Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism
Makes Our Lives Worse,
And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy
by Tara Lohan, AlterNet
January 16, 2011
Source
To many of us, a society where no one goes hungry,
where there is no unemployment, where people are happy and they have
spacious homes and
lots of leisure time seems like fantasy. But it's not a fantasy for
Helena Norberg-Hodge—she
saw it firsthand in the tiny Himalayan region of Ladakh, a remote mountain community that borders Tibet.
During the course of 35 years there, she also saw what happened when
Ladakh was suddenly thrown open to the outside world in the 1970s and
subsidized roads brought subsidized goods to the region. The local economy
was undermined, the cultural fabric was torn apart. Unemployment, pollution
and divisiveness emerged for the first time.
"This was Ladakh's introduction to globalization," says Norberg-Hodge.
The "story of Ladakh can shed light on the root causes of the
crises now facing the planet."
The account of Ladakh's transformation opens the new
film, The
Economics of Happiness, created by Steven Gorelick, John
Page and Norberg-Hodge,
the founder and director of the International
Society for Ecology and Culture. As Bill McKibben says early on
in the film, according to a poll conducted every year since the end
of World World II, happiness
in the
U.S. peaked in 1956. "It's been slowly downhill ever since," he
says. "But in that time we've gotten immeasurably richer, we have
three times as much stuff. Somehow it hasn't worked because that same
affluence tends to undermine community."
Our consumer culture, driven by the engine of globalization,
has resulted in an economic and environmental crisis and, the film's
creators say,
a crisis of the human spirit.
Through interviews with experts and activists like McKibben, Vandana
Shiva, Zac Goldsmith, Richard Heinberg, David Korten, Keibo Oiwa, Samdhong
Rinpoche, Balaji Shankar and Andrew Simms, among others, the film crosses
six continents examining the pitfalls of globalization and how people
are envisioning a more sustainable economy. It begins by exploring eight
inconvenient truths about globalization.
1. Globalization makes us unhappy. More stuff and
more wealth has meant less contact with community, rising levels
of depression, jobs
with longer
hours, more time spent working at home and longer commutes. "Lonely
people have never been happy people and globalization is creating a very
lonely planet," says author and activist Vandana Shiva.
2. Globalization breeds insecurity. Corporations are raising our children
and driving what they eat, buy, wear and what they care about. Identity
that was once shaped by one's culture and language, molded by community
leaders and family, is now filled by marketers. Across the world, sales
of blue contact lenses are on the rise, along with products to lighten
skin and hair as people try to fulfill a Western ideal and an emulation
of American life.
3. Globalization wastes natural resources. Consumerism is threatening
the planet, natural resources are stretched to the breaking point and
yet we have an economic system that encourages us to consume more and
more, says Norberg-Hodge. Consumer culture is increasingly urban and
when rural people move to the city the food they used to grow themselves
is now grown on industrial-sized chemical-intensive farms. Food must
be trucked to cities, waste must be trucked out. Large dams are needed
to provide water and huge centralized power plants must be fueled by
coal and uranium mines.
4. Globalization accelerates climate change. Globalization's "success" is
often attributed to efficiencies of scale, but mostly it is fueled by
deregulation and hidden subsidies that make food from around the globe
cost less than food from down the street. With efficiencies of scale,
it's really the opposite, says British MP Zac Goldsmith, "Tuna
caught off the east coast of America is flown to Japan, processed and
flown
back to America to be sold to consumers; English apples are flown to
South Africa to be waxed, flown back to England to be sold."
Treaties like NAFTA promote international growth through economic trade,
which sounds good on paper, except that you end up with countries importing
and exporting nearly identical amounts of the same products -- which
means we're needlessly shipping goods across the world that we are already
producing at home.
5. Globalization destroys livelihoods. Pension funds are now at the
mercy of speculation. In the Global South, small farmers are being displaced
from their land and forced to move to urban areas where they become cheap
labor for factories producing more goods.
6. Globalization increases conflict. In Ladakh, Buddhists and Muslims
who lived side by side for 500 years without conflict turned on each
other after globalization caused unemployment and stiff competition for
new commodities. Around the world, competition for scarce resources and
jobs has resulted in the demonization of differences that were once accepted.
7. Globalization is built on handouts to big
business. "If there
is one thing that political parties from the left to the right seem
to agree on today, it is the power and value of the free market," says
Goldberg. "But the irony is that the majority of really polluting
things that happen today wouldn't exist in a genuinely free market.
Nuclear power, for example, wouldn't exist without massive state
support. We're about as far away from a free
market as it's possible to be."
Globalization has resulted in subsidies for some of
the wealthiest multinationals as well as the deregulation of trade
and finance. "It is basically
a system that criminalizes the small producer and processor and deregulates
the giant business," says Shiva.
8. Globalization is based on false accounting. Our current economic
model is based on infinite growth on a finite planet, which is a recipe
for disaster. Political leaders believe that more economic growth is
the answer to all our problems -- bailouts to big banks, stimulus to
make us spend more, carbon trading schemes -- but all these do is reinforce
a system that is inherently broken.
Our way of measuring our worth is so twisted says
Helena Norberg-Hodge, that when there is "an oil spill, the
GDP goes up; when drinking water is so polluted we have to buy it
in bottles, GDP goes up. War,
cancer, epidemic illnesses—all of these involve an exchange of money,
so they end up on the positive side of the balance sheet."
A Different Path Forward
The first half of The Economics of Happiness provides
a detailed reminder of why globalization has been a failure for the
environment and for the
economy. The second half of the film explores the movements that are
providing us with an alternative. Instead of letting corporations dictate
policy and regulation, instead of measuring the success of our lives
by GDP (Gross
Domestic Product), we can take a cue from countries like Bhutan. In
1972 the King of Bhutan initiated a measurement of Gross
National Happiness and sought
to embed that in his development policies.
Since that time we've also seen the advent of the
Genuine
Progress Indicator (GPI), which is based on "full cost accounting." How
much does an item cost once you figure in the environmental and social
metrics? The
sticker price of what we pay for goods today is only part of the story.
The GPI tells the whole story:
The things we measure and count, quite literally,
tell us what we value as a society and determine the policy agendas
of governments. The
GPI presents a better way to measure our societal
progress and well being. The GPI assigns explicit value to environmental
quality, population health, livelihood security, equity, free time,
and educational attainment. It values unpaid voluntary and household
work
as well as paid work. It counts sickness, crime and pollution as costs
not gains.
So how do we truly improve our standard of living,
including protecting our environment, building healthy communities,
having a stable economy?
Localize, the filmmakers say. We don't need to eliminate international
trade entirely or be completely self-reliant, says Norberg-Hodge. But
we do need to create "more accountable and sustainable communities
by producing what we need closer to home."
This means that taxes, subsidies and regulations should not favor multinationals
over local businesses. Studies have proven that more money spent at local
businesses has meant more money staying in communities, which is a win-win.
The benefits are similar with local food and energy systems.
Already there are examples of this in motion: Ecovillages,
Transition Towns and Post
Carbon Cities are working to rebuild economies with
a focus on localization. The organization Via
Campesina is "an international
movement which coordinates peasant organizations of small- and middle-scale
producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities
from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe." It has members in 69
countries and represents millions.
Two new books build on many of the ideas in The
Economics of Happiness. The Post
Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's
Sustainability Crisis looks at the convergence of population,
water, energy, food and climate
threats. All
That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons shows how
communities are reclaiming shared spaces and resources to better
the economy and
the environment.
Those books and the film bring home three essential points. First, we
simply cannot continue to follow the trajectory we're on. Local economies
are being decimated and the global economy hangs by a thread that will
snap, likely in short time. Our planet cannot support our hunger for
resources, our disregard for sustainability and our shortsightedness.
And second, there are alternatives to globalization and suicidal capitalism.
As Asher Miller writes in The Post Carbon Reader:
Our starting point for future planning must be the realization that
we are living today at a critical moment in the long arc of human history
when numerous crises are not only converging simultaneously, they are
interdependent and affect virtually every living thing on the planet.
The sheer scale and complexity of the challenges at hand are unprecedented
... It may sound bombastic to say, but it's nevertheless the truth: The
success or failure of the human experiment may well be judged by how
we manage the next ten to twenty years.
Which brings up the third point: It's time to get going.
Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet. You can
follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.
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