When I was born in 1966, millions of people in Western countries had no televisions, no indoor plumbing, yet the intellectuals of their day were arguing that they had plenty. Go back a generation further and, even in the United States, there were plenty of rural homes without indoor toilets, that were not hooked up to the electricity grid, and it took a day simply to do the washing, and another to do the ironing. Go back to the nineteenth century and you are in a world of constant exhaustion, illness and dirt. Yet Victorian moralists breezily asserted that people had never had it so good, and that society had lost its sense of what really mattered. Why assume that ours is the generation that has finally reached saturation point? Why should we be the ones who get to draw the line? Ah, you say, but we’re not talking basics like housing and medicine; we’re talking about the unnecessary opulence of the modern consumer. Well, fine, but where do you think the housing and the medicine come from? It’s our “obsession with GDP” that is raising up the destitute. In 1990, 36 percent of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than a dollar a day. Today, that figure has fallen to 9 percent, and the drop has been sharpest in the places which have opened up to global markets, above all in Africa. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it creates conditions in which happiness can be achieved. Which is why, contrary to popular belief, surveys show a strong correlation between economic growth and self-defined contentment. Wealthier countries are happier places. If you doubt it, ask yourself this… would you prefer be poor in the Liberia or North Korea?
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 04:46:16 +0000
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