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A political leader attempting to promote the well-being of his citizens is pulled in different directions: he will be graded on economic performance but there are many other dimensions to the quality of life, including the state of the environment. (Writes Jospeh Stiglitz)

While there is no single indicator that can capture something as complex as our society, the metrics commonly used, such as gross domestic product, suggest a trade-off: one can improve the environment only by sacrificing growth.

But if we had a comprehensive measure of well-being, perhaps we would see this as a false choice. Such a metric might indicate an increase in wellbeing as the environment improved, even if conventionally measured output went down.

STWR 14 September 2009

Report.pdf

Reviewing the Commission's report, The Indie's David Prosser commented:

France may have given the phrase laissez-faire to the world, but it has never subscribed to the sort of purist free-market economic theory that dominates in the US and to a lesser extent here.

No surprise then, that it was a French president who asked two Nobel prize-winning economists to think about how levels of happiness might become an important economic indicator.

Still, the ideas of Joseph Stiglitz and Armatya Sen, published by President Sarkozy yesterday, have their supporters in this country – most notably the LSE professor Richard Layard, who has argued for some time that a narrow focus on GDP is a poor target for economic policy because it neglects any consideration of human happiness.    [IND]

Writers such as Zygmunt Bauman have been warning us for years that the world took a wrong turn when the economic quackery of Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys was adopted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and those famous phrases - "You can't buck the market" and "No such thing as society" - became the basis of economic policy.

Problems arising from the unbalanced elevation of market behaviours - and in Britain's case an unbalanced economy - arguably lead to the denigration of social norms which, as Oliver James has argued, has resulted in - among other outcomes - the growth in mental health problems:

... Apart from enabling a basic level of economic success, sufficient to pay for food, health and education, the purpose of government is to minimise the amount of mental illness by creating a benign society, like the Scandinavians have been doing for 70 years. Blatcherism has done the opposite. If you can face it, here's a glimpse of what really happened to our social psychology in the past 10 years, starting at the beginning of life.

Foetuses depend on having calm, happy mothers. There is abundant evidence that feeling stressed in the last trimester is an independent cause of hyperactivity and behaviour problems. The mother's high levels of cortisol - the fight-flight hormone - are passed through the placenta and continue to affect the child nine years later. Yet, since 1997, women have been more, not less, likely to work right up to the birth.

It just goes on from there, as if the New Labour control freaks are oblivious to the evidence of what makes for mental health.

Caesareans have multiplied several-fold, even though they interfere with bonding.

British babies are even less likely to be breastfed than anywhere in Europe, again reducing emotional intimacy.

Then, mental illness-inducing strict routines for babies, like insistence on four-hourly feeding or imposed sleep schedules, have become widespread.

Where is the government action, following the damning study of this method published last year?

It shows that, compared with babies raised in infant-centred regimes (for example, demand-feeding or sharing the parental bed when distressed), at three months the routine-nurtured babies spend 50 per cent more time crying or fussing: the Discontented Little Baby ...

Oliver James The Independent, 13 May 2007

And while we are on the subject of wellbeing:

Beyond a certain level of material wealth, more does not equate to happiness; indeed, the pursuit of more is positively pathological.

Where this pursuit is accompanied by increasing inequality and economic insecurity, the results are even more dire.

Add to this the ever more insidious power of advertising, the new electronic circus of celebrity culture, and the workaholism of unregulated economies, and we are, as we know, in big trouble.

Oliver James argues that the spread of the US model of capitalism is responsible for the epidemic of emotional distress that has swept across the developed world, and is threatening to engulf the new China and Russia, among others.

The competitive drive for money, status and power results in a profound deformation of the human soul.

We end up treating ourselves and others as commodities, as mere means to vacuous ends. Our capacity to form authentic, loving relationships, to feel secure and balanced, is destroyed. Anomie, alienation and addiction await us ...

David Goldblatt, The Independent 16 February 2007

Failed Drugs Policies

If Lord May is right, and evolved co-operation is going to be needed to combat the range of eco-threats - which have been greatly magnified by the pursuit of growth - then neoliberalism will come to be seen in the same light as Nietzsche's other philosophical offspring - Nazism - another failed rationalist theory which attempts to 'reform' human nature by social engineering.

As John Gray put it:

The idea that the world's diverse economies and regimes could be corralled into a single, universal free market will be remembered ... as an experiment in utopian social engineering undertaken by rationalist planners who had learned nothing from the disasters of the twentieth century.

Like Marx's idea of worldwide communism, it is an inheritance from a discredited philosophy of history.

According to thinkers of the Enlightenment, the growth of scientific knowledge tends to produce a universal civilisation in which diverse religions and cultures .. will merge.

This assumption of historical convergence ... underpins both Marxism and market liberalism.

"False Dawn" John Gray, Granta Books, 2002 | pages xxi-xxii

On the blogspot 'Building the Third Way', Larry44 writes on the basic difference between owners and workers:

Autonomous Individuality v. Rugged Individualism

Capitalism is internally contradictory.

In one breath it promotes rugged individualism, where the “self-made man” is said to have raised himself by his own bootstraps, while at the same time creates a dependency of workers who are forced to survive on the often meager wages paid to them by employers.

If you fail to find someone to hire you then you are likely to find yourself out on the street ...

Building the Third "Way 17 August 2008

This confirms that only those Robert W. Cox called 'integrated workers' - entrepreneurs and managers - have any realistic hope of becoming "autonmous".

For the rest there's conformity, plus insecurity. Hence the importance of economic democracy, one aspect of which is seeking out 'socialised' forms of ownership.

Williams Davies piece for openDemocracy advances the argument for co-operative structures, mutualism and economic rights, all of which would go some way to enhancing well-being, security, and a greater sense of participation - of belonging - in an aspect of life where these are normally absent.

physiocrat 24 Sep 09, 7:15am

Labour's problems run deeper. It was Lenin who said that "the wind always blows from the Left". This principle gave socialism an intellectual and theoretical underpinning which was ultimately Marxist, even though it often manifested in diluted and democratic forms.

Once Marxism was discredited amongst even its former supporters, a process which was well under way by the 1970s, democratic socialist parties lost their compass.

In the meantime, libertarianism had come to the ascendant, following the works of Ayne Rand and Robert Nozick, and the Hayek school of economists.

It was this movement that drove Thatcherism and there is still no effective counter to the philosophy it forwards. Perhaps oddly, it is only the the Catholic Church that has even stood up against libertarianism with any coherence at all, for example in the recent document issued by the Pope, Caritas in Veritatis (Charity in Truth).

The result is that libertarian notions are running rampant and unchecked, with disastrous social consequences. Even in Sweden, inequality is widening rapidly, with rising and serious social unrest as a consequence.

It is time to abandon the idea that socialism can be revived. Radicals need to acknowledge that the movement for social reform went off in the wrong direction about a century ago and pick up the thread from a different viewpoint. It will demand that cherished but mistaken ideas are abandoned and rigorous thinking is done. So far there is little sign of the latter, and so the libertarian poison is still spreading.

Guardian  23 September 2009

Constituent
24 Sep 09, 8:50am

Physiocrat - you say that socialism is discredited, and that libertarianism has gone too far. Fine. So far we have found that socialism tends to be hijacked by dictators who order the people about rather than listen to them. The problem is that socialism requires responsibility, while libertarianism works on the basis that everyone is irresponsible, but that the various greedy groups will balance out.

We now find ourselves with situations like the one in which prisons are run by one private company which employs other private companies, enabling everyone to say it's the fault of the other lot when things go wrong. Contracts for public services are won by the cheapest tender, and the cheapest tenders tend to come from firms that cut corners, don't make checks, and hope that things won't go wrong.

Everything now depends on this year's set of accounts, with no one caring for the future or for anyone else but themselves.

Socialism used to involve a sense of responsibility, by which everyone helped each other and looked after the planet for the common good. Now the labour party accepts money from big business interests, but to a certain extent it has to because people try to avoid joining trade unions, which are the last democratic organisations left.

You mention the catholic church. Oddly enough, it is the churches that still hold the banner for personal responsibility and caring for others. It is such a pity that they are fighting each other about trivial matters of ritual and minor aspects of belief. It is in the interest of big business to keep churches at each other's throat. The thing is that religions consist of the same basic rules (care for each other and the planet, and don't take out more than you put in) to which have been added interpretations to suit particular places and times. Unfortunately, churches can also be used as means of crowd control and as a means of building up personal power and wealth on earth. But all religions condemn greed.

Religions are dismissed by people who see God as an unpredictable being living above the clouds who needs to be appeased. But if you see god as being the totality of everything, including ourselves, with good deeds helping everyone, but with unrestrained self-interest acting as a cancer on everyone, a different picture emerges.

The current anti-islam hysteria, and other inter-church squabbles, clearly serve the interests of big business. When religious disagreements become shooting wars the only people to gain are the arms manufacturers and dealers. Churches need to join together against the greedy.

Another foundation of the labour party was the co-operative movement. Co-operation also seems to be unfashionable in a world in which even musicians and dancers are expected to compete. We've just got this world, and competition has got out of hand. We need a Labour party that thinks internationally and works for a bottom-up tiered government system, with at the top a world government that is capable of curbing the excesses of big business. We want co-operation, not competition.

It is quite right that Brown is concentrating on the UN rather than local tactical details. If the Labour party is doing its job properly it shouldn't matter who is its parliamentary leader.

Guardian  23 September 2009

EriMac
23 Sep 09, 1:08am

If find myself in agreement with much of what Mary Colwell says at least as it relates to the modern christian churches of the west. What I have difficulty with is the lack of understanding that environmentalism is already a religion in its own right.

Yes, I know that many environmentalists regard themselves as secular and scientific and others are already practicing members of other religions. But consider this:

Environmentalism is about a transcendent attachment to the natural world that goes beyond its utility to humans, appreciation of its beauty and wonderment at its coherent complexity.

It manifests itself in many ways:
1. Asceticism – regarding simple and minimal living as intrinsically morally superior to than a high consumption lifestyle (independent of any consideration as to the damage the consumption may have)
2. Valuing the natural above the manmade environment at a moral level with pristine being the highest state.
3. Regarding each species as valuable in its own right
4. Irrational attachment to things such as each and every tree, so that someone chopping down a tree to, say, improve their view is regarded as a heinous criminal.
5. An attitude of moral superiority to those who do not have these values
6. Missionary zeal

You dont have to rely on the Earth Mother nutters, the Gaia worshippers or the End of Days freaks to establish that environmentalism is a religion. It taps directly into the core of human nature that drives religion: a sense of awe, the need to believe in something greater than oneself, the need for meaning and moral direction in our lives. It is even beginning to meet the ritual needs that religions provide. This is what much of recycling is about.

Environmentalism uses the language of science but is at heart a religion.

Even those environmentalists that practice another religion are in many cases using it to revitalise the old faith. What we are seeing is an attempt by the old religions to import elements that make them more relevant in todays world. Nothing new here either.

Guardian  23 September 2009

Earlier this year, the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills commissioned David MacLeod, a management guru, to carry out a review of ‘employee engagement' as a necessary factor in Britain's future prosperity ... the case for flatter, more interactive relationships was made.

... a common assumption about the status of firms in society suggests that they sit in a political vacuum, allowing their decisions and structures to be only evaluated in terms of economic efficiency.

The problem with the managerial ‘participation' rhetoric is that it only values human autonomy to the extent that it contributes to productivity and business performance.

Hence a growing feeling of irony pervades our workplaces, as described eloquently in the sociology of Richard Sennett, and conveyed brilliantly in the BBC sit-com, The Office.

We no longer mean the words we speak to each other at work. The rhetoric of equality and power appears to exert no friction on the dominant, Anglo-Saxon capitalist model, in which management power is unchallenged, so long as value is constantly returned to external shareholders ...

Co-operative structures, in which labour hires capital rather than vice versa, are one institutional form that republicans such as White and Nien-He Hsieh, have celebrated.

The original meaning of ‘profit-sharing' is also worth returning to: the notion is that, once both capital and labour have received their ‘wage', that any remaining surpluses should be split equally between the two.

Companies that were organised to uphold this principle would still be capitalist and profit-making, but they would not be profit-maximising. This represents a positive departure from the neo-liberal, shareholder value-oriented model of the firm.

Yet these are difficult arguments to mobilise in a policy culture that still seeks to diagnose all social ills using neo-classical economics and its derivations ...

Various forms of mutualism and employee ownership deliver exactly this balance between political and economic goods.

They demonstrate that a private sector organisation can be high-performing, well managed and profitable, while offering employees tangible forms of control over their working lives and environments.

Ownership, as republicans frequently argue, brings with it political freedoms as well as economic rights.

Virtuous circles are possible, in which the higher levels of deliberation and responsibility within companies spills over into higher levels of employee commitment and knowledge-sharing ...

openDemocracy  22 September 2009

Reinventing the Firm

Reinventing the Firm.pdf

Mutuo

Employee Ownership Association

Leading scientist calls on religious leaders to tackle climate change

Religious leaders should play a frontline role in mobilising people to take action against global warming, according to a leading scientist.

Lord May ... highlighted the value of religion in uniting communities to tackle environmental challenges ahead of his presidential address to the British Science Association ...

He will use the address to raise what Charles Darwin considered one of the great unsolved problems of his time: the evolution of co-operation.

While scientists can explain the emergence of co-operative behaviour in small, related groups of animals, understanding co-operation among distant human societies has been more difficult, he said.

May will argue that the puzzle is as pressing today as it was to Darwin 150 years ago, because of the urgent need for global co-operation to tackle the environmental issues of water shortages, greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable energy consumption ...

Guardian 07 September 2009

Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress

Between the time that the Commission began working on this report and the completion of this Report, the economic context has radically changed.

We are now living one of the worst financial, economic and social crises in post-war history.

The reforms in measurement recommended by the Commission would be highly desirable, even if we had not had the crisis.

But some members of the Commission believe that the crisis provides heightened urgency to these reforms.

They believe that one of the reasons why the crisis took many by surprise is that our measurement system failed us and/or market participants and government officials were not focusing on the right set of statistical indicators.

In their view, neither the private nor the public accounting systems were able to deliver an early warning, and did not alert us that the seemingly bright growth performance of the world economy between 2004 and 2007 may have been achieved at the expense of future growth.

It is also clear that some of the performance was a “mirage”, profits that were based on prices that had been inflated by a bubble.

It is perhaps going too far to hope that had we had a better measurement system, one that would have signalled problems ahead, so governments might have taken early measures to avoid or at least to mitigate the present turmoil.

But perhaps had there been more awareness of the limitations of standard metrics, like GDP, there would have been less euphoria over economic performance in the years prior to the crisis; metrics which incorporated assessments of sustainability (e.g. increasing indebtedness) would have provided a more cautious view of economic performance.

But many countries lack a timely and complete set of wealth accounts – the ‘balance sheets’ of the economy – that could give a comprehensive picture of assets, debts and liabilities of the main actors in the economy.

8) We are also facing a looming environmental crisis, especially associated with global warming. Market prices are distorted by the fact that there is no charge imposed on carbon emissions; and no account is made of the cost of these emissions in standard national income accounts.

Clearly, measures of economic performance that reflected these environmental costs might look markedly different from standard measures ...

Extracted from 'Executive Summary'