Demonetize it!

Review: The Economics of Happiness

People throughout the developed world as well as larger parts of the developing world, such as China and India, are being bombarded daily with messages from politicians and pundits saying that the only solution to economic crises is further economic growth. Indeed, economic growth is seen as the most important thing in the world, and even vital issues such as ecological devastation must take a back seat to growth because it is the way out the global poverty, or so say the globalist politicians and their minions in the media. But look around you today, and you will see ever deepening crises of economy, ecology, and human spirit in the world, which globalization only seems to worsen. Moreover, human economics is coming face to face with natural resource constraints.

Peak oil, water shortages, an ever-shrinking reserve of grain in the world caused by failed harvests in the world’s breadbaskets, and a world population that now tops 6.8 billion people should make us rethink the wisdom of a paradigm of infinite growth on a finite planet. Helena Norberg-Hodge and friends have been doing just that, and have produced a 67-minute film called The Economics of Happiness, which not only shows the folly of the globalist paradigm, but shows that, contrary to globalist propaganda, there is a sustainable alternative: localization.

Norberg-Hodge draws on over 35 years of experience with people of Ladakh or “Little Tibet” in the Himalayas to demonstrate the point. The traditional culture of the Ladakhis lacked many of the conveniences most Westerners feel are essential to a comfortable life, but it also lacked many of the banes of Western culture such as unemployment, income inequality, and the loneliness, fear, and discrimination rife in a world full of competition and comparison. In the traditional Ladakhi society, everyone had work, no one went hungry and the people looked out for each other. They had a comfortable material lifestyle with plenty of leisure time and, perhaps most importantly, they were proud of their culture. But starting in the mid-1970s, when Ladakh was opened to the West, the people were introduced to Western-style consumerism and competitiveness. The result was unemployment, growing income inequality, and a feeling of backwardness and inferiority among the Ladakhi people.

It is from this point that the film takes off on a scathing critique of globalization. We are shown how, throughout the world, people and cultures are being swallowed up by what documentary participant Dr. Vandana Shiva calls “Monocultures of the Mind”. Globalization is a monoculture that strives to makeover the entire world in the white Western model. As Norberg-Hodge points out, this monoculture marginalizes the vast majority of the world’s people who are neither white nor Western. This global monoculture also does disservice to the people who are white and Western as very very few of them can achieve the looks, wealth or status of the models, actors, celebrities and top-level consumers that are placed before them in the media as people whom they should imitate (with more than a little help from their corporate friends’ products, of course.)

“The Economics of Happiness” uses voices from six continents and different fields of expertise to point out the various problems related to globalization. These experts explain why localization is the answer to ills that range from poverty and energy waste to loneliness and depression. But the film also makes good use of scenes in which ordinary people make the case for localization. In one instance, a young man from India states that he does not want to be a beggar and that if he could only have his land back, he would return to farming. Globalization has had its harshest effect on the world small farmers who have been pushed off their land and into crowded urban areas where there are not enough jobs and where their individual energy usage, as well as cost of living, goes up.

The filmmakers also visited Detroit, Michigan, where people are reclaiming abandoned land for community gardens and offering food to whomever comes by so long as they are willing to “get dirty” as one of the urban farmers put it. I was especially heartened by this scene, because it showed an example of people being fed without money changing hands. Willingness to be part of the community (“See a weed. Pick a weed.”) was all that was needed to entitle a passerby to some vegetables.

The lack of community in the globalization paradigm was brought home in a scene in which Norberg-Hodge takes two Ladakhi community leaders—both older women—on a tour of a European city. She shows them the good things of modern Western life, such as washing machines, but she also shows them the homeless on the street and an elderly man wasting away in the sterile environment of what appeared to be a long-term care facility. The old man never married and had no children or grandchildren to visit him. A small television was his only company. You could see on the face of one of the elder Ladakhi women that she found this arrangement sad, and did not approve.

The effort to use localization as a way of reconnection with each other and with our natural surroundings was a theme that was carried on in the very screening of the film. I saw it at the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, CA, a small venue that had to turn away several hundred would-be audience members. The screening was followed by a panel discussion by Norberg-Hodge and several people from the San Francisco Bay Area, including Richard Heinberg, who was in the film, who are engaged in various localization projects, They not only made presentations, but had a Q & A with the audience, many of whom were activists of various stripes.

It is Norberg-Hodge’s hope that screenings of the film will be a springboard to further connections among activists who would otherwise work on their separate issues without ever meeting. The web site for the film, http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org has suggestions on how to get active in the localization process, including hosting screenings for your neighborhood. As the title of the film suggests, you might find the experience enjoyable as well as educational and practical.