Barry,
I ask a high school class: “How many of you work for money?”
Everyone raises a hand.
I then ask, “Then why do you get rid of it as soon as you get it?”
They realize that what they want is a hamburger, new jeans and a place
to live.
Money is simply a useful link between work and the needs of life.
So, what are needs?
The so-called ‘anti-consumerists’ appear to know what
people should need. I prefer that people decide for themselves. If we had a
half decent market economy, this would be dealt with automatically (if we
handled the land question, justice would also be dealt automatically).
We live in a county with too many laws and not enough justice.
However, good or bad, spending the money that is received for hard work
may be an important part of the week to many people.
The real question is why do people have to work so hard? Why can’t
they take a week or two off to see the desert flowers if they wish? Why is it
that with a young family, a wife can’t stay at home if she wishes and
give them her attention?
Why is it that with the incredible increase in the power to produce, it’s
so hard to make a living?
That was Henry George’s question, but the question really stemmed
from Ricardo’s analysis. His “Iron
Law of Wages” postulated a downward movement in the wages of the lowest
level of producers that would end when wages were at a bare subsistence level.
All wages would tend downward at the same time – even as wealth
would rise and become concentrated among a relative few.
Marx got the point in his third volume of Das Kapital, but no-one reads
it. They fail to complete the first two and sheer away from the third.
There isn’t much to choose between modern socialist and
capitalist economies. Both try to alleviate the condition of the very poor with
handouts of various kinds. I suppose the socialists would say they don’t
get enough welfare, while the capitalists figure the poor get too much.
In any event Katrina showed us a glimpse of what both Caps and Socs
have wrought -
and it wasn’t pretty.
Happiness begins with three squares a day and might finish with a month
on a mountain top. Yet, neither left nor right knows how to get us there.
Harry
********************************
Henry George School of Social Science
of Los
Angeles
Box
655 Tujunga CA 91042
818 352-4141
********************************
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Barry
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005
8:42 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Happiness is
not GDP
A somewhat interesting article from the NY Times. It
seems that a few people are starting to realize that money is not the only
measure of well-being for individuals or for countries.
Barry
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/science/04happ.html?pagewanted=all
A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little
Kingdom
By ANDREW
C. REVKIN
Published:
October 4, 2005
What
is happiness? In the United
States and in many other industrialized
countries, it is often equated with money.
Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting
figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic
product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a
nation.
But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan
has been trying out a different idea.
In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries
that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme
Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its
G.N.H., or gross national happiness.
Bhutan,
the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and
that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the
environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been
instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals.
Now Bhutan's
example, while still a work in progress, is serving as a catalyst for far
broader discussions of national well-being.
Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate
leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into
account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time
with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors.
The goal, according to many involved in this effort, is in part to return to a
richer definition of the word happiness, more like what the signers of the
Declaration of Independence had in mind when they included "the pursuit of
happiness" as an inalienable right equal to liberty and life itself.
The founding fathers, said John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher,
defined happiness as a balance of individual and community interests. "The
Enlightenment theory of happiness was an _expression_ of public good or the
public welfare, of the contentment of the people," Mr. Saul said. And, he
added, this could not be further from "the 20th-century idea that you
should smile because you're at Disneyland."
Mr. Saul was one of about 400 people from more than a dozen countries who
gathered recently to consider new ways to define and assess prosperity.
The meeting, held at St. Francis
Xavier University
in northern Nova Scotia,
was a mix of soft ideals and hard-nosed number crunching. Many participants
insisted that the focus on commerce and consumption that dominated the 20th
century need not be the norm in the 21st century.
Among the attendees were three dozen representatives from Bhutan -
teachers, monks, government officials and others - who came to promote what the
Switzerland-size country has learned about building a fulfilled, contented
society.
While household incomes in Bhutan
remain among the world's lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 years from
1984 to 1998, jumping to 66 years. The country, which is preparing to shift to
a constitution and an elected government, requires that at least 60 percent of
its lands remain forested, welcomes a limited stream of wealthy tourists and
exports hydropower to India.
"We have to think of human well-being in broader terms," said Lyonpo
Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's
home minister and ex-prime minister. "Material well-being is only one
component. That doesn't ensure that you're at peace with your environment and
in harmony with each other."
It is a concept grounded in Buddhist doctrine, and even a decade ago it might
have been dismissed by most economists and international policy experts as
naïve idealism.
Indeed, America's brief flirtation with a similar concept, encapsulated in E.
F. Schumacher's 1973 bestseller "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if
People Mattered," ended abruptly with the huge and continuing burst of
consumer-driven economic growth that exploded first in industrialized countries
and has been spreading in fast-growing developing countries like China.
Yet many experts say it was this very explosion of affluence that eventually
led social scientists to realize that economic growth is not always synonymous
with progress.
In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country,
incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond
certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or
$20,000, happiness does not keep up.
And some countries, studies found, were happier than they should be. In the
World Values Survey, a project under way since 1995, Ronald Inglehart, a
political scientist at the University
of Michigan, found that
Latin American countries, for example, registered far more subjective happiness
than their economic status would suggest.
In contrast, countries that had experienced communist rule were unhappier than
noncommunist countries with similar household incomes - even long after
communism had collapsed.
"Some types of societies clearly do a much better job of enhancing their
people's sense of happiness and well-being than other ones even apart from the
somewhat obvious fact that it's better to be rich than to be poor," Dr.
Inglehart said.
Even more striking, beyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to
redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in
society instead of their material status.
Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty
and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the
subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary
was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.
About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first
option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.
Such findings have contributed to the new effort to broaden the way countries
and individuals gauge the quality of life - the subject of the Nova Scotia conference.
But researchers have been hard pressed to develop measuring techniques that can
capture this broader concept of well-being.
One approach is to study how individuals perceive the daily flow of their
lives, having them keep diary-like charts reflecting how various activities,
from paying bills to playing softball, make them feel.
A research team at Princeton is working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to
incorporate this kind of charting into its new "time use" survey,
which began last year and is given to 4,000 Americans each month.
"The idea is to start with life as we experience it and then try to
understand what helps people feel fulfilled and create conditions that generate
that," said Dr. Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton
economist working on the survey.
For example, he said, subjecting students to more testing in order to make them
more competitive may equip them to succeed in the American quest for ever more
income. But that benefit would have to be balanced against the problems that
come with the increased stress imposed by additional testing.
"We should not be hoping to construct a utopia," Professor Krueger
said. "What we should be talking about is piecemeal movement in the
direction of things that make for a better life."
Another strategy is to track trends that can affect a community's well-being by
mining existing statistics from censuses, surveys and government agencies that
track health, the environment, the economy and other societal barometers.
The resulting scores can be charted in parallel to see how various indicators
either complement or impede each other.
In March, Britain
said it would begin developing such an "index of well-being," taking
into account not only income but mental illness,
civility, access to parks and crime rates.
In June, British officials released their first effort along those lines, a
summary of "sustainable development indicators" intended to be a
snapshot of social and environmental indicators like crime, traffic, pollution
and recycling levels.
"What we do in one area of our lives can have an impact on many others, so
joined-up thinking and action across central and local government is
crucial," said Elliot Morley, Britain's environment minister.
In Canada,
Hans Messinger, the director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics
Canada, has been working informally with about 20 other economists and social
scientists to develop that country's first national index of well-being.
Mr. Messinger is the person who, every month, takes the pulse of his country's
economy, sifting streams of data about cash flow to generate the figure called
gross domestic product. But for nearly a decade, he has been searching for a
better way of measuring the quality of life.
"A sound economy is not an end to itself, but should serve a purpose, to
improve society," Mr. Messinger said.
The new well-being index, Mr. Messinger said, will never replace the G.D.P. For
one thing, economic activity, affected by weather, labor strikes and other
factors, changes far more rapidly than other indicators of happiness.
But understanding what fosters well-being, he said, can help policy makers
decide how to shape legislation or regulations.
Later this year, the Canadian group plans to release a first attempt at an
index - an assessment of community health, living standards and people's
division of time among work, family, voluntarism and other activities. Over the
next several years, the team plans to integrate those findings with
measurements of education, environmental quality, "community
vitality" and the responsiveness of government. Similar initiatives are
under way in Australia and New Zealand.
Ronald Colman, a political scientist and the research director for Canada's
well-being index, said one challenge was to decide how much weight to give
different indicators.
For example, Dr. Colman said, the amount of time devoted to volunteer
activities in Canada
has dropped more than 12 percent in the last decade.
"That's a real decline in community well-being, but that loss counts for
nothing in our current measure of progress," he said.
But shifts in volunteer activity also cannot be easily assessed against
cash-based activities, he said.
"Money has nothing to do with why volunteers do what they do," Dr.
Colman said. "So how, in a way that's transparent and methodologically
decent, do you come up with composite numbers that are meaningful?"
In the end, Canada's
index could eventually take the form of a report card rather than a single
G.D.P.-like number.
In the United States there
have been a few experiments, like the Princeton
plan to add a happiness component to labor surveys. But the focus remains on
economics. The Census Bureau, for instance, still concentrates on collecting
information about people's financial circumstances and possessions, not their
perceptions or feelings, said Kurt J. Bauman, a demographer there.
But he added that there was growing interest in moving away from simply
tracking indicators of poverty, for example, to looking more comprehensively at
social conditions.
"Measuring whether poverty is going up or down is different than measuring
changes in the ability of a family to feed itself," he said. "There
definitely is a growing perception out there that if you focus too narrowly,
you're missing a lot of the picture."
That shift was evident at the conference on Bhutan,
organized by Dr. Colman, who is from Nova
Scotia. Participants focused on an array of
approaches to the happiness puzzle, from practical to radical.
John de Graaf, a Seattle
filmmaker and campaigner trying to cut the amount of time people devote to
work, wore a T-shirt that said, "Medieval peasants worked less than you
do."
In an open discussion, Marc van Bogaert from Belgium described his path to
happiness: "I want to live in a world without money."
Al Chaddock, a painter from Nova
Scotia, immediately offered a suggestion:
"Become an artist."
Other attendees insisted that old-fashioned capitalism could persist even with
a shift to goals broader than just making money.
Ray C. Anderson, the founder of Interface Inc., an Atlanta-based carpet company
with nearly $1 billion in annual sales, described his company's 11-year-old
program to cut pollution and switch to renewable materials.
Mr. Anderson said he was "a radical industrialist, but as competitive as
anyone you know and as profit-minded."
Some experts who attended the weeklong conference questioned whether national
well-being could really be defined. Just the act of trying to quantify
happiness could threaten it, said Frank Bracho, a Venezuelan economist and
former ambassador to India.
After all, he said, "The most important things in life are not prone to
measurement - like love."
But Mr. Messinger argued that the weaknesses of the established model,
dominated by economics, demanded the effort.
Other economists pointed out that happiness itself can be illusory.
"Even in a very miserable condition you can be very happy if you are
grateful for small mercies," said Siddiqur Osmani, a professor of applied
economics from the University of Ulster in Ireland. "If someone is
starving and hungry and given two scraps of food a day, he can be very
happy."
Bhutanese officials at the meeting described a variety of initiatives aimed at
creating the conditions that are most likely to improve the quality of life in
the most equitable way.
Bhutan, which had no public education system in 1960, now has schools at all
levels around the country and rotates teachers from urban to rural regions to
be sure there is equal access to the best teachers, officials said.
Another goal, they said, is to sustain traditions while advancing. People
entering hospitals with nonacute health problems can choose Western or
traditional medicine.
The more that various effects of a policy are considered, and not simply the
economic return, the more likely a country is to achieve a good balance, said
Sangay Wangchuk, the head of Bhutan's national parks agency, citing
agricultural policies as an example.
Bhutan's
effort, in part, is aimed at avoiding the pattern seen in the study at Harvard,
in which relative wealth becomes more important than the quality of life.
"The goal of life should not be limited to production, consumption, more
production and more consumption," said Thakur S. Powdyel, a senior
official in the Bhutanese Ministry of Education. "There is no necessary
relationship between the level of possession and the level of well-being."
Mr. Saul, the Canadian political philosopher, said that Bhutan's shift
in language from "product" to "happiness" was a profound
move in and of itself.
Mechanisms for achieving and tracking happiness can be devised, he said, but
only if the goal is articulated clearly from the start.
"It's ideas which determine the directions in which civilizations
go," Mr. Saul said. "If you don't get your ideas right, it doesn't
matter what policies you try to put in place."
Still, Bhutan's
model may not work for larger countries. And even in Bhutan, not everyone is happy. Members
of the country's delegation admitted their experiment was very much a work in
progress, and they acknowledged that poverty and alcoholism remained serious
problems.
The pressures of modernization are also increasing. Bhutan linked itself to the global
cultural pipelines of television and the Internet in 1999, and there have been
increasing reports in its nascent media of violence and disaffection,
particularly among young people.
Some attendees, while welcoming Bhutan's
goal, gently criticized the Bhutanese officials for dealing with a
Nepali-speaking minority mainly by driving tens of thousands of them out of the
country in recent decades, saying that was not a way to foster happiness.
"Bhutan
is not a pure Shangri-La, so idyllic and away from all those flaws and
foibles," conceded Karma Pedey, a Bhutanese educator dressed in a short
dragon-covered jacket and a floor-length rainbow-striped traditional skirt.
But, looking around a packed auditorium, she added: "At same time, I'm
very, very happy we have made a global impact."
