[A-List] Reversal of Fortune

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. 
So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us?

by Bill Mckibben

MotherJones.com (March / April 2007 Issue)


For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same
branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why the
centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth 
of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum
economic production. Smith's core ideas - that individuals pursuing their own
interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that
increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing
wealth - have indisputably worked. They've produced more More than he could ever
have imagined. They've built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that
distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder
and no accident that Smith's ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook,
even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few
trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of
your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or
Better.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our
continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse,
both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier,
but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against
physical limits so profound - like climate change and peak oil - that trying to
keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And
perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current
dogma, that's as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward.
But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shifted to acknowledge Einstein's
more complicated universe.


1. "We can do it if we believe it": FDR, LBJ, and the invention of growth

It was the great economist John Maynard Keynes who pointed out that until very
recently, "there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average
man living in the civilized centers of the earth". At the utmost, Keynes
calculated, the standard of living roughly doubled between 2000 BC and the dawn
of the 18th century - four millennia during which we basically didn't learn to
do much of anything new. Before history began, we had already figured out fire,
language, cattle, the wheel, the plow, the sail, the pot. We had banks and
governments and mathematics and religion.

And then, something new finally did happen. In 1712, a British inventor named
Thomas Newcomen created the first practical steam engine. Over the centuries
that followed, fossil fuels helped create everything we consider normal and
obvious about the modern world, from electricity to steel to fertilizer; now, 
a 100 percent jump in the standard of living could suddenly be accomplished 
in a few decades, not a few millennia.

In some ways, the invention of the idea of economic growth was almost as
significant as the invention of fossil-fuel power. But it took a little longer
to take hold. During the Depression, even FDR routinely spoke of America's
economy as mature, with no further expansion anticipated. Then came World War II
and the postwar boom - by the time Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House in
1963, he said things like: "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things
we can't do. Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We
can do it all ... We can do it if we believe it." He wasn't alone in thinking
this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, "Growth of industrial and
agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the
capitalist system".

Yet the bad news was already apparent, if you cared to look. Burning rivers and
smoggy cities demonstrated the dark side of industrial expansion. In 1972, a
trio of MIT researchers released a series of computer forecasts they called
"limits to growth", which showed that unbridled expansion would eventually
deplete our resource base. A year later the British economist E F  Schumacher
wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful {1}. (Soon after, when Schumacher came
to the United States on a speaking tour, Jimmy Carter actually received him at
the White House - imagine the current president making time for any economist.)
By 1979, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that only
thirty percent of Americans were "pro-growth", 31 percent were "anti-growth",
and 39 percent were "highly uncertain".

Such ambivalence, Etzioni predicted, "is too stressful for societies to endure",
and Ronald Reagan proved his point. He convinced us it was "Morning in America"
- out with limits, in with Trump. Today, mainstream liberals and conservatives
compete mainly on the question of who can flog the economy harder. Larry Summers,
who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, at one point declared
that the Clinton administration "cannot and will not accept any 'speed limit' on
American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy
as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible." It's the economy, stupid.


2. Oil bingeing, Chinese cars, and the end of the easy fix

Except there are three small things. The first I'll mention mostly in passing:
Even though the economy continues to grow, most of us are no longer getting
wealthier. The average wage in the United States is less now, in real dollars,
than it was thirty years ago. Even for those with college degrees, and although
productivity was growing faster than it had for decades, between 2000 and 2004
earnings fell 5.2 percent when adjusted for inflation, according to the most
recent data from White House economists. Much the same thing has happened across
most of the globe. More than sixty countries around the world, in fact, have
seen incomes per capita fall in the past decade.

For the second point, it's useful to remember what Thomas Newcomen was up to
when he helped launch the Industrial Revolution - burning coal to pump water out
of a coal mine. This revolution both depended on, and revolved around, fossil
fuels. "Before coal", writes the economist Jeffrey Sachs, "economic production
was limited by energy inputs, almost all of which depended on the production of
biomass: food for humans and farm animals, and fuel wood for heating and certain
industrial processes". That is, energy depended on how much you could grow. But
fossil energy depended on how much had grown eons before - all those billions of
tons of ancient biology squashed by the weight of time till they'd turned into
strata and pools and seams of hydrocarbons, waiting for us to discover them.

To understand how valuable, and irreplaceable, that lake of fuel was, consider a
few other forms of creating usable energy. Ethanol can perfectly well replace
gasoline in a tank; like petroleum, it's a way of using biology to create energy,
and right now it's a hot commodity, backed with billions of dollars of
government subsidies. But ethanol relies on plants that grow anew each year,
most often corn; by the time you've driven your tractor to tend the fields, and
your truck to carry the crop to the refinery, and powered your refinery, the
best-case "energy output-to-input ratio" is something like 1.34 to 1. You've
spent 100 Btu of fossil energy to get 134 Btu. Perhaps that's worth doing, but
as Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa points out, "it's not
impressive" compared to the ratio for oil, which ranges from 30 to 1 to 200 to 1,
depending on where you drill it. To go from our fossil-fuel world to a biomass
world would be a little like leaving the Garden of Eden for the land where bread
must be earned by "the sweat of your brow".

And east of Eden is precisely where we may be headed. As everyone knows, the
past three years have seen a spate of reports and books and documentaries
suggesting that humanity may have neared or passed its oil peak - that is, the
point at which those pools of primeval plankton are half used up, where each new
year brings us closer to the bottom of the barrel. The major oil companies
report that they can't find enough new wells most years to offset the depletion
in the old ones; rumors circulate that the giant Saudi fields are dwindling
faster than expected; and, of course, all this is reflected in the cost of oil.

The doctrinaire economist's answer is that no particular commodity matters all
that much, because if we run short of something, it will pay for someone to
develop a substitute. In general this has proved true in the past: Run short of
nice big sawlogs and someone invents plywood. But it's far from clear that the
same precept applies to coal, oil, and natural gas. This time, there is no easy
substitute: I like the solar panels on my roof, but they're collecting diffuse
daily energy, not using up eons of accumulated power. Fossil fuel was an
exception to the rule, a one-time gift that underwrote a one-time binge of
growth.

This brings us to the third point: If we do try to keep going, with the entire
world aiming for an economy structured like America's, it won't be just oil that
we'll run short of. Here are the numbers we have to contend with: Given current
rates of growth in the Chinese economy, the 1.3 billion residents of that nation
alone will, by 2031, be about as rich as we are. If they then eat meat, milk,
and eggs at the rate that we do, calculates ecostatistician Lester Brown, they
will consume 1,352 million tons of grain each year - equal to two-thirds of the
world's entire 2004 grain harvest. They will use 99 million barrels of oil a day,
15 million more than the entire world consumes at present. They will use more
steel than all the West combined, double the world's production of paper, and
drive 1.1 billion cars - 1.5 times as many as the current world total. And
that's just China; by then, India will have a bigger population, and its economy
is growing almost as fast. And then there's the rest of the world.

Trying to meet that kind of demand will stress the earth past its breaking point
in an almost endless number of ways, but let's take just one. When Thomas
Newcomen fired up his pump on that morning in 1712, the atmosphere contained 275
parts per million of carbon dioxide. We're now up to 380 parts per million, a
level higher than the earth has seen for many millions of years, and climate
change has only just begun. The median predictions of the world's climatologists
- by no means the worst-case scenario - show that unless we take truly enormous
steps to rein in our use of fossil fuels, we can expect average temperatures to
rise another four or five degrees before the century is out, making the globe
warmer than it's been since long before primates appeared. We might as well stop
calling it earth and have a contest to pick some new name, because it will be a
different planet. Humans have never done anything more profound, not even when
we invented nuclear weapons.

How does this tie in with economic growth? Clearly, getting rich means getting
dirty - that's why, when I was in Beijing recently, I could stare straight at
the sun (once I actually figured out where in the smoggy sky it was). But
eventually, getting rich also means wanting the "luxury" of clean air and
finding the technological means to achieve it. Which is why you can once again
see the mountains around Los Angeles; why more of our rivers are swimmable every
year. And economists have figured out clever ways to speed this renewal:
Creating markets for trading pollution credits, for instance, helped cut those
sulfur and nitrogen clouds more rapidly and cheaply than almost anyone had
imagined.

But getting richer doesn't lead to producing less carbon dioxide in the same 
way that it does to less smog - in fact, so far it's mostly the reverse.
Environmental destruction of the old-fashioned kind - dirty air, dirty water -
results from something going wrong. You haven't bothered to stick the necessary
filter on your pipes, and so the crud washes into the stream; a little
regulation, and a little money, and the problem disappears. But the second,
deeper form of environmental degradation comes from things operating exactly as
they're supposed to, just too much so. Carbon dioxide is an inevitable byproduct
of burning coal or gas or oil - not something going wrong. Researchers are
struggling to figure out costly and complicated methods to trap some carbon
dioxide and inject it into underground mines - but for all practical purposes,
the vast majority of the world's cars and factories and furnaces will keep
belching more and more of it into the atmosphere as long as we burn more and
more fossil fuels.

True, as companies and countries get richer, they can afford more efficient
machinery that makes better use of fossil fuel, like the hybrid Honda Civic I
drive. But if your appliances have gotten more efficient, there are also far
more of them: The furnace is better than it used to be, but the average size of
the house it heats has doubled since 1950. The sixty-inch TV? The always-on
cable modem? No need for you to do the math - the electric company does it for
you, every month. Between 1990 and 2003, precisely the years in which we learned
about the peril presented by global warming, the United States' annual carbon
dioxide emissions increased by sixteen percent. And the momentum to keep going
in that direction is enormous. For most of us, growth has become synonymous with
the economy's "health", which in turn seems far more palpable than the health of
the planet. Think of the terms we use - the economy, whose temperature we take
at every newscast via the Dow Jones average, is "ailing" or it's "on the mend".
It's "slumping" or it's "in recovery". We cosset and succor its every sniffle
with enormous devotion, even as we more or less ignore the increasingly urgent
fever that the globe is now running. The ecological economists have an enormous
task ahead of them - a nearly insurmountable task, if it were "merely" the
environment that is in peril. But here is where things get really interesting.
It turns out that the economics of environmental destruction are closely linked
to another set of leading indicators - ones that most humans happen to care a
great deal about.


3. "It seems that well-being is a real phenomenon": Economists discover Hedonics

Traditionally, happiness and satisfaction are the sort of notions that
economists wave aside as poetic irrelevance, the kind of questions that occupy
people with no head for numbers who had to major in liberal arts. An orthodox
economist has a simple happiness formula: If you buy a Ford Expedition, then
ipso facto a Ford Expedition is what makes you happy. That's all we need to know.
The economist would call this idea "utility maximization", and in the words of
the economic historian Gordon Bigelow, "the theory holds that every time a
person buys something, sells something, quits a job, or invests, he is making a
rational decision about what will ... provide him 'maximum utility'. If you
bought a Ginsu knife at 3 am a neoclassical economist will tell you that, at
that time, you calculated that this purchase would optimize your resources". The
beauty of this principle lies in its simplicity. It is perhaps the central
assumption of the world we live in: You can tell who I really am by what I buy.

Yet economists have long known that people's brains don't work quite the way the
model suggests. When Bob Costanza, one of the fathers of ecological economics
and now head of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, was first
edging into economics in the early 1980s, he had a fellowship to study "social
traps" - the nuclear arms race, say - in which "short-term behavior can get out
of kilter with longer broad-term goals".

It didn't take long for Costanza to demonstrate, as others had before him, that,
if you set up an auction in a certain way, people will end up bidding $1.50 to
take home a dollar. Other economists have shown that people give too much weight
to "sunk costs" - that they're too willing to throw good money after bad, or
that they value items more highly if they already own them than if they are
considering acquiring them. Building on such insights, a school of "behavioral
economics" has emerged in recent years and begun plumbing how we really behave.

The wonder is that it took so long. We all know in our own lives how
irrationally we are capable of acting, and how unconnected those actions are to
any real sense of joy. (I mean, there you are at 3 am thinking about the Ginsu
knife.) But until fairly recently, we had no alternatives to relying on Ginsu
knife and Ford Expedition purchases as the sole measures of our satisfaction.
How else would we know what made people happy?

That's where things are now changing dramatically: Researchers from a wide
variety of disciplines have started to figure out how to assess satisfaction,
and economists have begun to explore the implications. In 2002 Princeton's
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics even though he is trained as a
psychologist. In the book Well-Being {2}, he and a pair of coauthors announce a
new field called "hedonics", defined as "the study of what makes experiences and
life pleasant or unpleasant ... It is also concerned with the whole range of
circumstances, from the biological to the societal, that occasion suffering and
enjoyment". If you are worried that there might be something altogether too airy
about this, be reassured - Kahneman thinks like an economist. In the book's very
first chapter, "Objective Happiness", he describes an experiment that compares
"records of the pain reported by two patients undergoing colonoscopy", wherein
every sixty seconds he insists they rate their pain on a scale of one to ten and
eventually forces them to make "a hypothetical choice between a repeat
colonoscopy and a barium enema". Dismal science indeed.

As more scientists have turned their attention to the field, researchers 
have studied everything from "biases in recall of menstrual symptoms" to
"fearlessness and courage in novice paratroopers". Subjects have had to choose
between getting an "attractive candy bar" and learning the answers to geography
questions; they've been made to wear devices that measured their blood pressure
at regular intervals; their brains have been scanned. And by now that's been
enough to convince most observers that saying "I'm happy" is more than just a
subjective statement. In the words of the economist Richard Layard, "We now know
that what people say about how they feel corresponds closely to the actual
levels of activity in different parts of the brain, which can be measured in
standard scientific ways". Indeed, people who call themselves happy, or who have
relatively high levels of electrical activity in the left prefrontal region of
the brain, are also "more likely to be rated as happy by friends", "more likely
to respond to requests for help", "less likely to be involved in disputes at
work", and even "less likely to die prematurely". In other words, conceded one
economist, "it seems that what the psychologists call subjective well-being is a
real phenomenon. The various empirical measures of it have high consistency,
reliability, and validity".

The idea that there is a state called happiness, and that we can dependably
figure out what it feels like and how to measure it, is extremely subversive. It
allows economists to start thinking about life in richer (indeed) terms, to stop
asking "What did you buy?" and to start asking "Is your life good?" And if you
can ask someone "Is your life good?" and count on the answer to mean something,
then you'll be able to move to the real heart of the matter, the question
haunting our moment on the earth: Is more better?


4. If we're so rich, how come we're so damn miserable?

In some sense, you could say that the years since World War II in America have
been a loosely controlled experiment designed to answer this very question. The
environmentalist Alan Durning found that in 1991 the average American family
owned twice as many cars as it did in 1950, drove 2.5 times as far, used 21
times as much plastic, and traveled 25 times farther by air. Gross national
product per capita tripled during that period. Our houses are bigger than ever
and stuffed to the rafters with belongings (which is why the storage-locker
industry has doubled in size in the past decade). We have all sorts of other 
new delights and powers - we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels,
consume food from every corner of the world. Some people have taken much more
than their share, but on average, all of us in the West are living lives
materially more abundant than most people a generation ago.

What's odd is, none of it appears to have made us happier. Throughout the
postwar years, even as the gnp curve has steadily climbed, the "life
satisfaction" index has stayed exactly the same. Since 1972, the National
Opinion Research Center has surveyed Americans on the question: "Taking all
things together, how would you say things are these days - would you say that
you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" (This must be a somewhat
unsettling interview.) The "very happy" number peaked at 38 percent in the 1974
poll, amid oil shock and economic malaise; it now hovers right around 33 percent.

And it's not that we're simply recalibrating our sense of what happiness means -
we are actively experiencing life as grimmer. In the winter of 2006 the National
Opinion Research Center published data about "negative life events" comparing
1991 and 2004, two data points bracketing an economic boom. "The anticipation
would have been that problems would have been down", the study's author said.
Instead it showed a rise in problems - for instance, the percentage who reported
breaking up with a steady partner almost doubled. As one reporter summarized the
findings, "There's more misery in people's lives today".

This decline in the happiness index is not confined to the United States; as
other nations have followed us into mass affluence, their experiences have begun
to yield similar results. In the United Kingdom, real gross domestic product per
capita grew two-thirds between 1973 and 2001, but people's satisfaction with
their lives changed not one whit. Japan saw a fourfold increase in real income
per capita between 1958 and 1986 without any reported increase in satisfaction.
In one place after another, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and depression have
gone up dramatically, even as we keep accumulating more stuff. Indeed, one
report in 2000 found that the average American child reported higher levels of
anxiety than the average child under psychiatric care in the 1950s - our new
normal is the old disturbed.

If happiness was our goal, then the unbelievable amount of effort and resources
expended in its pursuit since 1950 has been largely a waste. One study of life
satisfaction and mental health by Emory University professor Corey Keyes found
just seventeen percent of Americans "flourishing", in mental health terms, and
26 percent either "languishing" or out-and-out depressed.


5. Danes (and Mexicans, the Amish, and the Masai) just want to have fun

How is it, then, that we became so totally, and apparently wrongly, fixated on
the idea that our main goal, as individuals and as nations, should be the
accumulation of more wealth? The answer is interesting for what it says about
human nature. Up to a certain point, more really does equal better. Imagine
briefly your life as a poor person in a poor society - say, a peasant farmer in
China. (China has one-fourth of the world's farmers, but one-fourteenth of its
arable land; the average farm in the southern part of the country is about half
an acre, or barely more than the standard lot for a new American home.) You
likely have the benefits of a close and connected family, and a village
environment where your place is clear. But you lack any modicum of security for
when you get sick or old or your back simply gives out. Your diet is unvaried
and nutritionally lacking; you're almost always cold in winter.

In a world like that, a boost in income delivers tangible benefits. In general,
researchers report that money consistently buys happiness right up to about
$10,000 income per capita. That's a useful number to keep in the back of your
head - it's like the freezing point of water, one of those random figures that
just happens to define a crucial phenomenon on our planet. "As poor countries
like India, Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, and South Korea have experienced
economic growth, there is some evidence that their average happiness has risen",
the economist Layard reports. Past $10,000 (per capita, mind you - that is, the
average for each man, woman, and child), there's a complete scattering: When the
Irish were making two-thirds as much as Americans they were reporting higher
levels of satisfaction, as were the Swedes, the Danes, the Dutch. Mexicans score
higher than the Japanese; the French are about as satisfied with their lives as
the Venezuelans. In fact, once basic needs are met, the "satisfaction" data
scrambles in mindlnding ways. A sampling of Forbes magazine's "richest Americans"
have identical happiness scores with Pennsylvania Amish, and are only a whisker
above Swedes taken as a whole, not to mention the Masai. The "life satisfaction"
of pavement dwellers - homeless people - in Calcutta is among the lowest
recorded, but it almost doubles when they move into a slum, at which point they
are basically as satisfied with their lives as a sample of college students
drawn from 47 nations. And so on.

On the list of major mistakes we've made as a species, this one seems pretty
high up. Our single-minded focus on increasing wealth has succeeded in driving
the planet's ecological systems to the brink of failure, even as it's failed to
make us happier. How did we screw up?

The answer is pretty obvious - we kept doing something past the point that it
worked. Since happiness had increased with income in the past, we assumed it
would inevitably do so in the future. We make these kinds of mistakes regularly:
Two beers made me feel good, so ten will make me feel five times better. But
this case was particularly extreme - in part because as a species, we've spent
so much time simply trying to survive. As the researchers Ed Diener and Martin
Seligman - both psychologists - observe, "At the time of Adam Smith, a concern
with economic issues was understandably primary. Meeting simple human needs for
food, shelter and clothing was not assured, and satisfying these needs moved in
lockstep with better economics." Freeing people to build a more dynamic economy
was radical and altruistic.

Consider Americans in 1820, two generations after Adam Smith. The average
citizen earned, in current dollars, less than $1,500 a year, which is somewhere
near the current average for all of Africa. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey
explains in a 2004 article in the magazine Christian Century, "Your
great-great-great-grandmother had one dress for church and one for the week, if
she were not in rags. Her children did not attend school, and probably could not
read. She and her husband worked eighty hours a week for a diet of bread and
milk - they were four inches shorter than you." Even in 1900, the average
American lived in a house the size of today's typical garage. Is it any wonder
that we built up considerable velocity trying to escape the gravitational pull
of that kind of poverty? An object in motion stays in motion, and our economy -
with the built-up individual expectations that drive it - is a mighty object
indeed.

You could call it, I think, the Laurdlgalls Wilder effect. I grew up reading her
books - Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods - and my
daughter grew up listening to me read them to her, and no doubt she will read
them to her children. They are the ur-American story. And what do they tell? Of
a life rich in family, rich in connection to the natural world, rich in
adventure - but materially deprived. That one dress, that same bland dinner. At
Christmastime, a penny - a penny! And a stick of candy, and the awful
deliberation about whether to stretch it out with tiny licks or devour it in an
orgy of happy greed. A rag doll was the zenith of aspiration. My daughter likes
dolls too, but her bedroom boasts a density of Beanie Babies that mimics the
manic biodiversity of the deep rainforest. Another one? Really, so what? Its
marginal utility, as an economist might say, is low. And so it is with all of us.
We just haven't figured that out because the momentum of the past is still with
us - we still imagine we're in that little house on the big prairie.


6. This year's model home: "Good for the dysfunctional family"

That great momentum has carried us away from something valuable, something
priceless: It has allowed us to become (very nearly forced us to become) more
thoroughly individualistic than we really wanted to be. We left behind hundreds
of thousands of years of human community for the excitement, and the isolation,
of "making something of ourselves", an idea that would not have made sense for
99.9 percent of human history. Adam Smith's insight was that the interests of
each of our individual selves could add up, almost in spite of themselves, to
social good - to longer lives, fuller tables, warmer houses. Suddenly the
community was no longer necessary to provide these things; they would happen as
if by magic. And they did happen. And in many ways it was good.

But this process of liberation seems to have come close to running its course.
Study after study shows Americans spending less time with friends and family,
either working longer hours, or hunched over their computers at night. And each
year, as our population grows by one percent we manage to spread ourselves out
over six to eight percent more land. Simple mathematics says that we're less and
less likely to bump into the other inhabitants of our neighborhood, or indeed of
our own homes. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, "Major builders and
top architects are walling people off. They're touting one-person 'Internet
alcoves', locked-door 'away rooms', and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of
the house. The new floor plans offer so much seclusion, they're 'good for the
dysfunctional family', says Gopal Ahluwahlia, director of research for the
National Association of Home Builders". At the building industry's annual Las
Vegas trade show, the "showcase 'Ultimate Family Home' hardly had a family room",
noted the Journal. Instead, the boy's personal playroom had its own 42-inch
plasma TV, and the girl's bedroom had a secret mirrored door leading to a
"hideaway karaoke room". "We call this the ultimate home for families who don't
want anything to do with one another", said Mike McGee, chief executive of
Pardee Homes of Los Angeles, builder of the model.

This transition from individualism to hyper-individualism also made its presence
felt in politics. In the 1980s, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher asked,
"Who is society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women, and
there are families." Talk about everything solid melting into air - Thatcher's
maxim would have spooked Adam Smith himself. The "public realm" - things like
parks and schools and Social Security, the last reminders of the communities
from which we came - is under steady and increasing attack. Instead of
contributing to the shared risk of health insurance, Americans are encouraged to
go it alone with "health savings accounts". Hell, even the nation's most
collectivist institution, the US military, until recently recruited under the
slogan an "Army of One". No wonder the show that changed television more than
any other in the past decade was Survivor, where the goal is to end up alone on
the island, to manipulate and scheme until everyone is banished and leaves you
by yourself with your money.

It's not so hard, then, to figure out why happiness has declined here even as
wealth has grown. During the same decades when our lives grew busier and more
isolated, we've gone from having three confidants on average to only two, and
the number of people saying they have no one to discuss important matters with
has nearly tripled. Between 1974 and 1994, the percentage of Americans who said
they visited with their neighbors at least once a month fell from almost
two-thirds to less than half, a number that has continued to fall in the past
decade. We simply worked too many hours earning, we commuted too far to our
too-isolated homes, and there was always the blue glow of the tube shining
through the curtains.


7. New friend or new coffeemaker? Pick one

Because traditional economists think of human beings primarily as individuals
and not as members of a community, they miss out on a major part of the
satisfaction index. Economists lay it out almost as a mathematical equation:
Overall, "evidence shows that companionship ... contributes more to well-being
than does income", writes Robert E Lane, a Yale political science professor who
is the author of The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies {3}. But there is a
notable difference between poor and wealthy countries: When people have lots of
companionship but not much money, income "makes more of a contribution to
subjective well-being". By contrast, "where money is relatively plentiful and
companionship relatively scarce, companionship will add more to subjective
well-being". If you are a poor person in China, you have plenty of friends and
family around all the time - perhaps there are four other people living in your
room. Adding a sixth doesn't make you happier. But adding enough money so that
all five of you can eat some meat from time to time pleases you greatly. By
contrast, if you live in a suburban American home, buying another coffeemaker
adds very little to your quantity of happiness - trying to figure out where to
store it, or wondering if you picked the perfect model, may in fact decrease
your total pleasure. But a new friend, a new connection, is a big deal. We have
a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second
becomes more valuable.

Indeed, we seem to be genetically wired for community. As biologist Edward O
Wilson found, most primates live in groups and get sad when they're separated -
"an isolated individual will repeatedly pull a lever with no reward other than
the glimpse of another monkey". Why do people so often look back on their
college days as the best years of their lives? Because their classes were so
fascinating? Or because in college, we live more closely and intensely with a
community than most of us ever do before or after? Every measure of
psychological health points to the same conclusion: People who "are married, who
have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those
who do not", says Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz. "People who
participate in religious communities are happier than those who are not". Which
is striking, Schwartz adds, because social ties "actually decrease freedom of
choice" - being a good friend involves sacrifice.

Do we just think we're happier in communities? Is it merely some sentimental
'good night John Boy' affectation? No - our bodies react in measurable ways.
According to research cited by Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his classic
book Bowling Alone {4}, if you do not belong to any group at present, joining a
club or a society of some kind cuts in half the risk that you will die in the
next year. Check this out: When researchers at Carnegie Mellon (somewhat
disgustingly) dropped samples of cold virus directly into subjects' nostrils,
those with rich social networks were four times less likely to get sick. An
economy that produces only individualism undermines us in the most basic ways.

Here's another statistic worth keeping in mind: Consumers have ten times as many
conversations at farmers' markets as they do at supermarkets - an order of
magnitude difference. By itself, that's hardly life-changing, but it points at
something that could be: living in an economy where you are participant as well
as consumer, where you have a sense of who's in your universe and how it fits
together. At the same time, some studies show local agriculture using less
energy (also by an order of magnitude) than the "it's always summer somewhere"
system we operate on now. Those are big numbers, and it's worth thinking about
what they suggest - especially since, between peak oil and climate change,
there's no longer really a question that we'll have to wean ourselves of the
current model.

So as a mental experiment, imagine how we might shift to a more sustainable 
kind of economy. You could use government policy to nudge the change - remove
subsidies from agribusiness and use them instead to promote
farmer-entrepreneurs; underwrite the cost of windmills with even a fraction of
the money that's now going to protect oil flows. You could put tariffs on goods
that travel long distances, shift highway spending to projects that make it
easier to live near where you work (and, by cutting down on commutes, leave some
time to see the kids). And, of course, you can exploit the Net to connect a lot
of this highly localized stuff into something larger. By way of example, a few
of us are coordinating the first nationwide global warming demonstration - but
instead of marching on Washington, we're rallying in our local areas, and then
fusing our efforts, via the website stepitup07.org, into a national message.

It's easy to dismiss such ideas as sentimental or nostalgic. In fact, economies
can be localized as easily in cities and suburbs as rural villages (maybe more
easily), and in ways that look as much to the future as the past, that rely more
on the solar panel and the Internet than the white picket fence. In fact, given
the trendlines for phenomena such as global warming and oil supply, what's
nostalgic and sentimental is to keep doing what we're doing simply because it's
familiar.


8. The oil-for-people paradox: Why small farms produce more food

To understand the importance of this last point, consider the book American
Mania {5} by the neuroscientist Peter Whybrow. Whybrow argues that many of us in
this country are predisposed to a kind of dynamic individualism - our gene pool
includes an inordinate number of people who risked everything to start over.
This served us well in settling a continent and building our prosperity. But it
never got completely out of control, says Whybrow, because "the marketplace has
always had its natural constraints. For the first two centuries of the nation's
existence, even the most insatiable American citizen was significantly leashed
by the checks and balances inherent in a closely knit community, by geography,
by the elements of weather, or, in some cases, by religious practice." You lived
in a society - a habitat - that kept your impulses in some kind of check. But
that changed in the past few decades as the economy nationalized and then
globalized. As we met fewer actual neighbors in the course of a day, those
checks and balances fell away. "Operating in a world of instant communication
with minimal social tethers", Whybrow observes, "America's engines of commerce
and desire became turbocharged".

Adam Smith himself had worried that too much envy and avarice would destroy 
"the empathic feeling and neighborly concerns that are essential to his 
economic model", says Whybrow, but he "took comfort in the fellowship and 
social constraint that he considered inherent in the tightly knit communities
characteristic of the 18th century". Businesses were built on local capital
investment, and "to be solicitous of one's neighbor was prudent insurance
against future personal need". For the most part, people felt a little
constrained about showing off wealth; indeed, until fairly recently in American
history, someone who was making tons of money was often viewed with mixed
emotions, at least if he wasn't giving back to the community. "For the rich",
Whybrow notes, "the reward system would be balanced between the pleasure of
self-gain and the civic pride of serving others. By these mechanisms the most
powerful citizens would be limited in their greed."

Once economies grow past a certain point, however, "the behavioral contingencies
essential to promoting social stability in a market-regulated society - close
personal relationships, tightly knit communities, local capital investment, and
so on - are quickly eroded". So re-localizing economies offers one possible way
around the gross inequalities that have come to mark our societies. Instead of
aiming for growth at all costs and hoping it will trickle down, we may be better
off living in enough contact with each other for the affluent to once again feel
some sense of responsibility for their neighbors. This doesn't mean relying on
noblesse oblige; it means taking seriously the idea that people, and their
politics, can be changed by their experiences. It's a hopeful sign that more and
more local and state governments across the country have enacted "living wage"
laws. It's harder to pretend that the people you see around you every day should
live and die by the dictates of the market.

Right around this time, an obvious question is doubtless occurring to you. Is it
foolish to propose that a modern global economy of six (soon to be nine) billion
people should rely on more localized economies? To put it more bluntly, since
for most people "the economy" is just a fancy way of saying "What's for dinner?"
and "Am I having any?", doesn't our survival depend on economies that function
on a massive scale - such as highly industrialized agriculture? Turns out the
answer is no - and the reasons why offer a template for rethinking the rest of
the economy as well.

We assume, because it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense, that
industrialized farming is the most productive farming. A vast Midwestern field
filled with high-tech equipment ought to produce more food than someone with a
hoe in a small garden. Yet the opposite is true. If you are after getting the
greatest yield from the land, then smaller farms in fact produce more food.

If you are one guy on a tractor responsible for thousands of acres, you grow
your corn and that's all you can do - make pass after pass with the gargantuan
machine across a sea of crop. But if you're working ten acres, then you have
time to really know the land, and to make it work harder. You can intercrop all
kinds of plants - their roots will go to different depths, or they'll thrive in
each other's shade, or they'll make use of different nutrients in the soil. You
can also walk your fields, over and over, noticing. According to the
government's most recent agricultural census, smaller farms produce far more
food per acre, whether you measure in tons, calories, or dollars. In the process,
they use land, water, and oil much more efficiently; if they have animals, the
manure is a gift, not a threat to public health. To feed the world, we may
actually need lots more small farms.

But if this is true, then why do we have large farms? Why the relentless
consolidation? There are many reasons, including the way farm subsidies have
been structured, the easier access to bank loans (and politicians) for the big
guys, and the convenience for food-processing companies of dealing with a few
big suppliers. But the basic reason is this: We substituted oil for people.
Tractors and synthetic fertilizer instead of farmers and animals. Could we take
away the fossil fuel, put people back on the land in larger numbers, and have
enough to eat?

The best data to answer that question comes from an English agronomist named
Jules Pretty, who has studied nearly 300 sustainable agriculture projects in 57
countries around the world. They might not pass the US standards for organic
certification, but they're all what he calls "low-input". Pretty found that over
the past decade, almost twelve million farmers had begun using sustainable
practices on about ninety million acres. Even more remarkably, sustainable
agriculture increased food production by 79 percent per acre. These were not
tiny isolated demonstration farms - Pretty studied fourteen projects where
146,000 farmers across a broad swath of the developing world were raising
potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cassava, and he found that practices such as
cover-cropping and fighting pests with natural adversaries had increased
production 150 percent - seventeen tons per household. With 4.5 million small
Asian grain farmers, average yields rose 73 percent. When Indonesian rice
farmers got rid of pesticides, their yields stayed the same but their costs fell
sharply.

"I acknowledge", says Pretty, "that all this may sound too good to be true for
those who would disbelieve these advances. Many still believe that food
production and nature must be separated, that 'agroecological' approaches offer
only marginal opportunities to increase food production, and that industrialized
approaches represent the best, and perhaps only, way forward. However,
prevailing views have changed substantially in just the last decade."

And they will change just as profoundly in the decades to come across a wide
range of other commodities. Already I've seen dozens of people and communities
working on regional-scale sustainable timber projects, on building energy
networks that work like the Internet by connecting solar rooftops and backyard
windmills in robust mini-grids. That such things can begin to emerge even in the
face of the political power of our reigning economic model is remarkable; as we
confront significant change in the climate, they could speed along the same kind
of learning curve as Pretty's rice farmers and wheat growers. And they would not
only use less energy; they'd create more community. They'd start to reverse the
very trends I've been describing, and in so doing rebuild the kind of scale at
which Adam Smith's economics would help instead of hurt.

In the 20th century, two completely different models of how to run an economy
battled for supremacy. Ours won, and not only because it produced more goods
than socialized state economies. It also produced far more freedom, far less
horror. But now that victory is starting to look Pyrrhic; in our overheated and
underhappy state, we need some new ideas.

We've gone too far down the road we're traveling. The time has come to search
the map, to strike off in new directions. Inertia is a powerful force; marriages
and corporations and nations continue in motion until something big diverts them.
But in our new world we have much to fear, and also much to desire, and together
they can set us on a new, more promising course.


Notes:

{1} http://www.powells.com/biblio/72-0060916303-0

{2} http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780871544230-1

{3} http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780300091069-2

{4} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780743203043-0

{5} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780393059946-4

_____

Want to see how the "satisfaction index" has changed over your lifetime? Find
some of the data mentioned in this article - and a few other numbers that will
surprise you - at
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/happiness_extra.html
_____

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the
Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

(c) 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

http://ga3.org/ct/g1zGfo712XRg/

http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp