Reversal Of Fortune - Or Why Throwing Rocks At The More And Better Birds Doesn't Work Anymore

for most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. Smith's core ideas—that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth—have indisputably worked. They've produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They've built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith's ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or Better.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current dogma, that's as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward. But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shifted to acknowledge Einstein's more complicated universe.

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Yet the bad news was already apparent, if you cared to look. Burning rivers and smoggy cities demonstrated the dark side of industrial expansion. In 1972, a trio of mit researchers released a series of computer forecasts they called "limits to growth," which showed that unbridled expansion would eventually deplete our resource base. A year later the British economist E.F. Schumacher wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful. (Soon after, when Schumacher came to the United States on a speaking tour, Jimmy Carter actually received him at the White House—imagine the current president making time for any economist.) By 1979, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that only 30 percent of Americans were "pro-growth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain." Such ambivalence, Etzioni predicted, "is too stressful for societies to endure," and Ronald Reagan proved his point. He convinced us it was "Morning in America"—out with limits, in with Trump. Today, mainstream liberals and conservatives compete mainly on the question of who can flog the economy harder. Larry Summers, who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, at one point declared that the Clinton administration "cannot and will not accept any 'speed limit' on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible." It's the economy, stupid.

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http://motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/03/reversal_of_fortune.html

"...traditionally, happiness and satisfaction are the sort of notions that economists wave aside as poetic irrelevance, the kind of questions that occupy people with no head for numbers who had to major in liberal arts." - This is the core of the mistake, you should measure what you want to manage and monetary wealth is artificial what we want to measure is how well we are living, our quality of life. We don't exist for work, work is a way for us to provide for our selves and community at a pragmatic level of keeping us alive and beyond that it's only purpose is to provide dignity and self-expression not another coffee-maker or new car.


"Simple mathematics says that we're less and less likely to bump into the other inhabitants of our neighborhood, or indeed of our own homes. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, "Major builders and top architects are walling people off." We're less connected with each other as well as the land.

These are lessons I've learned personally particularly through the Voluntary Simplicity seminar I took last year.

There is hope I've heard this man speak a couple of times: http://www.tufts.edu/~jagyem01/ his focus is on Environmental Social Justice. And apparently there are organizations trying to get a better grasp of how to measure quality of life and promote the use of those measures to at least complement if not replace things like GDP. http://www.neweconomics.org/gen

Heck Bhutan is trying to use Gross National Happiness (GNH) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness

the less you need other people. The less you need other people, the more you need some increasingly distant authority. Good article.

Starts by claiming "for most of human history" as a basis of validity for the claims following, but then confines argument to only one cultural paradigm of all that have existed, and of that one only covering about 10% of the historical record.

Not an auspicious start... In fact, that entire record across the span of cultures documents exactly the opposite of what is concluded - trials and challenges are the trigger to innovation and successful adaptation vastly, vastly, vastly more often than they are the cause of collapse. It really isn't too important to the ideas presented, it is just a pet peeve of mine when people make these sweeping assertions about the human condition based on an obviously flawed ethnocentric sample.

The author speaks of "current dogma". In this time of transition, I'd like to know just what the current dogma actually is; for it certainly isn't free market fundamentalism, nor is it central planning and ownership of resources. I'm probably being a bit too critical because these days, as soon as you think you have the cultural dynamics figured out, events throw you a curve ball.