mutually reinforcing relationship: “In the largest sense, your mind is made by your
brain, body, natural world, and human culture—as well as by the mind itself”
(Hanson 2009: 7).
These findings resonate with Welzer’s ‘mental infrastructures’ that have path
dependency effects embedded beneath cognitive processes of knowing or social fears
of losing status or access. Referring to the economic growth paradigm, Welzer discusses how deeply rooted resistance to change can therefore be. Debunking it would
play on people’s fundamental “secret fears” that “everything they have established,
everything they worked for, planned and believed in, could have been meaningless.
The dimensions of meaning and identity that Western-style capitalist societies provide stand and fall with the functioning of the market” (Welzer 2011: 29).
So of course post-growth imaginaries and narratives may not necessarily gain
traction right away. They may offer the least enticements to those who risk losing
quite a few of their privileges if the promise of always more for everyone cedes and
paradigms and narratives on fair shares become dominant.
I am not sure if this was the upset of the human self-image that the Brundtland
Report foresaw to be necessary for sustainability to succeed. But surely, scientific
concepts and models should help to understand and explain such an upset and its
consequences instead of ruling it out by imposing theoretical iron cages.
The evidence behind policymaking would then look very different as well.
Richard Layard, leading British happiness economist, argues that well-being
research findings require turning mainstream concepts of productivity and competitiveness on their head. Given the hedonic treadmill and high price of materialism, he demands that policy should constrain the ability of individuals to earn and
work much more than other people:
If a person works harder and earns more, he may himself gain by increasing his income
compared with other people. But the other people lose because their income now falls
relative to his. He does not care that he is polluting other people in this way, so we must
provide him with an incentive to do so (Layard 2005: 229).
The proposed incentive is significantly higher taxation on working too much
given that a true benefit to society as a whole can no longer be identified. Whether
or not one likes this particular proposal, the important idea is that the adoption of a
historically sensitive mind-set does not lend itself to there-is-no-alternative claims.
Sociocultural circumstances and politico-economic institutions like markets shape
people’s mind-sets and imaginary and therefore their aspirations and preferred
need-satisfaction strategies. In the light of their surveys, for example, Kahneman
and Krueger suggest shifting attention from increasing consumption opportunities
to an emphasis on increasing social contacts; shifting the emphasis from income for
well-being toward a person’s relative embedding in society; making possible a
different allocation of time that reduces the amount of time people spend doing
things they find unpleasant (Kahneman/Krueger 2006: 18).
Given that work in its current forms ranks high among those things in life which
many say they do not like doing, some interesting strategies for sustainability
emerge. A popular one is to reduce working hours, because this would allow for the
78
3 Why the Mainstream Economic Paradigm Cannot Inform …
brain, body, natural world, and human culture—as well as by the mind itself”
(Hanson 2009: 7).
These findings resonate with Welzer’s ‘mental infrastructures’ that have path
dependency effects embedded beneath cognitive processes of knowing or social fears
of losing status or access. Referring to the economic growth paradigm, Welzer discusses how deeply rooted resistance to change can therefore be. Debunking it would
play on people’s fundamental “secret fears” that “everything they have established,
everything they worked for, planned and believed in, could have been meaningless.
The dimensions of meaning and identity that Western-style capitalist societies provide stand and fall with the functioning of the market” (Welzer 2011: 29).
So of course post-growth imaginaries and narratives may not necessarily gain
traction right away. They may offer the least enticements to those who risk losing
quite a few of their privileges if the promise of always more for everyone cedes and
paradigms and narratives on fair shares become dominant.
I am not sure if this was the upset of the human self-image that the Brundtland
Report foresaw to be necessary for sustainability to succeed. But surely, scientific
concepts and models should help to understand and explain such an upset and its
consequences instead of ruling it out by imposing theoretical iron cages.
The evidence behind policymaking would then look very different as well.
Richard Layard, leading British happiness economist, argues that well-being
research findings require turning mainstream concepts of productivity and competitiveness on their head. Given the hedonic treadmill and high price of materialism, he demands that policy should constrain the ability of individuals to earn and
work much more than other people:
If a person works harder and earns more, he may himself gain by increasing his income
compared with other people. But the other people lose because their income now falls
relative to his. He does not care that he is polluting other people in this way, so we must
provide him with an incentive to do so (Layard 2005: 229).
The proposed incentive is significantly higher taxation on working too much
given that a true benefit to society as a whole can no longer be identified. Whether
or not one likes this particular proposal, the important idea is that the adoption of a
historically sensitive mind-set does not lend itself to there-is-no-alternative claims.
Sociocultural circumstances and politico-economic institutions like markets shape
people’s mind-sets and imaginary and therefore their aspirations and preferred
need-satisfaction strategies. In the light of their surveys, for example, Kahneman
and Krueger suggest shifting attention from increasing consumption opportunities
to an emphasis on increasing social contacts; shifting the emphasis from income for
well-being toward a person’s relative embedding in society; making possible a
different allocation of time that reduces the amount of time people spend doing
things they find unpleasant (Kahneman/Krueger 2006: 18).
Given that work in its current forms ranks high among those things in life which
many say they do not like doing, some interesting strategies for sustainability
emerge. A popular one is to reduce working hours, because this would allow for the
78
3 Why the Mainstream Economic Paradigm Cannot Inform …