Skip to main content

Limits of quantifiable wealth

Robert Skildesky has an interesting piece on the limits of using Gross Domestic Product (national income or output) as a measure of social wellbeing (or welfare). There has been a renewed push following the credit crisis for alternative measures to underpin policy direction of governments. For many years many governments have focused on increasing GDP but many a calling for a shift in think – wealth is proving not to be enough. Part of the problem is not only that money can’t buy happiness but also that how money is distributed affects many people’s happiness:
Another finding has...started to influence the current debate on growth: poor people within a country are less happy than rich people. In other words, above a low level of sufficiency, peoples’ happiness levels are determined much less by their absolute income than by their income relative to some reference group. We constantly compare our lot with that of others, feeling either superior or inferior, whatever our income level; well-being depends more on how the fruits of growth are distributed than on their absolute amount.

Put another way, what matters for life satisfaction is the growth not of mean income but of median income – the income of the typical person. Consider a population of ten people (say, a factory) in which the managing director earns $150,000 a year and the other nine, all workers, earn $10,000 each. The mean average of their incomes is $25,000, but 90% earn $10,000. With this kind of income distribution, it would be surprising if growth increased the typical person’s sense of well-being.

That is not an idle example. In rich societies over the last three decades, mean incomes have been rising steadily, but typical incomes have been stagnating or even falling. In other words, a minority – a very small minority in countries like the United States and Britain – has captured most of the gains of growth. In such cases, it is not more growth that we want, but more equality.

More equality would not only produce the contentment that flows from more security and better health, but also the satisfaction that flows from having more leisure, more time with family and friends, more respect from one’s fellows, and more lifestyle choices. Great inequality makes us hungrier for goods than we would otherwise be, by constantly reminding us that we have less than the next person. We live in a pushy society with turbo-charged fathers and “tiger” mothers, constantly goading themselves and their children to “get ahead.”

The nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill had a more civilised view: “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think…that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind….The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.” That lesson has been lost on most economists today, but not on the king of Bhutan – or on the many people who have come to recognise the limits of quantifiable wealth.
The problem of course is that given technological progress inequalities will always persist unless people are forced to share all the gains from technological progress. Then of course someone will ask – who will invent? Indeed it seems that inequality is actually necessary in some economic models e.g. Kuznets hypothesis which argues that it is the rich that save and invest, thereby increasing the size of the national cake. More income equality means less cake overall, so the argument goes. Jesus said, “the poor you will always have”, not to approve of inequalities but as an empirical fact that has remained true for two millennia. If inequalities are here to stay, so is the inadequacy of human striving for quantifiable wealth. Mill’s idea of a “best state for human nature” where “no one is poor, no one desires to be richer” is not a contentment that fallen man can not produce. On this the Christian and the Darwinian are in agreement. The Darwinist believes that without human striving there’s no evolutionary progress. The Christian holds that the heart of man is utterly depraved. At the fundamental level there's nothing in man that immediately inevitably and forever gravitates him towards contentment without a deeper work of divine engineered grace.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Am Mother

I think it is true to say that the Netflix film I Am Mother is one the most disturbing movies I have watched for a long time. The film is set in a near future. Human life has been wiped out. An artificial intelligence (AI) called Mother is living inside a bunker where thousands of embroyos are stored. It selects an embryo and initiates a program to grow a baby within 24 hours. The AI then goes on to raise the child as its mother over the next few years.  After 16 years, the girl, who now goes by the name of Daughter (Clara Rugaard) is a teenager. She has never been outside because Mother has told her that the air is toxic. Her time is spend being home schooled in science and ethics so that she can become a perfect human being. The bond between Daughter and Mother is unusually strong. To our surprise there does not appear to be any mental or pyschological trauma of having a machine as her mother.  The strength of the bond between man and machine is tested when a nameless Woman (Hilary

What is the best preparation for preaching?

The best preparation is not to be too anxious about it. Anxious care hinders liveliness and efficacy. It leads to too little dependence on the Spirit. Be not didactic. Aim at the conscience as soldiers aim at the faces. Consider I may be preaching my last sermon. This leads to setting forth Christ as The Way, the Truth and the Life . .. Make Christ the prominent figure…Pay less attention to dear self. JOHN NEWTON

White Fragility, A Review

Robin DiAngelo has a sermon to preach. It is in form of a short popular book called White Fragilit y. Straight off the bat she tells us not to expect balanced analysis but a forceful argument “unapologetically rooted in identity politics”.  She understands identity politics as “the [political] focus on the barriers specific groups face in their struggle for equality”. The group she wants to save is black people, whom she blankets under “people of colour”.  So what is White Fragility about?  DiAngelo is sick and tired of white racism in the western world, and specifically the USA. She believes every white person, including babies, are guilty of racism by virtue of being white. So she wants to use her “insider status” as a white American woman to challenge this white racism by getting her fellow “white progressives” to force forward her thesis. In her words, “I am white...and I am mainly writing to a white audience”. I was immediately tempted to put down the book because being black Afri