What could Sir Martin Sorrell possibly want with £7.4m annual income? What could the FTSE350 company directors do with their 49% annual rise? As Adam Smith put it, there are limitations to ‘the size of a man’s stomach’. Of course, he also recognised they might want to satisfy ‘other wants and fancies … Cloathing and lodging, household furniture and … equipage.’ These might include what Thorstein Veblen referred to as ‘conspicuous consumption’, or for the truly inadequate: ‘conspicuous waste’. But Sir Martin Sorrell and his colleagues on the Prime Minister’s advisory committee on economic strategy, such as arch tax avoider Sir Philip Green, would struggle to spend even a small proportion of their income on such. So, according to the current economic orthodoxy – which it has to be admitted is based on some pretty quaint ideas – most of their income will necessarily find its way, as savings, into investment.

Some might get stashed under matresses and some might be spent on works of art, fine wine etc – the sort of things Ricardo noted as being in fixed supply and therefore reasonable stores of value with the potential for speculative gain. But the vast bulk of savings will be deposited with investment banks or other financial institutions where they are lo9oked after by professional fund managers. The orthodoxy assumes, though it is known to be an utterly false assumption, that it will be invested in real firms and real projects, creating jobs for the general population. Thus, even apart from Sir Martin’s claim to be worth 300 or more of his fellow human beings, his extreme high income is justified by its benign impacts for the rest of us. Any argument to the contrary must be motivated by base envy, and not worthy of consideration.
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