a society influenced rather less by Anglo-Saxon capitalism and rather more by the catholic teachings that inspired Europe's postwar social market economy. Sprinkle in a bit of Keynesian liberalism and a pinch of social democracy and the good society is within reach.

Well, perhaps. How Much Is Enough? is a spirited polemic but it is not without its faults. The book starts and finishes well but has a long central philosophical section in which the disquisitions on Marcuse and Aristotle give the impression that the authors are showing off. They also have quite fixed views on what constitutes the good life. They approve of the opera and wine-tasting but not of watching TV and getting drunk, noting that Keynes's vision of middle-class culture spreading to the masses with the increase of leisure has not been realised.

But the main problem with this book is one of political agency. They make a series of sensible suggestions for how the good life could be attained: a basic citizens income, an expenditure tax and curbs on advertising to rein in consumerism; a Tobin tax on financial transactions. Where they are less convincing is in sketching out how these policies will be effected. "A sustained effort should be made to raise the share of income received by teachers, doctors, nurses and other public service professionals," they say. "This will require a higher rate of taxation and for that reason will encounter more political resistance than in countries which start with more equal income distribution." You bet it will.

 Larry Elliott's Going South: Why Britain Will Have a Third World Economy by 2014 is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

In the book of Exodus, the hunger of the people of Israel is answered by God with the daily gift of manna. It falls from heaven as a fine flaky substance and covers the ground like frost. The Jews are told to gather what they need but no more. They are also given a warning: those who gather too much will find that it turns to worms by the morning. In Egypt, the land from which the Jews had escaped, grain was piled up into huge barns. Here wealth was stored for the pharaohs. But in the new circumstances of the desert, God offers a very different model of economics: there is such a thing as enough.

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky (a father-and-son/economist-and-philosopher combination) are firmly rooted in the tradition of enlightenment rationalism, but they too seek an economics of enough. Yet it is also the inherent optimism of enlightenment rationalism and its presupposition of continual progress and growth that forms the intellectual hinterland for How Much is Enough?'s opening problematic.

Back in 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote the essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren in which he takes "wings into the future", arguing that economic growth and the resulting surplus of wealth would lead to an unimagined world of prosperity and increased leisure for all. So why did this promised land turn out to be a dystopia of greedy bankers and sink estates?

What is fascinating about Keynes's essay is how relaxed it is about greed as one of the important drivers of growth. Morality, he insists, is for the time of leisure that is to come. "Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight." Hmmm  what could possibly go wrong?

The Skidelskys resist the idea that growth has a natural limit as some sort of metaphysical fancy, thus distancing themselves from many ecological approaches that regard the planet as a finite resource that cannot sustain continual economic expansion. Technology, the Skidelskys insist, will come to our aid. Moreover, they accuse deep ecological approaches to economics as harbouring a secret puritanism. "Most climate radicals are also passionate haters of greed and luxury, people who in previous ages might have been Cromwells or Savonarolas." The problem, as they see it, is that economic growth has been pursued as an end in itself and not been indexed to any sense of what a good life might look like. Indeed, the very idea of the good life has been so eliminated from public consideration that we are left floundering with the vague rhetoric of happiness, something that has proved insatiable and elusive.

Drawing upon the work of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen and their capabilities approach  as well as a dash of Catholic social teaching  they seek to produce a list of the basic goods that are necessary conditions for this good life, and go on to sketch out a few of the fiscal levers that might be used as a means to this end. Economics, they insist, needs to be impregnated with purpose, with some humancentred teleology.

In other words, markets were made for man and not man for markets. This is a commendable insight, but whether their prescriptions for an economics of the good life are sufficiently inclusive to work at the level of the poorest in our society  those for whom growth and accumulation are what mostly happens to others  was something about which I was less convinced. Mostly, the Skidelskys are concentrated on the size of the pie and not so much on how the pie is cut up.

In What Money Can't Buy, Michael Sandel comes at things differently. He too would subscribe to the need for a more confident articulation of the good life, having built his philosophical reputation attacking the idea of a free-floating "unencumbered" self that is at the heart of John Rawls's hugely influential Theory of Justice. It is this same rootless self that he regards as unable to resist the power of the market to redefine our deepest values.

Thus, where the Skidelskys are prepared to leave certain liberal assumptions unchallenged, Sandel wants to draw attention to the ways in which the underlying liberalism of the marketplace wipes away a horizon of ethical significance  which is, roughly speaking, what the Skidelskys mean by the good life. In other words, Sandel insists that market values crowd out all other values like a cuckoo in the nest. "There are some things that money can't buy," he begins, "but these days, not many."

Not many indeed. Everything from kidneys to the best university place is now for sale. And the ingenuity of the market is endless. Paying homeless people to stand in the queue so wealthy people don't have to. The market in life insurance policies for the terminally ill, where a book is being made in how long a dying person survives. Marx spoke prophetically of how the market turns people into things and subjects into objects. But could he really have imagined the full extent to which capitalism leads to the commodification of life? In example after example, Sandel charts the full depths of reification. It makes for a terrifying story.

Sandel is a persuasive writer who may be just a little bit too fluent for his own good. For, like his engaging and hugely popular lecturing style  less lecture, more public Socratic dialogue  his technique is to allow wisdom to dawn through the application of practical reflection upon the particular. Is it right to pay children to write thank you letters? This might get them into the habit of writing thank you letters or it might commercialise an activity that ought to have nothing to do with financial reward. Discuss.

Sometimes one wants the real Michael Sandel to stand up a bit more. But this is to be overly critical.

Both books make a valuable contribution to the increasingly urgent literature on the nature of value. They are worth reading together. For they form a part of a much broader picture about the multiple failures of free-market fundamentalism and the moral vacuum in which it has trapped us.