By Winton Bates, on March 4th, 2011
This charming little video provides some history of the concept of Gross National Happiness and its application in Bhutan.
It is amazing how much passion has been aroused by Gross National Happiness outside Bhutan. In August last year Jeffrey Sachs, a distinguished development economist, suggested that western countries should follow Bhutan in adopting Gross National Happiness as a national objective. His concern is that trends toward ‘hyper-consumerism’ have accelerated in the United States in recent decades and that this is destabilizing social relations and leading to aggressiveness, loneliness, greed, and over-work to the point of exhaustion. It is not self-evident that Sachs’ claims are true – and he provides no evidence in support of them. More importantly, it is not clear how he thinks adopting Gross National Happiness as a national objective in western countries would lead to better outcomes. I fear that the remedy he has in mind for alleged hyper-consumerism is additional paternalistic interventions by governments to further remove from individuals the responsibility to control their own lives.
On the other side of the canvas, Julie Novak, a free market liberal whose views I normally respect, has described Bhutan’s adoption of the GNH objective as a failed experiment. Julie’s reasoning seems to be that the experiment must have failed because Bhutan has a relatively low per capita GDP level and its ratings on various social indicators are also relatively low. However, I doubt whether many people would claim that adopting GNH as an objective can immediately lift the average well-being of people in a low-income country like Bhutan to a level comparable to that attainable in the most affluent countries. That would be just as silly as claiming that an increase in economic freedom can convert a low-income country immediately into a high-income country.
It makes more sense to compare Bhutan’s performance on various economic and social indicators with that of other low-income countries. The comparison I made between Bhutan and India, here, suggests that Bhutan has performed reasonably well. For example, Bhutan’s average economic growth rate of around 8 per cent per annum over the decade to 2007 was substantially higher than that for India.
It seems to me that it is far too soon to come to a judgment about Bhutan’s GNH experiment, particularly since it is only in recent years that a serious attempt has been made to measure GNH and there is little evidence to suggest how this information will actually be used in policy development. I concluded my research on this topic for APEL by suggesting that it is not yet clear to what extent the judgments implicit in the methodology reflect the values of the people of Bhutan on such matters as the dimensions of well-being that are important and the weighting that should be given to each dimension. One of my concerns is that the weight that people living in urban centres may wish to give to resilience of cultural traditions may differ substantially from that of people living a traditional rural lifestyle. It would not make sense to claim, for example, that the happiness of any individuals can be enhanced by forcing them to adopt traditional lifestyles if they would prefer more cosmopolitan lifestyles (or vice versa).
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By Evelyn Black, on April 14th, 2009
With the recent turnaround in the stock market, happy days are here again, at least for a minute. And yet, if you are very, very still, you will a hear a faint rustling in the background, like something scary sneaking up on a rabbit.
That rustling you hear is everybody sneaking around looking for anybody to blame for our current economic distress. Soon we will witness a free-for-all blamefest.
Let me just get a jump on here that while no one is paying attention.
First of all, I don’t believe that we are witnessing the bursting of an ‘oil bubble.’ What we are seeing now is a combination of 1) an expected drop in prices due to a drop in demand and 2) a reaction to market turbulence that sent the dollar dropping rapidly against the euro. This happy time won’t last. It’s a blip on the screen; a shiny reflection on the water that survivors stranded on a deserted island briefly mistake for a rescue ship.
Calm down. It’s not a rescue ship. We really are doomed.
So let’s get back to naming names and assigning blame. Who caused this mess? Was it Alan Greenspan? Was it day traders and short sellers? Was it oil and commodities speculators? Whom should we string up for this? I think there is plenty of blame to go around, but it doesn’t seem to be settling in the right places. It may never settle there. That doesn’t mean I can’t assign it in my own special way, right here, right now:
Bad CEOs.
Why is it that if I go to the restroom too many times on my shift I get in trouble, but if our CEO loses us billions of dollars by making risky investment decisions that go bad, he gets to retire with a golden parachute of $132 million? Personally, I call that bad management. I mean, I could run our corporation into the ground faster and better and all I would require by way of a parachute is a single million dollars. That’s all I want, not a penny more. You see, right there I could have saved our stockholders $131 million but did anyone ask me? No. I’m not waiting by the phone either.
Dumb voters.
It really is the economy stupid. What did you think the spoiled son of a Texas oilman was going to do for you anyway? What ever made you think for one single second that he even cared? Molly Ivins sounded the alarm about Dubya over and over again, in book after book, and she kept on sounding it right up until her untimely death last year, but did anyone listen? They did not. You know those chickens that will be in every pot? First they have to come home to roost. That’s what’s happening right now. Try and catch one if you can. You’ll be needing the protein.
Consumerism.
Who ever heard of an economy that could sustain itself simply by buying tons of cheap crap from China? Which economic theory lays that possibility out in a way that makes even marginal sense? I used to like to troll the bargain end-caps at Target as much as the next woman, but no more. Even if it means the terrorists win, my pocketbook has forced me back to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do’. I have been forced to ’stretch’ meat with noodles and mashed potatoes. Next I’ll be making Depression Cake. We should have known this all along, but, flush with cash, many Americans overspent while the housing boom was booming, and now that it’s bust, the party is over. Expect the next waive of credit defaults to be unsecured.
Congress.
Investment banks should not be allowed to chop up bad in debt and package it in ways that make it untraceable, then trade it in insane ways that bring down entire retail institutions. That is the sort of high risk gambit that regulation was invented to address, but no one in Congress got around to passing any regulation. Could it be because they themselves were making too much money while things were going well? No, that’s too cynical. Still, they have been less than effective. The current legislation meant to help out the five million homeowners expected to lose their homes this year to foreclosure, if passed, will help about 400,000 people, if the banks agree to work with them. It leaves the decision up to the banks. But it hasn’t been passed yet. There’s talk of a veto. God help us, because Congress won’t. You can count on that.
That’s my short list for today. I’d like to see a parade of CEOs held accountable for horrible decisions and unfathomable losses. I dream about that.
I may as well dream. You know what happens when we let dreams die.
By Evelyn Black, on October 23rd, 2008
In an op-ed piece of October 17’s New York Times world-famous entrepreneur and financier Warren Buffet urged American investors to return to the stock market and bet on the long term future success of the United States. “Buy American,” Buffett’s headline reads. “I am.”
The essay was a vote of confidence from a successful guy at a time when America badly needs a vote of confidence from somewhere, anywhere, for anything.
But is Buffett’s advice valid?
The gist of Buffett’s analysis is that when markets tumble, the best time to buy stocks has historically been before recessionary effects hit the broader economy. As Buffett explains it,
During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.
Or, if you need a more shorthand rule of thumb: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”
It’s hard not to like Warren Buffett, a guy who admitted openly on a recent televised interview that 1) his clerical staff pays higher income taxes than he does, and 2) that’s not right. No, he’s not out pestering the IRS to accept additional taxes from him as a mea culpa, but he does go out of his way to encourage Americans, to back American businesses, and to responsibly critique U.S. government policies, all the while managing to still enrich Warren Buffett in the process.
If there’s such a thing as an Everyman CEO, Buffett is the guy.
Still, many analysts see hard times ahead for the U.S. for many decades, not just many years. While it’s true that ‘buy low, sell high’ is still a decent way to conduct yourself in regard to the stock market, it’s also true (and Buffett admits it in the NYT essay) that the U.S. could be in for a prolonged decline before we see a Renaissance. What that means is that unless you are young and careful with what you purchase, this might not be a great time to jump into the stock market: Not because America will never come back–of course it will come back eventually–but because you may or may not be around when it does, and you may or may not pick the company that will thrive in whatever nation America is about to become.
Because the America that existed up until this month? That nation is effectively gone now.
What we are witnessing right now is for all intents and purposes the decline of an empire. How far will we fall? The most positive estimates have the U.S. going through a severe recession with a continued drop in housing prices, rising unemployment, and frequent government intervention through 2010 at least and possibly longer. Those are the optimists.
Pessimistic forecasts invoke Mad Max movies and survivalist nightmares.
I think the truth will, as usual, be somewhere in the middle, with the downturn being more severe than predicted in the press but less apocalyptic than predicted by the conspiracy theorists. Will some people find ways to get rich during these difficult times? Yes. Some people always do. The Chinese sign for crisis is also the sign for opportunity (whether it really is or not!) and so on and so forth.
But will most of us prosper?
No.
Most of us will be lucky to hang on to what we have, and any little bit of money left over will probably not be spent on stocks. Not for a long time.
What that means is that, while the stock market may be close to bottoming out at this point (who can say?), and while certain stocks might be worth buying right now for that reason (which stocks, even Buffett isn’t saying), the ability of most people to buy anything is going to go away for a long, long time, starting this Christmas if not sooner.
We are likely to see a stock market bottom, whenever it comes, followed by years of flat-lined market activity. Gains will be modest and unpredictable. Old standbys will go the way of the dinosaur and some surprising start-ups will briefly appear like shooting stars. Good guessers with lots of cash will be rewarded, but most people will just hang on until whomever we are going to be as a nation emerges clearly out of the 2008 smoke and carnage.
Many have made a credible case that the housing bubble was really an extension of the tech bubble and that, by replacing one bubble with another, we only forestalled and worsened the effects of an economic crisis that has been building for decades, not years. Manufacturing is no longer the foundation upon which the American middle class builds its wealth and security. We have been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs, and a lingering distaste among many for the abuses of the labor movement that led to the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa and the coronation of Ronald Reagan continues to keep us from doing what we need to do to shore up wages and opportunities. It’s fine to have beliefs, economic or otherwise, but here’s a fact that flies in the face of fiscal dogmatism: People can’t spend money they don’t have.
Not anymore they can’t, anyway. Not with credit markets frozen and jobs disappearing into the October mist like so many spectral visitors from America Past. With Christmas approaching, retail chains where I live are laying off employees.
Anyway you slice it, our “consumer culture” seems to be DOA. A victim of fiscal cardiac arrest.
So what does America do now? We don’t make things. We’ve lost the tech battle to China and India. We’ve tapped out our oil. Our young people are uneducated and unwell. And the final death rattle of a declining culture–rampant consumerism–is about to become a morality tale told to children around the wood stoves of the future by grandparents who lived through The Crash of 2008.
I appreciate Buffett’s encouragement, his faith in American business, and his willingness to step forward as a cheerleader right now. But I submit that the crisis we are facing is not so much a financial or economic one as it is an identity crisis, the biggest identity crisis we have faced as a nation since the Civil War.
Who are we and who do want to become?
The answers to these critical questions will determine our future prosperity.
Let’s hope and pray we get them right.
By Evelyn Black, on July 14th, 2008
Recently I read a disturbing article by a young South Carolina mother entitled “A Letter to Illegal Mexican Walmart Shoppers.” (Editor’s note: the article’s original URL no longer exists. Click here to read it from Google’s cached pages.) The gist of the letter is that, in this woman’s opinion, Mexican Walmart shoppers are rude, and most of the men want her bodies. And since they are single-handedly ruining America by taking our jobs, she feels they could at least be polite and stop leering at her.
What I find both refreshing and maddening about this letter is its open and unapologetic racism combined with a total lack of appreciation for the irony of the author’s position. Most Americans are a little more guarded in expressing their racism these days, even when they share the same views. But in South Carolina it is apparently open season on Mexican immigrants, and they darn well better keep their hands off our white women if they want to keep shopping at Walmart!
Wow.
It’s refreshing to get this blind hatred out into the light where we can at least see it, and I thank the author for doing that. Usually this stuff breeds in the dark. If everyone who thought these things said them out loud right away, we could then discuss them on the spot and dispel a lot of ignorance. Discussion would be a good thing. Sadly, we rarely get the chance to take it that far.
The irony of course is that no one promotes cheap labor and abusive labor prices as ruthlessly and effectively as Walmart. Those low, low prices come at the cost of American jobs, and you don’t have to be an economist to see that. The $19.95 CD player you picked up on sale under the ubiquitous smiley face was almost certainly made by Chinese workers who earn less than the cost of the item itself for an entire week’s work. Recently Walmart lost a lawsuit brought against it by its own employees for not providing them with legally required work breaks and for forcing them to work off the clock on pain of losing their jobs.
So clearly, the easier and more rational way to avoid being annoyed by Mexican immigrants at Walmart is to stop shopping at Walmart, but the problem is that many Americans have come to believe it is their God-given right to get the cheapest prices available on earth and damn the consequences. They shouldn’t have to think when they shop. They should just be able to consume at the pace they have grown accustomed to, regardless of economic conditions. That’s what we are after all; we’re consumers, right? We have to be able to consume things, and cheaply. It’s the American way.
Corporate responsibility is not a concept many American consumers understand or want to understand. And yet, somebody has to be blamed for the inconveniences in their personal lives. Mexican immigrants as a group do fit the bill. They don’t or won’t speak English, so it’s easy to blame them. (No back talk, except from people like me).
This is how scapegoats are born, and our country can’t keep functioning the way it is now without them. That’s what I want to focus on here:
Our country can’t keep functioning this way without scapegoats.
I want to focus on this because it has come to the attention of even oblivious Walmart shoppers that our country currently isn’t functioning very well. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that our country has, in fact, become dysfunctional. In order to stay dysfunctional, we have to manufacture targets of blame for the obvious and growing problems we face: We need scapegoats. Without scapegoats, we’d have to look at the real, complex causes of our current problems, and if we do that, everything will change. Scapegoats help us to maintain the status quo, no matter how much the status quo stinks.
Like the saying goes, better the devil you know.
So, here for your shopping pleasure is a short list of some of the hottest and cheapest scapegoats around right now. Grab one while you still can! (I’m reasonably certain all of them can be found at Walmart.)
Mexican immigrants. They’re taking our jobs and ruining our country. Great jobs Americans would love to do like picking tobacco or working in slaughterhouses or roofing suburban homes in the dead heat of summer at sub-minimum wage. Let’s get serious for a minute here: Jobs that pay wages Americans can actually live on are not being snapped up by illegal immigrants. Those good jobs are going overseas to China and India. So blame your bad luck on Mexicans if you want to, while you can. Soon, however, there won’t be any good jobs for people born here, at which point you will have to be a little nicer if you want to get hired to pick tomatoes with these folks.
Married gays. It’s not the fact that the American auto industry is DOA or that the price of gasoline is on its way to Mars or that we are dumping enormous sums of money into a war we can’t win that is hurting our country’s economy right now; it’s those pesky homosexuals, always out in public doing pesky gay things like picking out drapes and going to the gym. Now they want to get married. No wonder we are doomed. God will now smite us with forest fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and gay divorce lawyers. Hard to believe that the last election was largely won by simply invoking the power of homophobia, but it was. All of you people who voted for George Bush just so Adam and Steve wouldn’t get a marriage license, how is that working out for you now? (And by the way, Adam and Steve? Yeah, you two, out in California? Congratulations! High five!)
Stupid poor people. As you probably point out constantly to everyone you know, America is crawling with people who are way stupider than you. If those people sign papers with predatory lenders that take all their money and then repo their homes, it’s their own damn fault. Doesn’t matter if they are in their 90s and live on an $800 a month Social Security check, they should have planned better when they were younger. Now they are bringing down the whole country with their stupid stupidity by way of too many foreclosures. Alleged fraud and book-cooking at Fannie Mae or Countrywide is beside the point. Those nice, ambitious young brokers who invented ways to package and trade mortgage loans as securities, ways that completely erased who held the bad debts? Those nice boys were just trying help your stock portfolio increase in value.
We should never blame Wall Street or the finance industry for their own disasters because the market is self-regulating. Ronald Reagan said so and ever since then this is the official prayer of all rich people. High rolling high finance=good. Stupid poor people=bad. Always remember that every advantage in your own life was won solely through your own efforts with no help from anyone, ever, and every disadvantage of poverty is due to the stupidity and laziness of poor people. Keep thinking that way, and pay no attention to that self-portrait hanging in your den that for some reason is aging rapidly and taking on the visage of a depraved, self-indulgent monster. Oh yes, and hang onto your money. Tight. It’s yours, all yours.
Negroes. Come on, can’t you do any better than that? If you are still holding onto this one, you are probably over 80 and aren’t reading this anyway, and you may not have even noticed that a black guy is currently running for president. Speaking of that guy, lots of working class people, especially working class white guys, are uncomfortable with this candidate’s inexperience at this critical time in our nation’s history. It’s nothing to do with his race at all; it’s his inexperience. Uh-huh. Where was all your concern when George Herbert Walker Bush’s prodigal son wanted to be President? You know which son I mean: the same son that ran every thing he ever touched right into the ground, including oil companies gifted to him by Pappy’s friends, companies that were practically fool-proof money makers, and the entire state of Texas. Where was all your concern back then? Honestly, you guys aren’t fooling anybody.
That’s my short list. I know it could be longer but I have to end this rant somewhere.
The truth is, we have serious problems that will take a degree of unity to solve that we haven’t seen in this country in my entire lifetime. We just can’t afford to tear at each other when we are losing our place as a world power and endangering the whole planet with our waste and pollution. We have to look at the problems themselves and start producing products and services, not scapegoats.
Once upon a time, long ago and for a brief but shining period, we were more than consumers. We were merchants, craftsmen, workers, artists, and builders.
Wouldn’t it be great to get back to that time before it’s too late?
By J.C., on July 12th, 2008
These are exciting times for all of us given the increasing interest in healthcare during a presidential election. One key theme in the transformation of our medical system has been whether universal healthcare is something we want, something we can afford, and something we want to make happen.
When people think of universal healthcare, they often look at the rosy view – that every person should have access to healthcare. This is an ideological change from the previous view that healthcare was a privilege and a fringe benefit. For those of you who don’t know, the health insurance industry really came about for the need for companies to recruit great workers. Many of these potential workers were war veterans and needed medical care. Thus, medical “benefits” was indeed a fringe benefit that was only previously afforded by the elite or those with good jobs. Interestingly, if you think about it, every one has “access” to medical care these days. There are no barriers from anybody walking into a doctor’s office or a hospital. Whether you can pay for it is a different story. Thus when we say “access to care” we really mean “care that is paid for by someone else”!
In this day and age, many people are viewing healthcare as a right. Thus, in other words, people expect to receive medical care that is paid for by someone else; simply because you exist in this world, you have the right for healthcare. That “someone else” happens to be the government, which passes on the cost to every person in the United States via some tax somewhere.
But one of the consequences of universal care, which I view as somewhat of a socialist concept, is that all care will be the same. In other countries where universal care is in place, you do not get a “choice” to go to the doctor you think is better than the other. What you get is the right to see the doctor who you see.
We Americans are truly a spoiled lot when it comes to consumerism – the medical industry is not spared. We want to go to the best doctor possible. We want choice, and we will pay for choice. If there is a special procedure, we want it done. What we do not realize is that those choices and tiers of medicine are only availed through a profit-driven capitalist medical industry. Where do we think all of those drug and device discoveries are coming from? From the company that spent billions of dollars researching it and who sells it at a handsome profit and whose stock is listed in the public markets!
Are we ready to give up choice to establish a “standard” of care from which no patient receives anything different? I really don’t think so. I really think we love the idea of “fairness,” but when it comes to ourselves and our bodies and our health, we want the best even if it is what others cannot afford.
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