'Happiness & Money' - Interesting Site

Saturday January 11, 2003 11:26

by Anonymous - Left Wing / Humanitarian

http://homepage.tinet.ie/~earrings/happiness.html An interesting site giving a brief study/collection on the relationship between happiness and money, and the resulting consequence this has for the ideal formation of society.

Some extractions:-

"GNP measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile." Robert F Kennedy ...

Article by David Korten

Sample "The problem is this: a predatory global financial system, driven by the single imperative of making ever more money for those who already have lots of it, is rapidly depleting the real capital - the human, social, natural, and even physical capital on which our well-being depends. The truly troubling part is that so many of us have become willing accomplices to what is best described as a war of money against life."

"...the truth is that market fundamentalism is itself naive and illogical. Even if we put aside the bigger moral and ethical questions and concentrate solely on the economic arena, the ideology of market fundamentalism is profoundly and irredeemably flawed. To put the matter simply, market forces, if they are given complete authority even in the purely economic and financial arenas, produce chaos and could ultimately lead to the downfall of the global capitalist system." George Soros (1998) (Yes, THAT George Soros !)

"Chinese economist Yew-Kwang Ng argues that once the basics of life are provided for, further consumption can actually make us worse off. 'Our ways to increase happiness further then take on the largely competitive forms, like attempting to keep up with the Joneses,' he says. 'From a social viewpoint, such competition is pure waste. On top of this, production and consumption to sustain the competition continue to impose substantial environmental costs, making economic growth quite possibly happiness-decreasing.'"....full article
more

"The bottom line is this. For a person, the evidence is that money does buy happiness (though not very much). For a society that is already rich, it may not.

"One day this sort of evidence will revolutionise government policy in the western democracies. It is my firm belief that surveys of happiness and well-being are here to stay."