Prosperity without Growth

1.       All this malarkey about New Growth Model / High-Income Model etc is making me puke. It’s a shameless and misguided call for increasing GDP growth figures so that wealth will create happiness to people.

2.       TDM’s years have actually proven that placing this criteria above all else is mistaken. Back at the peak of the Asian crisis, our GDP growth figures held up reasonably compared to our peers, but that’s because of pump-priming, aka let’s build beautiful buildings in Putrajaya so that we can tell the world how we’ve got it made, and **** the masses cos the spillovers will benefit them. Fast fwd to now, and we have a country building up its debt levels with all these continuous deficit budgets, increased crime, fractured society and blameworthy politicians from both divides. While I’m being disingenuous if I were to blame all these problems to the construction of Putrajaya, I’d like to venture that that was a manifestation of spend to create growth, for GDP growth is the penis envy affliction of some country’s economic administrators.

3.       And here we are repeating the same mistakes with the NGM / MIM thing, and this SWF is lending its full support to execute this.

4.       What we need is a leader who knows that life in Dunya is only as preparation for the Hereafter, but this life in Dunya needs to sustain a happy, sustainable lliving for all. And again, this philosophy is superbly, comfortably captured in the Quran.

5.       The following extracts bring recency to this argument, although intuitively I sense certain gaps are missing as it’s still looking into merely “worldly” things, but it’s a fantastic start, and ideologues for Islamic economics would do well to pick this up.

Source: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/public-data/files/happy-planet-index-2-0.pdf

Excerpts from the report:

“To maintain growth, Western capitalist economies have a structural need to sustain demand for consumption.72,73,74 But this feature of the system sets it at odds with a widely noted fact about human nature – that once our basic material needs are comfortably met, more consumption tends to make little difference to our well-being. This is not just folk wisdom, although it is certainly the case that throughout history, and across all cultures and religions, people have cautioned against an excessive focus on wealth and material possessions. Research suggests that in most reasonably developed countries, material circumstances such as wealth and possessions play only a small role in determining levels of happiness – some psychologists estimate that they explain only around 10 per cent of variation in happiness at the aggregate level.75 Beyond a certain level of income, increasing wealth makes little difference.76 Much more significant are factors relating to individual differences in outlook and to the kinds of activities that people engage in: socialising, participating in cultural life, having meaningful and challenging work and so on.

But the requirement to maintain consumption growth at all costs has led to a situation in which, for decades, we have been presented with a poisonous combination of messages. First, we are constantly bombarded with messages from advertisers and marketers, all pushing the idea that buying this or that new product will make us happier. Added to this, in many countries we have been offered staggeringly easy access to credit with which to keep up our level of consumption. Quite apart from the environmental impacts, this has served us very poorly in a number of ways.

For one thing, levels of debt have soared in recent years; in 2007 and 2008, for the first time on record, UK personal debt exceeded total GDP.77 As recent research from the Institute of Psychiatry in London shows, debt is a large contributing factor to a person’s chances of developing clinically significant anxiety and depression, largely irrespective of their income.78 It is not hard to imagine why this might be. The stress of working just to keep up repayments is exhausting, the fear of defaulting constant and gnawing, and that’s without having to deal with the feelings of despair and inadequacy for having failed.

But there is also a more subtle and no less damaging aspect to all this focus on personal consumption. People who are strongly motivated by the idea of getting rich and famous are what psychologists refer to as materialistic. Using an engaging metaphor, psychologist and author Oliver James describes them as having caught the ‘affluenza’ virus.79 The scientific evidence for the negative impacts of materialism is overwhelming; they range from poorer personal relationships through fewer good moods and lower self-esteem, to increased prevalence of psychological symptoms.80 In short, people whose main aspiration is to be wealthy are inclined to be less satisfied with their lives in general than those who focus their energies elsewhere.81 What is worrying, but perhaps unsurprising, is the extent to which materialism is on the rise. Figure 2 shows data from an annual survey of college students in the USA. The proportion of respondents feeling that being very wealthy is important has doubled since the early 1970s, with a concomitant decrease in the number considering a meaningful philosophy in life to be important.”