Brave New World!

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't. 

(W. Shakespeare)

You may remember, that several weeks ago we have finished a blog with a sentence from Jose Mucija’s speech.

http://thewanderlife.com/human-happiness-and-the-environment-address-by-uruguayan-president-jose-mujica-at-rio-20-summit/

You can follow the full speech on this site and we shall think about something in connection with that.

A short meaningful sentence:

“We come into this planet to be happy”

When Jose said “we”, he did not mean it for himself, as he is an old and tired man, but he meant it for all of us.

He is the president of a latin american state and he thinks, that all everyone, including his people are born to be happy!

And he explains further:

“Because life is short and it slips away from us. And no material belonging is worth as much as life, and this is fundamental.”

And he says something even more important to us:

“But we cannot continue like this, indefinitely, being ruled by the market, on the contrary, we have to rule over the market.”

So this is a simple story.  Lets figure out a way where not the tail wagging the dog… Right?

Before we get more serious about the dog and its tail, lets see what happiness means?

Happiness is an English word. It means  state of well-being characterised by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy or emotions experienced when in a state of well being.

By the way Jose's reminder does not come as some great news to. 

The United States Declaration of Independence clearly states the basic right for

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness! 

Just to remind you; this was written at 1776.

Happiness is used in both life evaluation, as in “How happy are you with your life as a whole?”, and in emotional reports, as in “How happy are you now?,” and people seem able to use happiness as appropriate in these verbal contexts.

http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf

In general did you put for yourself the question? What shall make you personally happy?

Positive or negative emotional event, material possession or anything to do with you, your family, friends, your neighbourhood, or your country?

Yes, it is interesting – we usually happy or not happy, but we rarely think about this subject intentionally. We get used to “just” experience it or feeling lack of it.

I have another question – you must have voted sometimes in your life for someone, who supposed to represent you.

How many times you voted for a person, who by your believe would make your life happier? Do not misunderstand - I am sure you felt happy, when you voted. 

But what was your motivation made you happy at the moment of vote?

How many times makes you happy someone else’s misery or loss and how many times you make decisions with the aim to just get rid of something or someone without thinking of the person, organisation or event you aim for?

 

Laughing at someone’s misery in general is bad right? But why it is still creating so much happiness in general?

When did you do something intentionally to make yourself happy?

A number of great people were thinking about happiness. You can find the more relevant ideas and theories from the past in here:

http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/

Even there is a small country Bhutan, where since 1972, they measure the GNH (Gross National Happiness), instead of  GNP and GDP.

In general happiness is an important factor. Last time I have heard, that a government (besides Bhutan) was seriously interested to know directly about the level of the happiness of its people was in Eastern Europe during 80’s. They called it “sentiment report”… In fact this was a sort of regular report about the feelings of the population and their reaction on the policies of the government.

Modern day “sentiment reports” are made by votes in favour or against this or that political party. In extreme case the negative impacts are the numerous revolts and uprisings.

We can agree, that happiness has a very important political role and not only. It is in many ways a major factor of any economy.

If we just observe a national economy, than under the same conditions or in other words with the same economic data, we can expect absolutely opposite sentiments or levels of happiness. Meaning, that todays data do not let us predict, if our population will be happy or not.

This can for sure be manipulated by a good old roman way - “Panem et circenses”. 

But we can say for sure, that no "bread and circus" or any propaganda, religion can keep the people happy forever… You need to have some specific conditions, related to the economy to keep that positive feeling… In other words, the happiness should be materialised at a certain time.

I am sure you shall agree with me, that one of the main factors of happiness is the freedom of choices and the standard of living.

We can also say for sure – the human by nature does not like to be squeezed into ready-made (fait accompli) solutions and it cannot suffer any forced reduction of its standards of living.

When professional economists think about economic policies, they generally start with the principle, that a change is good if it makes someone better off without in making anyone else worse off. 

That idea, first suggested by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, is referred to as the Pareto principle. I find it hard to see how one could disagree with such a principle, which is why it is the widely accepted foundation for the evaluation of economic Policies.

http://www.nber.org/feldstein/pi99.html

In other words, you can make the lives of other people better, but make sure, you shall not make lives of other worst! You think about this, as this principle is regularly abused - especially in the conditions of the Globalisation.

But lets come back to our next definition of the "standard of living". 

What does a high standard of living entail? This judgement is relatively subjective, but there are a number of factors that seems to be common to most economists' ideals. These include 

- physical possessions, 
- nutrition, 
- health care, and 
- life expectancy. 

The more prosperous an economy, the better off the citizens of that economy are in terms of material possessions and health. Thus, prosperity is attainable when wages are high and countries are highly productive.

This is not to say that prosperity is static. Instead, over time different countries becomes more and less prosperous. An economic boom in one country may bring temporary prosperity to that country. Similarly, a depression may wipe out some hard won gains in prosperity. Overall, prosperity is a relatively subjective judgement once the basic necessities of life are in place.

http://www.sparknotes.com/economics/macro/growth/section3.rhtml


 ....academics and policy analysts often use real income as a proxy to measure living standard. But this focuses on cash-income alone and leaves out the possible effects of non-cash income on the well-being of individuals. Non-cash incomes such as use of stock of consumer durables, goods and services received as gifts, assistance, health, recreation, etc. affect the people’s standard of living. Thus, standard of living of an individual or group of individuals is determined by their access to resources, which comprise of both cash and non-cash income.

http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/9-domains/standard-of-living-and-happiness/

We can go further – the higher standard of living from a certain level does not necessarily brings higher happiness at all!

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/4783836.stm

We can divide two major situations:

- Developing economies and 

- the so called developed economies; 

The developed ones in fact react much more on non-commercial aspects of the happiness, such as healthy environment, job stability, friendly community, good family life, social activities, efficient government services, public security etc. However the developed nations also make sure, that their levels of happiness are built on the "strong foundations" of the misery of the developing world. (but about this we shall talk more in details later);

For the developing nations in general the main danger is the non sustainable growth, the unpreparedness for the rational pursue of healthy living standards and happiness.

The happiness itself is limited by time and ability of any human.

So it cannot be "chased" endlessly. Otherwise it turns into mania.

The happiness is also a part of the cultural environment of each nation. 

This also means, that running after a "unified" happiness model will cause extreme dangers for the nation itself.

And here we come back to another general question. The Globalism by its nature pushing by any means the nations to the fastest growth levels of economy and consumption. 

Still each nation should identify for themselves are they ready for this and how they are ready for this? How to handle this? The answer is in the

sustainable growth… 

Not as the target of the global, but as a target of the local and national economies.

We can bring an example brought by Mr. Deng Boqing in the article he wrote for Thisday Newspaper of November 3rd 2011, which entitled: “The Inside Story of China’s Rise”. 

He said: “It’s easy for people outside China to see the growth as the big and strong side while we, the insiders have seen the difficulties as its small and weak side. China’s per—capital GDP in 2010 just exceeding 4,000 US Dollars, ranks the 94th in the world and is less than a third of Equatorial Guinea’s and a tenth of US’s”. “The problem of uneven development is prominent with expanding gap between the West and East. There are still more than 130 million Chinese people living on less than one dollar a day and 10 million people having no access to electricity”. 

http://businessdayonline.com/2013/08/does-high-gdp-translate-to-better-living-standard/

This is the last minute call for developing countries to evaluate their own potentials and find their way into the future. This future should not stand on chasing the rapid growth, but to find 

STABILITY

through clear vision of 

- poverty elimination, 

- education, 

- infrastructure development, 

- environment and cultural heritage conservation; 

As we humans value the most the stability, chance for choice and clear vision of short-mid and long term goals instead of fast ups and downs and bitter lessons, which the free GLOBAL market brings to them, as a special "gift" from the leading economies of the World.

And I leave you to think about this till next time.