The stupid Economy

“THE economy, stupid” were words that played a big part in getting Bill Clinton elected president of the richest, most powerful country in the world.

And talk about “The Economy” is the Western politician’s Teflon coating whenever awkward questions about social and environmental issues need rebuttal. There’s a “bottom line”, so the story goes, and no possible good can ensue if the “bottom line” is transgressed… pay homage to "The Economy" and you'll be fine.

It’s like Imperial Rome: once you’d sacrificed to Caesar, you could worship any other god that took your fancy. It’s a clever ruse: freedom on the end of a chain. Celtic druids and early Christians were not the only ones who paid with their lives for not playing along. “The Economy” — as a controlling belief system, not to be messed with — is comparable.

In September 2010, The Guardian newspaper in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, carried a Canadian Press story about native opposition to plans for a copper and gold processing operation (called the ‘Prosperity’ mine) to use a remote lake in British Columbia as a dump for its toxic tailings.

The story quoted the local Tsilhqot’in chief: “Our people are willing and ready to defend our lands. As one of my elders said when we were going through panel hearings, she will be there on the road in her wheelchair. She will have her shotguns and she will not miss.” The story noted that a federal review panel had found the project would impose “significant adverse environmental effects on fish, fish habitat, grizzly bears and First Nations’ use of the land for traditional purposes” — whatever that means.

The B.C. (British Columbia) government, on the other hand, “argues that (the project) should go ahead, partly because the economic benefits during the 20-year life of the mine would outweigh the environmental harm.” The story referred to a projected $5-billion “economic injection” and $600 million in expected tax revenues “in an area that has struggled to deal with the mountain pine beetle, the collapse of the forestry industry and low commodity process.”

To a modern ear, that sounds pretty clear — time to rally the legions for the cause of progress and economic common sense — and the Tsilhqot’in elder sounded simply daft: these people hadn’t got rich, they hadn’t produced a millionaire or politician of note… not even a pop star. But they did have their lake and all of their sustaining interactions with it, from birth to death, generation after generation. And “where,” you might ask, “is the profit in that?”

Well, we have a system that puts ALL of us on skids. That crazy Tsilhqot’in elder isn’t alone here.

It works simply, starting with an investment.

The investment commits money to a particular purpose on the basis of the chances that it’ll generate more money, fair enough. And who, given a choice between “more” money and “less” money would choose less?

The “more” money is good because it can fund more investment, and this is what drives “progress” …which, in turn, is “good” because the whole train of activity that’s set in motion spills over as income for people who can thereby fulfil career goals and material aspirations and get to mow suburban lawns, helping as they do so to generate new “needs” and opportunities.

The reason for the investment in the first place is the allure of its profit potential. Its profitability is determined by circumstances established very largely by previous investments. So: costly and complicated deep sea drilling for oil is profitable because of the massive global “need” for petroleum that was created by networks of previous investments — in things like internal combustion engines, tar-sealed road networks and airports that all owed their profitability in part or in whole to what was once the cheapness and abundance of oil and the unanticipated complication of emissions. The internal combustion engine changed our sense of place, of journey and time, our town planning, our communities, our relationships, the way we live and the way we see ourselves, the world.

Opportunities create needs … and they generate new opportunities and new generations of need: each multiplies the other. It is a pervasive, deep-reaching dynamic that produces proliferating points of change and adjustment and, in fact, takes hold of the direction of social and political change. It may be best to put to one side the knowledge that a person who chronically behaves this way is diagnosed as “obsessive compulsive”.

It’s not too long ago that no-one “needed” mobile phones, HDTVs or laptop computers; and there was a time before that when no-one “needed” telephones, televisions or typewriters. And, looking back, it’s hard to accept that people were no less happy then than now. It’s true that there was terrible poverty in the world’s richest nations “back then” but there’s still terrible poverty in the world’s richest nations and then, as now, it is more the result of inequities more than shortages.

When it comes to “shortages”, shortages have so far been accommodated as opportunities-generating “needs”; only now are a few shortages becoming absolute, in the sense that there’s nowhere to go for any more. So new opportunities lie in finding substitutes or ways to circumvent the particular need.

This avalanche of change called “progress” barges ahead with lusty pragmatism because the dawn of each new “opportunity” adds to the momentum of direct and spin-off investment. A financial “crisis” merely vents a little frenzy; it does not shift the direction in which we’re headed. And the frenzy is for money. Truth, beauty, meaning and wisdom don’t rate an entry on the balance sheets. Nor do long-term benefits to society as a whole, or the survivability of the planet. Money is promoted and seen as the express route to all of these other things.

As the momentum of the needs-opportunities cycle grows and accelerates, it all becomes more self-fulfilling and less considerate of external realities that offer little or no short-term profit. And the trajectory of this investment is steered ever more vigorously by those historically-laid paths of perceived opportunity rather than being led by considerations of a “better” future, or of natural life-cycles and planetary health. That some of us get more of whatever’s going is more necessary to profit-generation than our enjoyment of whatever it is that we get more of… or, indeed, our enjoyment of life.

It’s a stampede that’s dismissive of human values and ideals and is set to bring down a hail of disappointments. Forget heaven and the “eye of a needle”: it’s hard to get happy on EITHER side of the economic wall.

But there’s hope: a huge, 25-year study about getting happy, led by Bruce Headley, an Australian researcher at the University of Melbourne, and involving annual interviews with thousands of people in Germany, Britain and Australia, has found some interesting consistencies in the sorts of choices that lead to happiness. The first section, on the German data, was published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The most predictably trodden paths to misery were careerism and the pursuit of material “success”, living with a neurotic partner and — this seems so unfair, but it is a lesser factor — being an overweight woman or an under-weight man.

The most reliable paths to happiness, on the other hand, were led by the pursuit of altruistic and family values, and some kind of religious commitment.

Other studies too have shown that income is not a terribly effective predictor of happiness, and that it tops out fairly quickly.

So… maybe “The Economy” is not as absolutely all-important as we’re told.

Maybe we have better things to get on with. Maybe we should risk shaping our lives and our society around sounder value systems and better, happier ways to live.

Maybe the Caesars were mere mortals after all…

And, just maybe, those Tsilhqot’in know a thing or two.