What if we didn’t buy any new cars for a year? That’s a thought experiment suggested by Andrew Oswald, professor of economics and behavioural science at the University of Warwick, writing to the Financial Times recently. 

Oswald used data from the RAC Foundation and Autocar to estimate that UK buyers will spend £80 billion on new cars this year. Which is, technically speaking, a shedload of money.

Relatively, we won’t spend vastly greater sums on public services like education (£110bn) or health and social care (£190bn) – both public expenditures that the government may be looking to trim.

Will we really spend that much on cars? Possibly. We’d need to buy two million at £40k a pop to total £80bn. We bought (or registered) 1.9 million last year. But for the purposes of the experiment, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a bit over or under: it’s still a ton of money.

What would happen, wondered Oswald, if we reviewed our private spending as we do public spending, so thoroughly in fact that we bought no new cars at all this year? “How much harm would that do to our citizens?” he asked.

I suppose the first thing to consider would be the practical harm. It would put thousands of people out of jobs, and a significant part of that £80bn will be tax, with VAT into double-digit billions and another chunk again from first registration fees (which vary dependent on CO2 emissions), plus the Expensive Car Supplement for cars costing over £40k.

The Treasury could lose £15bn or more before one even considers a drop in corporation and income taxes and an additional spend on benefits. I suspect Rachel Reeves would prefer this thought experiment to remain exactly that.

But the esteemed prof is, I think, more curious about what it would do to our overall happiness. “Humans are dragged into harmful ‘keeping-up-with-the-Joneses’ status races,” he wrote. The implication is that we might feel better if we gave up those and looked after one another more.