Affluenza

I met with the authors of the Australian book ‘Affluenza’ recently.

What’s the book about?

The argument is a familiar one. The Western world is in the midst of a consumption boom – we’ve never had it so good with seemingly unlimited availability of new goods and services to meet our wants and desires. We measure and define our progress on GNP indicators of economic growth. Yet, there’s little evidence we’ve become happier for it (see chart below). Indeed rates of depression and stress continue to rise. And meanwhile we run down the world’s resources at an alarming and unsustainable pace.

It’s trendy to think this is something new that humankind has hit on. It’s not – it goes back at least as far as the Epicurean school in 4th century BC ancient Greece. Of course, the lines of argument have evolved and changed since but the fundamental question about the relationship between material wealth and human happiness remains.

Is anything different now?

Yes, at least to some extent. First, prosperity has been growing at historically unprecedented rates since the industrial period and particularly since the Second World War. Essentially the first 6,000 years of human history were punctuated by marginal gains in wealth followed by major slumps and setbacks. So the last fifty years gives us a good opportunity to assess things.

Second, the science about what makes us happy and the evidence linking wealth and happiness has got much better. For example, lots of interesting findings are coming out of the field of neuroscience alone. Third, the sustainability trends have started to get really quite irreversible, particularly of course on climate change.

Time for a grand alternative?

This is where books and theories like ‘Affluenza’ rapidly deteriorate, as they amateurly try to create a grand-alternative narrative. It’s too easy to fall into the unthinking tradition of left-liberals from Hampstead. The consumer-orientated, economic-centric model of society won because its arguments are simple, powerful and complete. So it’s not a midnight session ‘solving the world’ over a bottle of Bordeaux, or a Hippie-like tendency to say ‘why don’t all businesses start being nice’, that’s going to make any difference. More to the point there isn’t any sufficiently robust alternative that can be systematically used for policy development. Indeed, that’s self evident in the terms of the debate – an offensive on materialism rather than promotion of a coherent set of rival solutions.

Give up and resign ourselves to a never-ending spiral of rising wealth but growing misery and depletion of the environment?

Personally, I think there’s much to be said for taking an admittedly less sexy but more focused approach to the debate. What might this involve?

First, some subtle shifts that have potential to add up to something more substantive:

• Let’s try to develop and mainstream some alternative measures of progress. The UK DEFRA’s attempt to look at wellbeing is to be welcomed even if it’s little known within Whitehall let alone beyond at the moment. Linked to this we also need some more systematic policy-testing of what the science and evidence on happiness is telling us. (We need to get over our social fear of randomised policy trials for a start).
  
  
• Reintegrate economic thought with other social sciences. The post-war debates between the likes of Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises against the Keynesian and Galbraithian schools were not just about what the right economic models were, but also how to think about economics. The legacy of which was the sad divorce of economics from other social sciences in which its roots lay (particularly politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and geography). I think reintegrating the practice of economics with the developments of these other social sciences could start leading us some different policy conclusions – like the importance of making short-term transitionary adjustments to effects like globalisation or the value of labour market policies to reduce the harshness of tradeoffs that people have to make between work and leisure and family.
  


• Invest in community and public assets. A clear trend in the evidence is that we systematically over-invest in the individual things we think will make us happy (DVDs, clothes, cars, homes) but under-invest in some of the community and social assets that also contribute to our happiness. So it might sound old-fashioned but actually having high quality parks, civic institutions, public spaces and cultural activities is important to happiness and something government needs to initiate to overcome the free-riding problem.
  


• Teach young people some broader social and emotional skills. There’s long been an obsession with teaching the skills that most contribute to productivity. The focus on science, maths and literacy and numeracy is broadly the logical result of that. As too are political calls to meet the challenges of globalisation through developing ‘hard’ skills. All of course right in part but we shouldn’t under-value the importance of personal and social education – providing young people with the skills in order to make better choices later in life that will impact on their happiness and life satisfaction.

Second, a focus on reducing unhappiness, misery and want:

• Attack on the scourge of mental health. This was Lord Layard’s focus in his book on ‘happiness’ and there’s actually some positive developments here like the UK Government’s commitment to fund cognitive behavior therapy (e.g. see Scotland's recent initiative). I think this is only a start to tackling not just the high rates of mental illness we find today (one in six people will suffer from depression at some point in their lives) but also the attached social stigma.
  


• Prioritise health activity on long-term conditions and other ‘life-course’ ill health events. Proportionally too much health activity is on the visible, event based, and invasively-solved ill health. But, like mental health, there are 17 million people in the UK suffering from long-term conditions that materially impact on their quality of life. Getting really serious about this (and not just a few words about care planning) could have a dramatic impact on their wellbeing.
  


• Don’t surrender the fight on poverty and disadvantage. I think one of the as yet under-recognised achievements of New Labour was the shifting of the terms of debate on poverty. Admittedly, progress has been mixed (e.g. on child poverty), and in some cases has got worse (e.g. on relative inequality). But the Thatcherite legacy of implicit social acceptance of poverty in society is now in retreat. Even Cameron’s Conservatives now too have social and community policies where they would once have been unthinkable to them. The progressive left needs to continue to push the fight and not surrender this territory.

I’d meant to keep this one short but it’s already become too long and I haven’t started to do the topic justice. So I’ll stop for now and return to at another point…