On a clear day, you can see it for miles - the HSBC tower at Canary Wharf. I had never realised that HSBC occupied all of it, and had rather assumed they let much of it out. But no, it's all theirs and it is reportedly the biggest single workplace in Europe.

I was there to meet the chairman, Stephen Green. and was whisked to the 40th floor, which turned out to be surprisingly funky. A bustling coffee bar, a lounge area, thinking pods and meeting rooms, and shared book cases with volumes on everything from golf to the Aids pandemic.

The one book I couldn't see was the latest work of Mr Green himself, Good Value: reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world.

I'm not surprised it wasn't there. I don't get the impression that Mr Green is the kind of chairman to thrust his book down the throats of his staff. In fact, he comes across as surprisingly gentle and unassuming.

His book reads as a fairly earnest manifesto for the capitalist globalisation that has been an unstoppable force in the world, to be tempered by a certain degree of self-restraint and driven by moral as well as purely financial values.

He makes a useful point in the week our government publishes its banking regulation white paper. Mr Green thinks regulation is necessary, but not sufficient to ensuring banks work in the public interest.

I met Mr Green and chatted to him, and you can hear my interview with him below.

The conversation we had inevitably strayed into the practicalities of regulation and it is perhaps therefore my failure that what is probably Mr Green's greatest insight rather got lost in it.

This is important, so let me spell it out here.

His point - as I understand it - is not so much that we should exhort bankers and others to somehow be moral against their own self interest when they are making money for themselves. No. His point is that bankers and others should be moral in their own self interest; that they will actually find life more satisfying if they are not narrowly selfish in their behaviour.

In other words, to be happy, you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and think - I have done something worthwhile for others as well as myself.

It turns out that there is a substantial amount of empirical economic evidence for this view. And it is perhaps a finding that should generate headlines more often than other economic news which fills the airwaves: the truly interesting economic revelation is that giving is more pleasurable than taking.

A study by Elizabeth Dunn literally handed money to people either to spend on themselves or on others, and it showed that the givers were happier afterwards than the ones who spent on themselves.

There is also evidence that volunteering is a route to happiness as well. Mr Green is surely right to remind them that there is more to life than making money.

Perhaps they should teach this in school. People do not always seem very able to judge these things for themselves.

But of course, what do you do in a world where many people act according to a different set of principles? Maybe they are not programmed like the rest of us. Maybe they get their satisfaction from being selfish!

I asked Mr Green how many people in banking might fit that bill, but he couldn't give me a clear answer.

Which I guess is why we need to regulate banks.

With people like Stephen Green in charge, one wonders how banks could have allowed themselves to become to so voracious and reckless. The answer is probably that people like him were not always in charge. HSBC, of course, has not gone bust and has not received state aid.

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I have reacted to the Telegraph's daily feed of different MPs' detailed expense claims with the usual mix of amusement, shock, disappointment and anger.

But from the beginning of it, I have had a guilty voice in my head asking me how I would myself behave if I was offered a temptation similar to that of our parliamentarians? A system that apparently encouraged large claims, validated the general sense that the money was there to be taken and which was hidden from public view.

It's hard for each of us to know how we would behave given the chance because we are not offered such opportunities very often. We might tell ourselves we would be very different to those scoundrel MPs - especially now we have seen the MPs being held to account.

Well it was this week that I remembered there was a lot of evidence on this subject. Behavioural economist Dan Ariely has performed a number of tests on groups of people, offering them chances to benefit from cheating.

The evidence suggests that our MPs are not abnormally mischievous.

The message is that most ordinarily moral people will give themselves the benefit of the doubt on moral questions. They wouldn't dream of stealing even 10p, because they know stealing is wrong, but they would happily bend some rules to give themselves $100, if they could justify it to themselves.

We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules. You probably won't have to think hard to find examples in your own life (from claiming on insurance, to paying in cash for a small building job).

The evidence is not that a few bad apples cheat a lot, it's that the vast bulk of us cheat a little.

And we have an amazing capacity to tell ourselves it is all right.

Professor Ariely - whose book, Predictably Irrational is an amusing and informative read on this and other human traits - makes the point that we should be tolerant of individual weakness in this situation, but harsh on the system that encouraged that weakness.

Unfortunately for the MPs, it was the MPs who made the system.

But the implication of Professor Ariely's work is that it is collective failure which is more significant than the personal failings of individual members.

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It's not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.

The Today planning team evidently share my view on that and to that end have set up some interviews on bizarrely prosaic subjects of late.

We recently ran one on road signs, for example.

This morning it was the turn of chairs to take the spotlight. You can hear the interview with furniture designer Tom Dixon below. (Thinking about it, chairs are very relevant to this year's budget, in that when you listened to it you rather felt you needed to sit down).

So, what did I learn about chairs from meeting Tom Dixon?

At one level nothing at all.

You see, I had thought Mr Dixon would tell me about how a good chair works; what the optimal ergonomic design consists of; what the relative dimensions are that spread the weight of the body over the widest possible area. That sort of thing.

Not a bit of it.

He appeared remarkably uninterested in the functional aspects of the design and almost exclusively preoccupied with the aesthetics.

That was initially disappointing.

I thought I was somehow missing out on securing any crucial new insights into the pure ideal of a chair. Until Tom explained that good chairs are not about function at all.

And now I understand...chairs are really about meaning.

A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself.

That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions from academia to Parliament to the law.

And the implication is that the statement a chair makes through its design is as important as any ergonomic performance. Or to put it another way, most of us would put up with some discomfort to have the smartest looking chair on the block.

Obviously one can't push the argument too far...the comfort of a chair does matter of course. And some chairs - like the plastic one I'm sitting on, in fact - are designed to be little other than cheap, stackable and sturdy.

But the general message that there's more to a chair than its contact with our backside applies to most of what we consume. Once we are fed, heated, housed and healthy, our extra consumption inevitably has an element of luxury about it.

And once luxury enters the scene, the practicalities are in trouble, as women who wear expensive stiletto heels can testify.

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