De-linking
Growth and Material Accumulation from Economic Development and Social Wellbeing
Capitalism, Consumer Culture
and Social Wellbeing: (Frowny Face)
Thanks to the mop-top legends
of twentieth century pop music, we already know ‘Money Can’t Buy me Love’. But
now we’re starting to learn that money can’t buy me happiness, either. And it
certainly can’t buy me things like fulfillment, peace of mind, spiritual
connection, or soul-tingling interpersonal relationships. We’re even discovering
that beyond a sufficient threshold of income and purchasing power, having more
money and material possessions is actually making us more unhappy[1] [2], lending economic
credibility to Thoreau’s timeless words: “Most of the luxuries and many of the
so-called comforts of life are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances
to the elevation of mankind”.
Income’s diminishing returns to
happiness[3]
extend beyond the individual or household to the national level, where rich
countries getting richer has not meant that people living in these countries
are any happier[4].
Although Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the measure of economic growth and
understood as the total dollar value of all goods and services produced within
a country, has risen significantly over the past half-century in the countries
of the Global North, citizens today do not report feeling happier than their
counterparts in the mid-twentieth century; in many instances, people are less
happy today than they were in the past despite significant rises in per capita
income. For example, Matthieu Ricard, author of Happiness: A Guide to Life’s
Most Important Skill, notes that between 1949 and today, while real income
in the United States has increased more than double, the number of people
declaring themselves as “very happy” has decreased[5]. Similarly, Mark
Anielski comments in his book The Economics of Happiness, “many life
conditions for the average US citizen have grown worse despite increasing
levels of GDP and booming financial markets”[6]
To understand this concept in a tangible sense, a recent poll conducted by
Marist College pegged $50,000 as the household income threshold for a family of
four in the United States, beyond which additional income does not contribute
to higher wellbeing.[7]
So if a family of four can maximize happiness on a combined income of $50,000
in a country like the US with its relatively high cost of living, why the
continued obsession with wealth accumulation and consumption beyond the
happiness sufficiency threshold and beyond the natural limits of the Earth?
In our current (final) stage of
modern capitalism, understood by Daly and Cobb as “the hedonistic accumulation
of riches without any moral or ethical limiters on sufficiency or a sense of
what constitutes a virtuous life”[8],
even the most wealthy nations and their citizens are beginning to sense a
disconnect between modern life and what we know in our hearts to constitute a
good life[9].
As described in the metaphorical anecdote in the previous post, the North’s
obsession with economic growth and material accumulation has come to define its
increasingly homogenous culture, whereby the ‘pursuit of happiness’ has become
synonymous with society’s competitive drive for making money and spending it on
consumer goods. As inherent to the structure of the capitalist system, this
process propels the continuous hamster-wheel-like cycle of the codependent
relationships between production and consumption; between money, debt and
economic growth.
As industrialization allowed
modern society to produce en masse, well beyond the intrinsic needs or wants of
people, promoting consumption became the solution to absorbing all the excess
production[10],
because in a market-driven system supply and demand must meet to reach
equilibrium. Enter: the birth of the advertising industry, helping potential
consumers everywhere awaken to their unexpressed desires to buy, buy, buy; in
economic terms, stimulating demand. As advertising and pop culture continue to
promote over-consumption by purposely making us feel like we need to own things
we otherwise wouldn’t want or care about, we keep the system alive: obedient
hamsters on the wheel of debt-and-economic growth, chasing the American dream.
In the words of Dave Ramsey, the consumer lifestyle is pathetically simple: “we
spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t
like”.[11]
As a result, our identity and pleasures in life have come to be defined by what
we can buy – which restaurants we eat at, where we shop, the cars we drive, the
clothes we wear and the houses we live in. In a market democracy, we call this
“freedom of choice”, exercising our constitutional rights in the pursuit of
happiness by shopping where we want to shop and eating where we want to eat.
When we pause for a second,
however, we recognize that none of it is really ‘our choice’ at all; we
wouldn’t buy the majority of what we buy if it weren’t for advertisers
convincing us that we need the next best product we can’t live without (we’ve
lived without it for this long, why do we need it now?). We begin to
acknowledge that our extreme consumption and material accumulation has not made
us any happier, but has instead left us with thunder thighs and no closet space
and gaping holes in our souls. Still, we yearn to consume to keep up with the
glamorous lifestyles we see on TV, which are increasingly impossible for the
majority to attain: “More and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a
few, whose lifestyles are glorified by the media, which means that the
expectations of the majority have become increasingly beyond their means”[12]. As a result, we
are not more fulfilled now but rather more empty because we’ve attempted to
find happiness by filling our homes and closets with an endless number of
material things instead of focusing on those intangible things that actually,
it turns out, contribute more to our personal and community wellbeing; things
like deep social bonds, connection with nature, being active, exploring our
inner passions, developing our talents and skills, and sharing our lives with
those we love.
Alan Thein Durning explains
this perpetual sense of lack in modern society as follows: “many in the
consumer society have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow –
that, hoodwinked by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly
attempting to satisfy with material things what are essentially social,
psychological and spiritual needs….By the consumerist definition, satisfaction
is a state that can never be attained”[13].
This perpetual inability to feel satisfied fits nicely in the capitalist
framework whereby we will continue consuming and therefore feeding the growth
machine, which is itself vital to the service of usury (interest charged of
loans), as explained in detail in the anecdote. The service of usury is so
entrenched in the system that money owed is always greater than the money
existing, forcing us to continue “innovating” -- creating new goods and
services to sell on the market in order to keep the wheels of the machine
turning. This has resulted in the commodification of things that were once
free: “the relentless conversion of life, spirit and world into money”[14], deepening our
inability to find meaning in anything when the intrinsic use-value of it has
been disregarded in favor of those things determined to possess exchange value,
which, in the capitalist consumer society, means anything that can be priced
and sold on the market. This process of commodification of things that were
previously free – like nature and its resources, spiritual practices, leisure
activities, etc. – and the prioritization of exchange value over use value has
misguided our entire values system such that we only know how to value that
which has a price tag. Meanwhile, the “free” things in life, the things that have
no value on the market (e.g. meaningful relationships, exploring our passions,
social participation), are what actually contribute most to our experience of
happiness. Quite the perplexing disconnect in our modern consumer culture, and
at the heart of our discontent.
As the first step in the
process of awakening, this realization phase is most uncomfortable, and in our
entrenched consumer society there is not much space for imagining a different
existence, often leading us into depression as we see no way out of this dark
tunnel, or fueling addiction as we keep trying to fill ourselves up by
consuming or numbing the pain of our materially rich but spiritually and
socially empty lives. And instead of being rightly seen and treated as the
social symptoms of our diseased capitalist system and the consumer culture on
which it thrives, we face increasing stigmatization and social alienation,
deepening the pain and emptiness inside us and making it no surprise that two
percent of all deaths in the world are suicides, above both murder and war[15].
Growth for Development:
Exporting Frowny Faces
and Killing the Planet
Exporting Frowny Faces
and Killing the Planet
While the situation is
spiritually and psychologically sad for those in the North coming to terms with
their meaningless, repetitive lives as consumers on capitalism’s hamster wheel,
the fact that economic development policy imposed on Southern nations continues
to promote economic growth as a primary development solution should be cause
for even greater concern. Wrongly founded on an assumption of infinite growth
in a world of finite resources, Southern economies are encouraged to
industrialize, stimulate consumer demand and create their societies in the
image of the North as their hope for lifting billions of people out of poverty
and into the system. An often ignored reality in this scenario is that the
North’s incentive for promoting growth as a development strategy in the South
is not born of a benevolent desire to improve quality of life for the world’s
citizens, but rather grounded in the fact that the North itself relies on the
expansion of Southern economies for its own survival in the form of continued
economic growth and the accumulation of wealth. This is evidenced in the
persistent need for cheap resources, labor and primary exports from the South
to fuel production in the North, the subsequent reliance on consumers in the
South as an extended market for those goods produced in the North, as well as
the structural adjustment loans characteristic of the final decades of the
twentieth century in order to keep the money pumping through the banking
system, funding bad policies and unfruitful projects invented in the North and
imposed on the South[16].
As discussed previously, in the global capitalist system growth cannot end,
because if it did, no one would be able to repay debts and both banks and
people would go bankrupt. On the world stage, this has led to international
development policy oriented not toward helping improve the lives of people
living in poverty and despair, but rather toward stimulating economic growth to
ensure debt repayments in order to keep the global money system, and thus the
global economy, alive.
But as the impossible hamster[17] and its message of
finite planetary limits demonstrate, there are real and obvious limitations to
growth – and therefore to the growth-for-development model --, making the
collapse of the system inevitable, along with the development strategies it
employs. However, in our ongoing round of economic musical chairs, “as long as the music’s playing, there’s no
loser”, and the entrenched interests of the powers that be have a vital stake
in ensuring that we as a global humanity become aware of this reality as late
in the game as humanly possible.
As the monitoring mechanism of
the growth-for-development model, the measurement of per capita GDP has been
traditionally used as the principal indicator for determining the social
wellbeing of a country’s people, evaluating development success or failure on
the measure of income alone. GDP-based wellbeing indicators reflect a purely quantitative
concept of development and overlook the more significant qualitative aspects of
living a meaningful life[18].
With economic growth and per capita income treated as ends in themselves rather
than as the means to a brighter future for a nation’s citizens, development
strategies have grown increasingly dehumanized and focused on numbers instead
of human wellbeing, yet another perverse manifestation of modern capitalism’s
prioritization of profit and economic growth over people and their quality of
life. In recent years, new indicators have been created to take additional
social and environmental aspects into account when evaluating the success of
development strategies, including ecological footprint, health and education,
as well as subjective measures of social wellbeing . Some of these new
indicators will be explored further in the third installment of this series.
As a fallout from the economic
development process described here, indigenous ways of life and local values
are lost to the consumerist monoculture, which has become the “globally
dominant cultural orientation”[19]
of modernity, its overwhelming power and dominance undermining the cultures of
non-consumers and crowding out those who attempt to live a virtuous life[20]; expressing itself
in even greater distortion in exported form so at odds with native traditions
in the Global South. Facing these stark realities, we are now coming to
recognize that if the goal of economic development is to contribute to the wellbeing
of people and communities around the world, exporting an unsustainable
growth-based system that has made people more unhappy and the planet less
livable is no longer, nor has it ever been, a viable development strategy. In
other words, “socioeconomics based on the growth paradigm can never be
sustainable”[21]
and “attempts to bring people out of poverty by bringing them into the money
[system] as it is defined today, are doomed”[22].
As new development approaches emerge, economic growth will play a much less
significant role in policies designed to support social wellbeing, poverty
alleviation and the promotion of flourishing communities. As this process
unfolds, the economic growth-for-development and material
accumulation-for-social wellbeing mantras of the global capitalist paradigm are
constantly being called into question and increasingly discredited on a grand
scale.
Similarly, the environmental
struggle has erupted as the people of the Earth rally against select elite
interests whose entrenched power and influence stymie widespread progressive
action to limit growth within the confines of the planet’s finite natural
systems. Currently, “a world without growth is politically unthinkable”[23], because of those
whose powerful short-term interests neglect the needs of the Earth and the vast
majority of her people. Evelyn Linder makes mention of our dominant global
economic reality as “a certain geohistorical cultural context that enables a
‘raiding’ culture to flourish and to hijack institutions with innovate tools
and interventions [leading] to domination and exploitation, and if this happens
at a global scale, it means the destruction of the entire socio- and ecosphere”[24]. However, as this
scenario grows increasingly unsustainable, lurching toward its own demise, it
presents yet another tipping-point opportunity where the tables are beginning
to turn against the wealthy and powerful, in favor of the environment and the
people fighting hard to save it. The concepts of de-growth and the steady-state
economy[25]
have emerged within this new framework seeking to transform the conversation on
growth toward an understanding of sufficiency within planetary limits. This
will no doubt require a revolution of the money system away from its cyclical
reliance on economic growth.
Wellbeing Economics: Turning
that Frown Upside Down
With the ‘wellbeing revolution’
upon us, a new economics is piecing itself together, abandoning classical
market-oriented principles and seeking solutions outside the current system.
The new economics is founded on the de-linking of economic growth and material
accumulation[26]
from practices of development and conceptualizations of social-wellbeing as
discussed above, and is instead centered on the principles of collectivity,
cooperation and solidarity toward a socioeconomically and environmentally
sustainable world. Wellbeing economics is diverse in its foundations and does
not present blue-print models for society, respecting that wellbeing is a
subjective experience to be defined differently among individuals, communities
and nations. Based on the understanding that true wellbeing is determined by
the satisfaction of subjective needs and living in line with personal values
for a meaningful life, wellbeing economics is revolutionizing the ways we
approach community development and design new systems to replace the old.
We will return to the
discussion of wellbeing economics in the final section, but let us first take a
closer look at the innovative socioeconomic approaches of the new paradigm now
in its incipient design phase. Stay tuned for the third installment of this
five-part series.
[1]
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship
with Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Penguin, 1999).
[2]
Daly, Herman E. (2007). Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development: Selected
Essays of Herman Daly. UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
[3]
Bruno S. Frey, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. CES (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 2010): 28-29.
[4]
Easterlin et al. The happiness-income paradox revisited. PNAS, December
28, 2010, vol. 107, no. 52.
[5]
Ricard, Matthieu (2003). Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life´s Most
Important Skill. Paris: NiL Editions. Ch. 15: A Sociology of Happiness, pp.
173.
[6]
Anielski, Mark. (2007). The Economics of Happiness. Canada: New Society
Publishers. p.39.
[7]
Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. Generation to Generation: Money
Matters. April 13, 2012. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/misc/Home%20instead/Money%20Matters_April%202012_FINAL.pdf
[8]
As cited in Anielski, Mark. (2007). The Economics of Happiness. Canada:
New Society Publishers, p.24
[9]
Anielski, Mark. (2007). The Economics of Happiness. Canada: New Society
Publishers.
[10]
Eisenstein, Charles (2011). Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the
Age of Transition. Berkeley, California: Evolver Editions.
[11]
Dave Ramsey (2009), The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial
Fitness. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
[12]
Robert H. Frank (2007), as cited in Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to
Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (New York: Picador, 2009):
36.
[13]
Alan Thein Durning, “Are We Happy Yet?” Ecopsychology (San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1995): 69-70.
[14]
Eisenstein, Charles (2011). Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the
Age of Transition. Berkeley, California: Evolver Editions. Ch. 6: The Economics
of Usury, pp. 93-124.
[15]
Ricard, Matthieu (2003). Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life´s Most
Important Skill. Paris: NiL Editions. Ch. 15: A Sociology of Happiness, pp.
170-185.
[16]
Daly, H. Growth, Debt, and the World Bank. August 14, 2011. Center for the
Advancement of the Steady State Economy. Retrieved 12/16/2011Bank
[17]
New Economics Foundation. The Impossible Hamster. January 24, 2010.
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqwd_u6HkMo
[18]
For example, see: Schumacher, E. F. (1993). Small is beautiful, A study of
Economics as if People Mattered. London: Vintage Books; Smith, P. B. and
Max-Neef, M. (2011). Economics Unmasked, From power and greed to compassion
and the common good. UK: Green Books; Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How
to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (New York: Picador, 2009).
[19]
Jonathan Dawson, “Eco-villages and the Transformation of Values”. State of the
World 2012: From Consumerism to Sustainability. World Watch Institute.
[20]
As cited in Anielski, Mark. (2007). The Economics of Happiness. Canada:
New Society Publishers, p.25
[21]
Smith, P. B. and Max-Neef, M. (2011). Economics Unmasked, From power and
greed to compassion and the common good. UK: Green Books.
[22]
Richards, Howard (2011), as cited in Lindner, Evelin (2012). A Dignity
Economy: Creating an Economy that Serves Human Dignity and Preserves our
Planet. USA: Dignity Press. Ch. 2: Let us work together and dig up the
facts, pp. 15-29.
[23]
Daly, Herman E. (2007). Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development:
Selected Essays of Herman Daly. UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
[24]
Lindner. A Dignity Economy: Creating an Economy that Serves Human Dignity
and Preserves Our Planet, 26
[25]
Daly, H. Growth, Debt, and the World Bank. August 14, 2011. Center for the
Advancement of the Steady State Economy. Retrieved 12/16/2011
[26]
Jonathan Dawson, “Eco-villages and the Transformation of Values”. State of the
World 2012: From Consumerism to Sustainability. World Watch Institute.
