Let's take it as a given that there's no comparison between the anxiety of earning too much and the far greater anxiety of earning too little. Nevertheless, earning money has indeed become an anxiety. I can personally testify that these days bringing in any appreciable income is actively unpleasant.

For 30 years, I earned peanuts. I'm not complaining. I was doing what I wanted, writing books, and considering that they continually lost money I was fortunate to have kept getting manuscripts into print. One novel finally took off commercially when I was 48. Now, writers are entrepreneurs. Most of their businesses fail, and in deciding to write professionally I took a rather poorly calculated risk. Beating the odds, an investment of time and effort has now paid off. Successful writers don't earn nearly as much as the public imagines, but I confess: I now make more money.

In which I take little enjoyment. Pushing my head above the parapet, income makes me a target. Like any American expat, I have two rapacious governments breathing down my neck, and the more I earn, the more I mark myself, like Rokos, as fair game. When an unexpected foreign rights payment comes in, am I pleased? No, I groan. It messes up my estimated tax regime. The better a year I have, the more fearful I become of a little brown envelope in the post. 

Is this what we want, even economically? Newspapers speculate that the 50 per cent tax bracket may result in the well-off "choosing to make less money". That's me. I've now no motivation to take on lucrative work that will only make me more miserable. I've no motivation to become one of those people that a council can bilk just because they have money that, in the moral terms of our new gestalt, isn't really theirs. 

I'm hardly asking for pity here but I was happier earning next to nothing. My life was bureaucratically uncluttered, my tax returns were simple, and I did not live in fear. I value my larger readership, but were I to return to the meagre income of yesteryear, I might honestly be more contented. Besides, denying my two governmental stalkers blood from a stone would provide a spiteful satisfaction.