http://demos.fi/files/Demos_Politics_of_Happiness_A_Manifesto_Eng_Draft.pdf
Recently, I've been reading Paul Theroux's follow-up to The Great Railway Bazaar called "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star". In it, he retraces the route he took in the Railway Bazaar after an interval of thirty years, across the Middle East, through India to the Far East, then back via Japan and the Trans-Siberian Railway. They are both fantastic travel books; I recommend them. One of his musings that most caught my attention was his desire to travel without luxury. Luxury, he complains, is the enemy of observation - comfort reduces your alertness to the world around you. and besides, he adds, rich people are deathly dull to travel with - all they talk about is how poor they are.
This last observation interested me. It seems to me that as a nation - perhaps as a civilization - we are caught in this trap: we are massively better-off than our grandparents were, and yet we seem more and more concerned with poverty. The idea of 'fairness' was a political touchstone in the last UK election - but when we all have so much, it seems strange that we are so fixated on this concept. Oh, I know, we're all struggling to keep our heads above water - as a wise man once said to me, 'job' stands for 'Just Over Broke', and that's the way it is and will always be... but if I look at the amount of material possessions that I own, I can't claim to be impoverished. And when I walk down the poorer streets round me, the plethora of satellite dishes and heavily modified cars suggests that poverty is not the simple "lack of money" concept we sometimes assume it is.
All of which leads me to the above report. I haven't read all of it - as usual, one of the reasons I'm posting it here is in the hope that I'll get around to reading it thoroughly later - but it seems like a really interesting discussion of the problems of running a sustainable, happy capitalist economy. Here's what core77 had to say about it
1 comment:
Just today I was listening to a Alex Steffen lecture that touched on poverty. Our world is really now made up of the desperately poor and the over-consuming planet-destroying wealthy, with little in between. Hang out in a small village in India and you'll see some real poverty. But head to the nearest city and you'll see fast food and televisions.
I love that they're trying to figure out how to build a third class somewhere in between - using money to buy sustainable happiness, rather than just things. But there's a whole lot of profit-driven forces that are working against them (did I need a new iPod this year? my last one was functional, but didn't have video or a built-in radio! sure I rarely use these features, but I didn't know that when I bought it).
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