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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (2856)	10/26/2005 12:52:44 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24248

Papa Smurf (Time for a Schumacher revival) Alexander Zaitchik, Freezerbox Magazine The New York Times recently reported on a curious conference held in Nova Scotia. The pow-wow brought together economists, social scientists, CEOs and government officials to inquire into the sources of human happiness, and why there seems to be a shortfall of this precious product in so many countries. Discussion focused on how governments might quantify and increase this contentment, once its elements were isolated and some sort of formula worked out. Participants all shared the assumption that the metrics of traditional economics--G.D.P., rates of growth and employment--were useless in gauging well-being. In determining quality of life, as opposed to mere standard of living, they agreed that the usual stats hid as much as they revealed about a society. The star of the conference was thus the only current government attempt at such a project--the Gross National Happiness Index maintained by the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan, which was heavily and happily represented in Nova Scotia. The idea of a Gross National Happiness index--of measuring such economic "externalities" as a healthy environment, time spent with family, enjoyment of work, quality health care, spiritual life--is, as the Times writer pointed out, straight from the playbook of the German-born British economist and social critic E. F. Schumacher, most famous for his bestselling 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. ...It's perhaps no coincidence that interest in Schumacherian ideas seems to be emerging from the margins just as talk of looming permanent oil shock gets louder. For while E. F. Schumacher's assault on traditional economics is at heart a humanist-spiritual one, its urgency and appeal have always shared their roots with harder stuff. Small is Beautiful proposes a scaled-down, resource-thrifty version of modernity not just because the author thought we'd all be happier (much), but because he felt it would eventually be forced upon us anyway, the result of a forceful revelation Schumacher had in the 1950s. While chief economist at the British National Coal Board, studying the energy consumption patterns of Western Europe, it occurred to Schumacher that the obsession with growth that was the religion of both the Western and Eastern blocs failed to take into account the finite resource base upon which their economies rested. ...Thirty-two years after the publication of Small is Beautiful, the world faces the prospect of a permanent oil-shock to make the jolts of the 1970s seem like ripples in a pond. Alexander Zaitchik co-founded Freezerbox in 1997. He is currently at large, somewhere in India. (20 October 2005) energybulletin.net