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Needed: New gauge of good life that doesn’t mean more stuff
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THE pervasive smog that is becoming an unavoidable part of urban existence should be a call to action, but the measures adopted so far are far from adequate.
If our policymakers continue to advocate GDP growth without the context of environmental protection, real progress will be elusive. For although growth can no longer be easily rationalized in ecological terms, it can always be easily justified in terms of the urgent issues of job creation and common prosperity.
“Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources” by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill offers a refreshing and thought-provoking analysis on the delinking between growth and prosperity.
It challenges the economic absolute that greater growth and consumption inevitably lead to greater happiness in a consumer-driven society.
Instead, the authors advocate a “steady-sate economy,” based on an awareness of the dangers of growth and consumption.
This view represents a revolutionary rethinking of the dominant economic tenet that unfettered growth, greater consumption and higher productivity always benefit society. Obviously, unfettered growth can only be sustained by unbridled consumption. Consumption has become the holy grail of modern society after it miraculously saved the Western world from the Great Depression last century.
To compel people to buy continually, highly disciplined manufacturers agreed to make products with designed product cycle, a euphemism for “planned obsolescence.”
Manufactures who fail to comply will be punished. In former East Germany, refrigerators were required to last at least 25 years. Today most of them can last no more than 10 years.
Impatient with planned obsolescence, some manufacturers resort to other strategies to turn customers into frequent purchasers. For instance, some mobile phone makers come up with a cutting-edge new product every few months, tempting buyers to discard perfectly good devices.
Rubbish heaps
Instead of making these products readily available, consumers are made to queue overnight outside shops in an competitive atmosphere that’s deliberately hyped.
Disposability has become a manifest feature of modern life. The necessary consequence of unbridled consumption is polluted air, poisoned rivers, and expanded landfills that are closing in on us.
Omnipresent, nondegradable plastic bags and wrappers are used once and tossed away. They can linger in the environment for 1,000 years. Sometimes our consumption is driven by the compulsion of greed, but more and more, it is driven by our trivial needs of vanity, for how else can you explain the night scene made hideous by neon and ornamental lights?
In time, the nature we abuse will exact its retribution. Today we are choking off the life of the most sanctified rivers and defiling our mountains and lands with the stains of our prosperity, or our improvidence.
Essentially our prosperity manifests itself as a multiplication of the stuff we do not need. As a matter of fact, greater share of consumption of vital necessities is generally considered a reliable gauge of abject poverty.
Frugality is no longer the virtue it once was, but a curse that interferes with our pursuit of the good life.
One of the most cited argument for growth is to help the billions of people still in poverty to embrace the brave new world of affluence, or consumption.
It is said that of the seven billion inhabitants on earth, 2.7 billion live on less than US$2 a day. The frequently unasked question is: Why can these 2.7 billion subsist on US$2, while the two percent of adults who own more than half of the world’s household wealth are still grabbing for more?
“The evidence suggests that most people living in wealthy nations already have enough material goods — the challenge is to figure out how to build an economy on something other than ever-increasing consumption,” the book observes.
But very few politicians and policymakers can actually think along these lines.
Therefore, a fundamental debunking of the GDP-centric modern life simply must take into consideration the finite resources of the earth. There are choices open to us. As the book suggests, potential choices include rationing and banning certain materials. There should be legal caps on the income of the CEOs who are earning hundreds or thousands of times more than a worker.
Significantly, we need a new gauge of progress or the good life, one that gives prior consideration to environment, leisure time, and spiritual welfare.
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