Canadians, Let's Get Happy
Next PM needs to reinvent how our country measures success.
We're consuming her future.
If you can, tear your eyes away from the meltdown in the fantasy world of high-finance derivatives.
The bigger threat by far is the rapid meltdown of the real economy we inhabit. The planet's top scientists are warning us that we are fast eroding the natural ecosystems on which our society and all its material and financial assets depend.
That's why the first order of business for our next prime minister should be reinventing how Canada measures success. Let me explain.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned us in 2005 that two thirds of the earth's natural systems -- from those regulating our water supply to those that provide us with wild and farmed food -- are being used up faster than they can recover.
The date on which scientists calculate that we ran through all of the planet's annual production of eco-services -- and after which we began digging into our stocks of past years' production -- came and went late last month. It has been moving earlier with every passing year since we first went into ecological overdraft in the early 1980s.
These are not simply pretty parks or iconic fauna we're talking about folks. This is our life-support system that we are actively destroying.
Are we having fun yet?
It might almost be worth it if we were actually enjoying the party at the end of the world. But especially on this Thanksgiving Day, we should probably reflect on whether we're really as happy as they say we are. Surveys of self-reported happiness show that in the richest countries on earth, including Canada, people are enjoying life no more today than in the 1950s. But indicators of distress, from rates of addiction to mental illness to marital breakdown to the daily struggle to find time for oneself or one's family, those have all gone steadily up.
Ground-breaking Canadian ecological economist Mark Anielski did a remarkable thing in his province of Alberta. He compared its performance between 1961 and 1999 as reflected in its gross domestic product, the primary compass of our economic and political management, with a much wider range of indicators that accounted for scores of additional factors such as air quality, forest fragmentation, the extent of poverty, suicide rates and commuting times. He called these indicators of Alberta's genuine progress.
From 1961 to 1999, Alberta's GDP rose by 4.4 per cent a year on average. Sounds good, right? Wrong. Over the same time, the province's genuine progress as reflected in all those other things that determine whether life is worth living and whether the planet will continue to support human life at all, fell at an annual rate of 0.5 per cent.
In other words, Alberta wasn't really getting richer at all. Not in any of the ways that matter.
A dinosaur named GDP
As Bobby Kennedy memorably observed just weeks before he was shot down in a hotel kitchen, our familiar GDP "measures everything... except that which matters."
Kennedy wasn't the first to twig to the shortcomings of GDP as a compass. The economist who originally devised the measure of all the cash flowing through an economy, Simon Kuznets, warned the world not to use his invention for the very purpose it has served: as a guide to political and economic choices.
Nor is Anielski's genuine progress index (which he has since renamed his "Genuine Wealth" approach to economics) the only effort to develop a better navigational aid for our most important collective decisions. A Halifax group has worked for over a decade on a genuine progress index for that province. Toronto's Atkinson Foundation is supporting an initiative led by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow (and including Anielski) to develop a Canadian Index of Well-being that will similarly reflect changes in the real quality of life in this country.
The Kingdom of Bhutan, of course, has become famous for hitching its development to something called its index of gross national happiness.
Better way to keep the books
We need more. In an article in the current issue of The Walrus magazine, I call on the next prime minister, whomever that is, to strike a Royal Commission tasked with designing a fair but effective set of accounting rules by which our conventional corporate and public book-keeping can begin to reflect in full all of the impacts of economic activity, including those on the environment and the quality of Canadians' lives. Beyond that, such a commission must draft a plan to return our economy to a sustainable, pay-as-you-go footing in its use of nature's services.
The three older parties competing for our votes quibble over carbon: tax it (Liberals) or cap it (Tories, sort of) or both (the NDP). None of their plans is especially convincing. The Harper government's is downright deceptive: under it, greenhouse emissions could actually rise as their 'intensity' (the amount of GHGs emitted for a dollar of GDP) falls.
The Greens, however, promise to measure not only "how much money changes hands" -- the function of the GDP -- but also "whether that economic activity makes us healthier and better educated, and the environment cleaner."
We need to hear much more on this from the Greens, and from the others something more than a debate over how to make the Tang hold out as Apollo 13 runs out of oxygen.
Related Tyee stories:
- After Globalization
Today's dominant economic theory is fading. Can we seize the opportunity? - Embrace the Collapse
Interview with The Upside of Down author Thomas Homer-Dixon - Coping with Climate Dread
Enviro experts battle despair as doom scenarios roll in.
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
nightbloom
13-10-2008
Very good article. The
Very good article. The battle over indicators - how we define and measure success - is a battle true progressives cannot afford to lose. It is worth more than a thousand street protests, advocacy cells, and alternative media sites.
And indicators won't be revolutionized via populist politics. They are, by their nature, hyper-rational, inaccessible, and elite. Rather, they'll be changed by winning over the technocrats, policy wonks, and "grey eminences" - i.e. the "decision definers" who sit behind elected decision makers. The real challenge is getting this specific segment of the professional classes onto the same page across global jurisdictions. The Social Sciences should have been onto this *decades* ago, instead of feeding us the incoherent babble of post-structuralist French theorists and navel-gazing Marxist-Feminists. we're finally coming around to something approximating the truth, and that (as they say) is the shape of things to come.
G West
13-10-2008
And above all...
If the data show the people with all the money aren't the happiest folks in the world then there must be something wrong with the measurment system.
Yeh, right. Not only is the GDP the wrong measure, money generally is the wrong yardstick - but changing the tape measure won't make any difference....and it has nothing to do with feminism or marxism although I do agree it's time to dump the current elite...
Americans, for example, should be more exercized about the $615 billion defence budget passed the same week as the $800 Billion financial bailout.
Didn't see much mention of THAT in the headlines. That's the thing about the military - they'll always find a way to burn up the bucks - no matter how bad things get.
politico
13-10-2008
Great Thanksgiving food for thought
The American Nationalization of the financial sector and its permeation throughout the world has proven that we are able to turn on a dime.
Today, as this article points out, everything is upside down. Our priorities are completely twisted and people are downright unhappy as it is impossible to participate in a world where no banker is left behind while a billion people starve and try to make sense of it.
This is why internet movies like this one and its first edition go viral:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912
The Venice Project depicted in the flick is so crazy it might work, but more to the point, this stuff is now the opiate of the masses who are clamouring around looking for answers.
Stump
13-10-2008
feminism and marxism
Before we dogpile on both schools of thought perhaps it's worth noting that they both have been espousing communities that measure their well-being by more than an individual's ability to amass wealth and power for quite a while.
Budd Campbell
13-10-2008
GDP Measures Output, not Welfare
GDP is intended to measure total economic output, at least all that which is monetized. It's not intended to measure economic well-being or social welfare.
lynn
13-10-2008
Knowing What Is Worth Dying For
As Canada under Harper sinks into a wasteland of corporate miltarism...maybe we just need to stand up and defend what is truly valuable in life:
"TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie."
Carl Sandburg
alda
13-10-2008
already passed
The Well-being Measurement Act to measure the GPI (genuine progress indicator) was already passed by the House of Commons in 2003, 185 to 46 or thereabouts.
However, as Woods says, we need government to implement it. Fat chance of that, though, if the Cons or Libs get in. Why not? Such a realistic measurement wouldn't let the country (and therefore, governmnet) look a tenth as healthy and rich and fair to all classes as Canadians have been brainwashed to believe it is. Couldn't have that or voters might start changing their habits...
Orchard
13-10-2008
Great article... two corrections
This is a very important topic and thanks for reporting on it.
There are two corrections to this article I'd like to make.
First, the liberal position is to have BOTH a tax-shift AND a Cap and Trade system. The NDP have staunchly argued against a Carbon Tax and ONLY accept a Cap and Trade system.
Second, with regard to your claim that "none of the political parties plans for climate change are especially convincing," I submit to you that 230 economists and over 100 of the nation's best scientists endorse Carbon Taxes.
Thanks for your attention.
ME2
13-10-2008
ill-defined goals
Humankind has been fiddling around with social organisation for some 10,000 years now, and while there's been a constant positive accumulation of knowledge about science and technology, there doesn't seem to have been much of practical value learned about environmental sustainability or social ethics.
AMP
13-10-2008
a few good things to try
*unplug lots of things you thought necessary.
*have absolutely no energy running in your home when you are not there.
*buy the smallest possible property you can afford and vow to only pay off one loan in your life, or none.
*spend a year getting no new clothes.
*start sharing your food until you notice that you now have to buy less food.
*get to know your friend's children well, and consistently over the years.
*don't ever buy a car.
*sleep atleast 30 mins in the middle of the day = like after work and before dinner.
*rub people's feet and backs more - very few people will claim that they need anything in those moments.
*spend time using your hands to create.
*treat your objects like old pals that you want to have pride in the time of length owned, and lasted. versus buying the newest trend.
*memorize songs you love and sing them yourself whenever, at no extra charge, but greatly increasing your joy.
*listen to old people, really listen.
*stare for a long time at animals, trees.
*remember every funny thing that ever happened.
these are all things that will help.