I've just read an interesting article all about Gross National Happiness which got me to thinking about the inadequacy of the capitalist "growth fetish" which seems to presume the sum of all happiness and contentment will flow from ever increasing economic growth, but which really does not seem very competent as a measure of human development and what people truly want from their lives. If seemingly endless growth of capitalist economies is supposedly so good for humanity, then why not measure human happiness to test the thesis?
Capitalism has very effectively promoted the fallacy that consumption (and thus material wealth, or buying power) is what will lead to individual contentment. Increased living standards such as per capita income and average lifespans are usually cited as evidence of this theory. So, if our contentment should grow relative to economic growth, why are we working ever longer hours, spending less time with family and friends, spending more money but for lower levels of personal satisfaction, and why is there ever increasing rates of depression and mental illness?
At the end of our lives, what are the achievements we will reflect upon? The things we bought, or the quality of our relationships? Our social status and our careers, or the fullness and richness of our intellectual, creative and spiritual life experiences? Will we regret not working more, not earning more, not buying more, or will we regret not doing more, seeing more, thinking, feeling, reading, loving, laughing or enjoying more?
The recent dissatisfaction with the government's increasing the minimum pension age to 67 is partly due to a suspicion they will soon try and do the same thing with the minimum preservation age for our own superannuation savings, but this anger is rooted in something deeper than a general railing against changing the goal posts after the game has started. It is, I believe, because we have become so ground down with the treadmill of daily living that we aspire to retirement, having accepted a lifetime of anticipated delayed gratification and happiness due to our acceptance of the idea that growth is good, and productivity is the core of growth, and productivity means I must work ever more and longer hours to one day achieve a better life. It's probably related to earlier religion notions of the nobility and piety of suffering and deprivation where your wretched life on earth is repaid with access to heaven if you keep your mouth quiet and go along with it and don't question the unfairness of your working class situation in life. Today we don't have the promise of a religious pay-off for suffering, and because we mostly are "white collar workers" we don't consider ourselves to be working class anymore even though we are still the rats on the proverbial treadmill of capitalist production, but we still accept this idea of a delayed payoff later on - retirement - so long as we accept our current lot in life and go along with the growth is good idea.
Of course there are those who do find the sum of their life fulfilment through the work and career. Good for them. In my experience, they are the minority.
But I digress. The main point is that measuring something like Gross National Happiness seems an excellent way to determine whether the cogs of society are spinning in the best way. GNH is not the only attempt to measure wellbeing outside of the macro-economic context. The most notable, and popular, attempt to "balance" the economic dominance of public policy is the "triple bottom line" or the three sustainability pillars or economic, environmental and social sustainability. The problem as I see it with these arguments is that they still allow for the dominance of economic arguments and they are all very much defined in the language of economics.
There have also been extensive attempts to define and measure social wellbeing and social capital (personally I'm not so keen on the social capital concept). There is also the Genuine Progress Indicator. Then there are the very popular quality of life indexes which try to rank cities on the basis of how nice a place they are to live and which are usually reduced to something akin to a horse race when they are released each year as every metropolitan newspaper reports whether their city is up or down in the rankings, congratulating or berating themselves accordingly without ever examining the underlying issues in any depth.
None of these alternative measures or any others that seek to measure some sort of human progress or human development goals have ever caught on in with governments or in the global policy making context the way the economic-growth-is-good-and-all-good-flows-from-it-if-you-believe mantra has. The fact that we keep searching for alternatives though is a good signal that there is a growing disillusionment with the promises of economic growth and a creeping awareness that we need to define our goals and our future in some other way. Such as, what makes us happy, perhaps?
