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Did you ever wonder about economic growth? Take the time to question your assumptions on economic growth and how it effects you? Thomas Homer Dixon has and what he says is quite interesting. From The Upside of Down pages 192 – 193.
“One might even say that we’re collectively fixated on maintaining growth. But this is a curious fixation because beyond a certain point – a point many of passed long ago – the higher incomes that growth produces don’t make us any happier.
When psychologists have questioned people over the years about how happy they are, they’ve found that people in rich countries are on average no happier today than people were in the 1970’s of even the 1950’s. During the intervening decades we’ve become far richer. In the United States, personal income (in constant 1995 dollars) more than doubled between 1957 and 1998. But over this period the percentage of people who said they were “very happy” actually declined slightly. Notes the American Psychologist David Myers, “We are twice as rich and no happier.” And when we look at countries around the world, we find that happiness is correlated with income up to about $10,000 to $13,000 per person annually, but beyond this threshold the correlation vanishes.
Money, in economists’ terminology, produces “diminishing returns” of happiness. Once our basic material needs are satisfied, it turns out, we don’t need more money to be happy, but we do need loving families, supportive social relationships, absorption in a satisfying activity, a sense of purpose in our lives, novelty and security from catastrophic threats to our income and health.
So, if above a relatively modest threshold, greater material wealth doesn’t make us happier, why do those of us who are already well off in rich economies work so hard to get more of it? Psychologists and behavioural economists have offered a range of answers to this question. Some say we’re stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”: our aspirations tend to exceed our income, and as our income rises, our aspirations rise in lockstep. Others stress that our happiness is partly a result of our relative social status because human beings naturally compare themselves with other people. We’re all trying to at least keep up with Mr.Jones next door. If our yardstick of comparison is income, a higher income makes us happier only if it goes up relative Jones’s income. But because Jones is working as hard as we are, nobody gets ahead, and no one feels any happier. We are, essentially, in an unwinnable income race with other people.
These theories may explain why most of work so hard to get ahead economically, and why all this effort doesn’t make us happier, but they don’t really address the deeper conundrum that’s our central concern here: why do our politicians, policy makers, economists, and public commentators remain so fixed on maintaining economic growth even when higher incomes don’t make us happier?”
Thank you Mr. Dixon. The next paragraphs in his book, (which I recommend you read) deal with answers to this problem given withing the contextual frame of capitalism. As THD is very thorough with his prescriptions let me offer my insights in addition to his.
If we need a rather modest amount of goods/income to be happy should we not support a system that focuses on building and developing society in ways that will make us more creative, productive and happy. Let’s look again –
Once our basic material needs are satisfied, it turns out, we don’t need more money to be happy, but we do need loving families, supportive social relationships, absorption in a satisfying activity, a sense of purpose in our lives, novelty and security from catastrophic threats to our income and health.
So, once the bases our covered we need things that don’t revolve around acquiring wealth. Here is where I would propose that economic systems that promote and focus on the welfare of society really shine. More egalitarian societies realize what THD has pointed out and consciously distribute their resources to make society a better place to live because they pay attention to all the factors that contribute to making our lives a happier worthwhile experience.
So things like Universal Health Care, Guaranteed Income, Old Age Security, welfare, social programs are necessary and vital parts of resilient, functional society.
Makes sense, no?
When I was quite young and much more naive than I am today, I was talking to my dad about drugs. We were talking about all the negative health effects of smoking in school, so I told my dad that I thought that it would be a wonderful idea if smoking was made illegal. Within a generation lung, throat, and mouth cancer would be decimated, people all over the planet would be happy, healthy, and less prone to violence. This could save the world!
My dad was quick to point out how I was in error. Drug lords, he said, would love nothing more than to have smoking become illegal. Making things illegal, without affecting the costs of production, would dramatically increase the retail price. The mark-up would be astronomical, making selling cigarettes very profitable indeed. He then pointed out that my grandfather, a dear and marvellous man, is addicted to smoking. Making it illegal would not magically make his addiction go away. The only thing it would do is make him a “criminal” and put him and his habit in jail.
Later on in my schooling, we learned about the prohibition era and how the criminalization of alcohol provided the financial backbone for a rampant expansion in organized crime. Another solid examples showing that making a substance illegal in no way reduces it’s use in a society, but rather just strengthens the criminal element and lowers public safety. Experiment failed, prohibition doesn’t work.
Now we have “The War on Drugs”. It seems obvious to me, from these earlier lessons, that having any drug be illegal is a dumb idea. Really dumb. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are, nor does it matter how bad a particular drug is for human consumption. All that matters is that prohibition doesn’t work. I point this out to people and in response I get a torrent of reasons why drugs are bad and how they destroy lives. To me this just begs the question ‘If this is so important, why are you employing such a demonstrably poor way of dealing with it?’
Then I get the speculations. ‘If drugs were legal, they would run rampant. Six year olds would be doing heroine, and society would be saying its ok’. This reminds me of theists who claim that, without god, people would go around raping people and burning school buses filled with children for fun. There is no reason to believe that these horror stories would actualize if drugs were legal, just as there is no reason to believe people without religion are all psycho killer arsonists.
But while there has always been evidence that prohibition was ineffective, there hasn’t been much to show that de-criminalization wouldn’t lead to the other ‘greater’ evils proposed by Drug War Mongers. The most I’ve gotten from an advocate of current drug laws was that, while the laws aren’t a perfect solution, they are the best solution we have. Enter Portugal. AIDS was rampant due to drug needle sharing, drug use was high, things were quite bad. Then in 2001, Portugal went rogue. The decriminalized drugs. All of them.
Nations on board with the War on Drugs were quick to predict catastrophic results for this radical move. Portugal was on the path of self-destruction. Soon the entire country would be populated by stoned-out-of-their-mind-gang-bangers, slitting each other’s throats to get their next fix for their un-controlled drug overdose orgy!
But then…somehow… armageddon did NOT decimate Portugal. Nothing close to what was predicted came to be. What did happen? Drug use fell. A lot. Portugal now has about a third the drug use of the average European nation. What about that AIDS problem? Down by almost a fifth!
Of course, it’s not as simple as ‘Make things legal then-POOF- everything’s better”. Treatment and rehab programs were made available. With the extra resources due to abandoning the War on Drugs, these programs were actually good. Plus, addicts, no longer fearful of persecution, actually used them. They actually committed themselves to helping people in a meaningful way. And it worked. Imagine that!
I’ve always been a huge fan of empirical evidence. There have been countless ideas about how the world could/ought to be. Admittedly some of them were absolute genius in there intricacy, detail, and internal coherency. I’ve come up with a few myself. But ultimately, that doesn’t actually matter. What really makes an idea worthy of pursuit is if the damn thing works.
The results are in. Societies always lose the War on Drugs. What happens if we abandon the war and decriminalize? Portugal has shown us the immense progress that is attainable in just one short decade. So far, most of the western world has not learned from the failure of prohibition, but perhaps it can learn from the success of Portugal.
Brief articles:1 and 2
Extensive article with data here
And for those who favour video:
I think one of the smartest things a parent can do is get rid of the TV if they have children. TV land is a violently misogynistic place that perpetuates the current ugly set of cultural norms we have here in North America. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation shares some startling/depressing facts about what people are subjected to while they watch TV.
“Nearly 2 out of 3 TV programs contained some
violence,2 averaging about 6 violent acts per hour.3
• Fewer than 5% of these programs featured an
anti-violence theme or prosocial message emphasizing
alternatives to or consequences of violence.4
• Violence was found to be more prevalent in children’s
programming (69%) than in other types of
programming (57%). In a typical hour of programming,
children’s shows featured more than twice
as many violent incidents (14) than other types of
programming (6).5
• The average child who watches 2 hours of
cartoons a day may see nearly 10,000 violent incidents
each year, of which the researchers estimate
that at least 500 pose a high risk for learning and
imitating aggression and becoming desensitized to
violence.6
• The number of prime-time programs with violence
increased over the three years of the study, from
53% to 67% on broadcast television and from
54% to 64% on basic cable. Premium cable networks
have the highest percentage of shows with
violence, averaging 92% since 1994.7
With this sort of socialization base are we really surprised about the lack of empathy and caring in our society?
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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