Don't we need a new type of conversation that names the many absurdities inherent in our global economic rules and questions them from the off?
For example, under the current rules for measuring growth in GDP, only activities that involve some transfer of money are economically relevant. This means that the work of the world's subsistence poor and the work of those raising children and building communities are on the whole considered irrelevant and unproductive by economists. Similarly, the services provided to us free of charge by the planet are also economically invisible, because no money changes hands when we get say fresh air, or clean water. If economically invisible, why should we expect politicians and business leaders in the game of chasing growth to really care about such things?
At the same time wars, oil spills and crime waves can be good news for growth figures since they can all increase spending and production. Under this bizarre logic the New Zealand MP and radical economist Marilyn Waring famously pointed out: "If you want a really productive oil tanker voyage, it's a very good idea to ram your oil tanker into an iceberg. The Exxon Valdez was the most productive oil tanker voyage in history."
Isn't it time for deeper conversations about whether increased consumption and economic growth necessarily leads to the things we really want?
Studies consistently show that beyond a certain level of material wellbeing (roughly where the UK was in the 1960s), there is no increase in subjective happiness with increased GDP.
Environmental economist Paul Hawken goes even further in poking the rules of the economic game and its fixation on growth alone, on quantity rather than quality. He points out that continual growth in any living system (be it a human body, a forest or an elephant) is unhealthy beyond an adolescent stage, and is associated in adult humans with tumours and cancers. He suggests that as a culture we are still at an immature stage of development - and need to grow up pretty quickly.
We need to explore the unbalanced world views that all of us, men and women alike, have come to accept as normal in modern, industrial society. In business and politics it is considered normal to focus exclusively on numbers, quantities, on whatever can easily be analysed into parts, measured and reported. It is considered odd, and even "unprofessional" to place equal value on emotional experience, subjective well-being, relationships and seeing the world as a complex whole.
The quest for growth at any cost means many politicians and business leaders have come to focus only on a subset of human activity. And much of what they focus on to stimulate growth creates no real happiness or wealth. To paraphrase Einstein: "You can't solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/08
