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You are here: Home / Happiness / From ‘Progress’ to an Economics of Happiness

From ‘Progress’ to an Economics of Happiness

March 19, 2023 by Helena Norberg-Hodge 5 Comments

If there’s one thing I’d love world leaders to think about in connection with the UN’s International Day of Happiness, it’s that their measure of progress actually goes up with unhappiness and unrest.

GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, which is still used as the principal indicator for development and progress, simply measures the exchange of money in society: more money changing hands, more commercialization, the higher the GDP.

But what does this mean for human wellbeing? More people sitting at home alone and paying for Netflix subscriptions – GDP goes up. More depressed people paying for pharmaceuticals and psychotherapy – GDP goes up. More stressed and isolated people getting fast food take-out instead of cooking with family or friends – GDP goes up.  War, cancer, epidemic illnesses – all of these things involve an exchange of money, and that means they end up on the positive side of the balance sheet.

It’s not that I believe GDP was implemented as an evil plot to make the world unhappy (actually, the originator of the GDP concept, Simon Kuznets, expressly warned against using it as a sole measure for societal progress). But, by looking through this narrow econometric lens, governments on both the left and right have ended up promoting policies that actually run counter to individual and societal wellbeing.  They have ended up supporting ever more global trade, and with it the amassing of wealth and power by global corporations. This has led to increasing speed, competition and commercialization, which in turn is breaking down the relationships that make life meaningful.

For example, agricultural policy has ended up maximizing agribusiness profits, while eliminating small farmers and fishers and local food economies. In the name of ‘development’, farm subsidies have been doled out to expand commodity production for export markets. Meanwhile, the energy and technology used for importing and exporting food around the world, including giant, fossil fuel-powered, refrigerated container ships, have also been subsidized. The localized, community-centered economies of villages, towns and city high-streets have been undermined, and steadily replaced with sprawling suburbs planned around malls, shopping precincts and superhighways.

GDP has gone up with this kind of globalizing development, but what has been lost? What happens to the wisdom and traditions of land-based people when their livelihoods are destroyed? What happens to mental health when people are forced to migrate to crowded, polluted cities to find work; when networks of community support get replaced by transactional market services? How wide is the hole left by vibrant local shops when they can’t compete with soulless supermarkets? What happens to health and wellbeing when local diets give way to the ubiquitous modern diet of chemical-laden, highly processed food?

This kind of development is precisely what is currently being promoted, most dramatically in the Global South, under the banner of ‘progress’. In the more industrialized countries too, economic ‘growth’ marches on, to the detriment of people’s wellbeing. As profits are increasingly concentrated in the hands of billionaires, the cost of living for the average person is rising sharply, pushing people to work harder and harder to meet basic needs. And, by leaving people’s jobs and livelihoods dependent on fraught supply chains and volatile financial markets, corporate globalization is leading to higher and higher levels of stress.

Meanwhile, studies show that the more time we spend scrolling through our smartphones – entranced by algorithms designed to hold our attention for the profiteering of some of the richest corporations on Earth – the more we experience symptoms of depression and anxiety.

On top of all this, the consumer culture embedded in this version of ‘progress’ deepens our insecurities and lowers our self-worth. From the youngest age, we are groomed to consume by advertising images and social media that make us feel inadequate as we are, and that promote unrealistic standards of beauty and success. As deep community bonds are eroded by economic globalization, the effects of consumer messaging are increasingly severe, leading to self-rejection that, in turn, fuels addictions, violence, and self-destructive compulsive behavior.

In order to move beyond self-blame and isolation, it is important that we recognize the multifaceted ways that the economy assaults our self-esteem, our joy and our happiness. The good news is that throughout the world, people are waking up to the systemic roots of their psychological wounding, and coming together to find refuge and healing.

People are stepping away from the consumer rat-race, and restoring the connections to self, community and nature that are the cornerstones of real wellbeing. In ecovillages, transition towns, mutual aid networks, community gardens and more, people are experiencing the profound psychological benefits of coming together in their local communities, getting their hands in the soil, and engaging in meaningful, productive work. I call these initiatives ‘localization’, because they represent the systemic antidote to globalization. They undo the distancing and anonymity imposed by the global economy, and recover webs of relationships rooted in place.

Throughout our evolution as human beings, such relationships utterly molded our personal identities. Even today, children In indigenous cultures develop their sense of self not through obsessive selfie-taking, peer pressure and celebrity culture, but in extended families, in mixed-age collaborative friendship groups, and with real flesh-and-blood role models. I have witnessed how this leads to secure, grounded identities, which in turn beget a remarkable ease, equanimity, and joy, as well as open-mindedness and tolerance.

In today’s localization initiatives, face-to-face intergenerational friendships come back to the forefront, providing avenues out of the peer-based culture of comparison and competition. By rejecting performative posturing and exposing needs and vulnerabilities, people are gradually moving away from the fear and self-consciousness that kept them apart, while creating more participatory cultures of caring and open-heartedness.

Rebuilding localized cultures offers the chance to transform one’s inner identity – away from isolated individualism, towards expansiveness through greater connectedness with others and with the earth. Research has shown that precisely this kind of egoic transformation can bring with it a physiological impact – sufficient, in some cases, to reverse illness and disease.

But stepping out of the dominant system is a distant dream for an increasing proportion of the global population, many of whom are struggling to put a roof over their head or food on the table. If we hope to change the harsh realities faced by people all around the world, we need more than just the courage to step out of the system – we need to work together to create an economics of happiness.

An economics of happiness would require not only very different measures of societal progress, but also regulatory changes that limit the power and influence of global multinationals, as well as subsidy and investment shifts to boost local production for local needs. With a big-picture, strategic restructuring of economic supports towards localization instead of globalization, we can make healthy local food cheaper than imported, processed food, and local, community-based, stable livelihoods the most abundant jobs available. We can recreate the structural basis for community, and put care for our children and the land back at the center of our daily activities. We can take back control of our own lives, and create the conditions that are a prerequisite for joy, peace and sustainability.

Today’s fast-paced global economy demands mobility, competitiveness, and individualism, and induces a fear of being vulnerable and dependent. Localization, by contrast, answers our deep longing for love and connection – the cornerstones of wellbeing and contentment.

There is ever more research into the deep healing that springs from reconnection to nature and to others, and from spiritually awakening to the oneness of life. Tried and tested twelve-step programs for recovering addicts, which focus on mutual support and contact with a higher spiritual purpose, have been demonstrating compelling results for quite some time. Recently, a myriad of other methods has emerged, including wilderness-immersion and animal-connection therapies, therapeutic horticulture, social prescribing and more.

Localization can create the economic structures that regenerate the fabric of interdependence – in part by promoting daily contact with others and with the plants and animals in the natural world around us. In this way, what are now expensive weekend therapies for a minority could become a fundamental way of life for people all over the world.

The localization movement is comprised of millions of people who have started the process of deepening the connections in their own lives. While they are often driven by a deep-seated concern for nature, for social justice, and for their children’s future, it is their intuitive pursuit of genuine wellbeing that is perhaps their greatest guiding force.

But genuine wellbeing transcends the personal – it is an inherently collective experience. In that sense, the movement for localization is about systemic, structural changes that would nurture happiness on the macro level.

Through strategic shifts in economic policy, we can usher in an economics of happiness for the majority. We can reclaim the very notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ from the clutches of commercialization and commodification, realigning them instead with human and ecological flourishing.

 

Photo: D Jonez on Unsplash.

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Filed Under: Economics of Happiness Conferences, Happiness, Localization Tagged With: consumerism, depression, Economics of Happiness, GDP, localization, mental health, progress, well-being

Author: Helena Norberg-Hodge

Helena Norberg-Hodge is founder and director of Local Futures/ISEC. A pioneer of the “new economy” movement, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for over 40 years. She is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary 'The Economics of Happiness', and is the author of 'Local is Our Future' and 'Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh'. She was honored with the Right Livelihood Award for her groundbreaking work in Ladakh, and received the 2012 Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.”

Comments

  1. Tom Hoppen says

    March 20, 2023 at 7:54 am

    Dear Helena, I love your work, everything of it, and among alle these theories that pop-up these days, I think the one of localization is the only one that really unites people from the right and the left, the north and the south, all levels. I thank you for that!

    In The Netherlands, where I live, we see politics dividing people. We see for decades now, a top-down technocratic approach where people can’t relate to. We see therefor frustration and agression, and even conspiration theories.

    My explanation to all this: there is a common ground between all these groups, whether they belong to the right or the left. We people are connected to each other and nature and we feel uprooted. The cause is the same, the way we give voice to it is different. My explanation for conspiration theories is the following: in this world of global capitalism, a lot is decided and precooked without us people knowing. Free Trade Associations are being discussed behind closed doors for years with global business helping to write the documents, and people can put their signature when the decision has been taken already. In the EU this happened with the introduction of the euro, it happened with the introduction of the internal market, it happens now with the discussion on creating a EU-army, and a EU-digital currency. There is no real democratic process in place.

    People feel that, but it is difficult, almost impossible, to make the right analysis of what is happening in this obscure world, where in fact there are continuous conspiracies going on, but not in the way many think. They are not informed. The world of the multinationals (and Finance) is intertwined with politics. Whereas politicians and multinationals have contact on frequent basis, civilians only get to vote once in four years.

    There is two points I would like to make.

    1) One point is related to what you write above. More and more proof is published by scientists who show our connectedness with each other and nature. But: the most advanced and convincing science in fact as I see it, provides us the proof for decades already: it is the marketing. Marketing can look into our brains, by following our online behavior, even where we prefer to click in a screen top-left, top-right, etc. By monitoring our behavior without us noticing, BigTech, like Google, knows more about us than we know ourselves. Marketing knows exactly what is needed to sell us its commodities.

    This is all well known, but if we know that marketing is such a sophisticated science (billions of dollars go every year to marketing; our best people dedicate the best years of their lives to make us click on buttons at the right moment), we can look at her expensive output as well, and what do we see?

    Products don’t sell themselves. Anno 2023 still they don’t. People don’t buy commodities, they buy relationships. A century ago, Ferdinand de Saussure learned us how signs by associative processess are made from signifier and signifieds. Our world is built up by signs. A diamond is forever, we learned, because of the intensive US campaigns in the 20th century on diamonds, relating them systematically to engagement and marriage. You can’t be happily married without a diamond. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

    On the other hand we can relate diamonds to the images of child labour, then the opposite sign of blood diamonds is created in our minds.

    The proof that marketing provides us over and over again, is that we may be separated from each other and from nature because of the way we have organized our societies and economic system, but that we are still subconsciously intensely connected to each other and nature. The proof lies in the way marketing sells us all her products: by associating these commodities, from the cheapest snacks to the most expensive cars and houses, with our physiological needs: friendship, love, sex, … nature. Expensive cars seem to sell best if they ride through pristine nature, with our peers driving these cars, smiling and enjoying each other’s company. If after investing all these huge amounts of money in marketing, this is the output of marketing cq. advertising we see each day, this must tell us something important.

    So, if marketing tells us something, it is that you Helena are right, that we thrive through relationships, with our family, our friends, and with nature. And that marketing knows this and makes use of this systematically to sell us her commodities.

    Marketing knows this. Marketing knows everything. This is important to be aware of. Marketing knows and has known all the time what it is that we really need and is continuously busy replacing these real needs by surrogates. And also, while businesses are organized the way they alienate from each other (individualism makes us highly dependant on paid services and it therefore good for the economy) and from nature, and make us compete with each other all the time, in these same businesses, a few doors further down the same hallway, the marketing department knows what they are doing to their employees and everyone of us, causing stress and making us sick.

    Here we see the real ethical dilemma of advertising and capitalism, being the vehicle that only can thrive at the expense of everything else, people, nature, earth. It is a parasitic system.

    2) Then, last but not least, I strongly believe: localization responds to how we are, nature. Like everything in nature organizes itself locally, from a small seed that grows to ever more abundance, till an optimum is reached, we people surround us with family, friends, and organize ourselves in our local communities, and care about ocurrences nearby in time and space. This is the Human Perspectives diagram from Limits to Growth, 1972. It tells me that we are nature, we behave like nature, and that the capitalist system we have created does not relate to us as human beings. Some of us try to make the best of it and try to care about what happens all over the planet, Occupy, XR Rebellion and many more, but biologically most of us cannot deal with this situation. It is beyond our spam of control. That is why far placed abstract deadlines, like 1,5 degrees in 2050, don’t work for us. We can’t deal with those abstract plans and figures, implemented top-down by people we don’t know.

    This is the fallacy of the system. It has been implemented upon us, without taking into account what we are: nature, evolved to take care about what is nearest to us, in time and place. A system that has been created to make ever more profit can’t just change that. We just don’t thrive on money. We are social creatures, we prefer to be poor, together, above rich, alone. It is lonely at the top. Also a the top we see lots of mental problems. Loneliness is our most serious disease. It is the harshest punishment to be isolated alone in a cell.

    Not for a second the Friedmans and Hayeks of the system have realised the following: what we are going to implement now is a system that does not fit living creatures. You can’t learn bees to swim. We are being learned to function in a way where we cannot. And because we are social and want to please each other, we tell each other that we are happy, but we are not most of the time. This system is too big, it does not fit us. We need to change it: relocalization!

    This is what I wanted to write you, sorry to take so much of your busy time. I have been watching your awesome film Local Planet, A Quiet Revolution with students, and I hope to watch it soon with The Party of the Animals in the north of The Netherlands. I strongly believe in your concept, in the power it has to unite all people, and in its simplicity. We need simplicity, we have made it far too complicated. Life is simple.

    Sorry to take so much of your time. Thanks for you inspiring actions and network. It really helps me to get loose from daily troubles and worries.

    A big hug, Tom Hoppen

    Reply
  2. Susmita Barua says

    March 20, 2023 at 7:57 am

    Helena can we send a global message to the UN and also the Government of every country to adopt one of the alternative measures of GDP through online petitions like here. https://www.change.org/petitions

    More on alternative measures
    https://ethical.net/politics/gdp-alternatives-7-ways-to-measure-countries-wealth/

    Reply
  3. David Reay says

    March 20, 2023 at 5:02 pm

    Localization is the answer. Join a local committee, then join another. Be generous with your gifts, the payback is amazing. Explore the world at your doorstep, there is a lifetime of experiences in your neighborhood. Once you realize that and embrace it, it will become infectious. Then we reach a critical mass, government will have no choice but to change. It is not just a solution, it is the only solution

    Reply
  4. Andre Piver says

    March 20, 2023 at 5:38 pm

    Local material interdependence is not a philosophical , moral nor ideological argument, it is what we are evolutionarily adapted to. Our mental (including emotional) “hardware” is made for this. Our cultural software changes with our environment in order to survive, but that strange rapidly changed and manipulated normal , is now so far from meeting our needs (meaning,belonging, self-knowledge and acceptance).

    Reply
  5. Shaun Browne says

    March 21, 2023 at 11:32 pm

    Thank you for this incredible article on the current state of the economy.

    In my area, our local, 2nd generation, family owned, independent shoe store closed their doors for good. Our family has shopped there for 27 years, as long as we’ve lived here. The store was within walking distance of our home. Sadly, the only place that sells shoes now is the Dollar Store, in a small mall significantly farther away. The Dollar Store only have cheap plastic ‘clogs’ imported from overseas. Only if our sizes are in stock, of course.

    Like many small communities, we have seen a number of local, small businesses shutter their doors, to our collective loss.

    Reply

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