wider sharing of paid work available, thus reducing unemployment—which is even
worse for health and well-being. This said, one also wants to include an analysis of if
or how this reduces pay and what it does to purchasing power and thus access in
deeply marketized societies. In Great Britain, for example, where private debt is the
highest in Europe and many low-paid workers have mortgages to service, the prospect of earning less in exchange for having more time does not mean an improved
life. Unlocking path dependencies in complex settings require whole system change
strategies with policy-packages hedging such detrimental side-effects.
Another approach could be to change the experienced utility itself, so that
spending time at work was less of a nuisance. For this to happen, the idea of what
makes a firm competitive would need to change. Its prime benchmarking purpose
would become delivering high product and process utility in the most resource-light
and resilient way—instead of myopic and narrow price competitiveness. It would
include outcomes of social capital (good relationships, reported well-being, and
trust), human capital (giving people skills, their ability to creatively innovate and
collaborate), and the protection of environmental capital (as little resource use as
possible for the delivery of certain need satisfiers). Some corporate strategies do
involve such ideas, but usually not as the goals of their system: they are means to
better deliver on the unchanged goal of maximum profit.
To level the benchmarking playing field for those companies that sincerely try to
turn these means into goals, regulatory changes are necessary. These goals could
also free corporations from the pilot paralysis they report regarding their sustainability endeavors. This would, however, require changing their business model and
thus corporate charters themselves. Other measures like taxation or subsidies are of
course political incentives that still induce people to work harder. In a transformational agenda the holy cow of constantly striving for labor productivity increases
should have to justify its merit: “if tax-cutters think people should work still harder,
they need to explain why” (Layard 2005: 228).
Today’s standard measures and indicators emerged from the ideas about the
world held by their inventors. Stripped of this context they function like ‘objective’
reference frameworks in arguing how to do things adequately. So if our culture,
signals and symbols were transformative in a way that steered clear of materialistic
values, extrinsic incentives and monetized expressions of worth, the perceived need
for ever more gain or new stuff in materially saturated societies might well fall. The
other deep wiring that needs double-checking is of course that of endless competition and individualist comparisons to define one’s own worth and value.
Interestingly, with these observations we come close to Asian wisdom that has
conceived of happiness as an existential and social concept all along. It stands for a
way of leading a life that is content overall and in which you feel able to master
challenges and enjoy what you are given. In Buddhist ethics and philosophy, as the
Bhutanese example of Gross National Happiness or GNH will show in Chapter 4 a
high degree of well-being for some individuals does not count as an achievement if
others in the community are suffering at lower levels. The Greek term eudaimonia,
as used by Aristotle, has a similar meaning. It describes happiness as an activity
rather than an emotional state: Happy individuals are capable of living up to the
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
79
worse for health and well-being. This said, one also wants to include an analysis of if
or how this reduces pay and what it does to purchasing power and thus access in
deeply marketized societies. In Great Britain, for example, where private debt is the
highest in Europe and many low-paid workers have mortgages to service, the prospect of earning less in exchange for having more time does not mean an improved
life. Unlocking path dependencies in complex settings require whole system change
strategies with policy-packages hedging such detrimental side-effects.
Another approach could be to change the experienced utility itself, so that
spending time at work was less of a nuisance. For this to happen, the idea of what
makes a firm competitive would need to change. Its prime benchmarking purpose
would become delivering high product and process utility in the most resource-light
and resilient way—instead of myopic and narrow price competitiveness. It would
include outcomes of social capital (good relationships, reported well-being, and
trust), human capital (giving people skills, their ability to creatively innovate and
collaborate), and the protection of environmental capital (as little resource use as
possible for the delivery of certain need satisfiers). Some corporate strategies do
involve such ideas, but usually not as the goals of their system: they are means to
better deliver on the unchanged goal of maximum profit.
To level the benchmarking playing field for those companies that sincerely try to
turn these means into goals, regulatory changes are necessary. These goals could
also free corporations from the pilot paralysis they report regarding their sustainability endeavors. This would, however, require changing their business model and
thus corporate charters themselves. Other measures like taxation or subsidies are of
course political incentives that still induce people to work harder. In a transformational agenda the holy cow of constantly striving for labor productivity increases
should have to justify its merit: “if tax-cutters think people should work still harder,
they need to explain why” (Layard 2005: 228).
Today’s standard measures and indicators emerged from the ideas about the
world held by their inventors. Stripped of this context they function like ‘objective’
reference frameworks in arguing how to do things adequately. So if our culture,
signals and symbols were transformative in a way that steered clear of materialistic
values, extrinsic incentives and monetized expressions of worth, the perceived need
for ever more gain or new stuff in materially saturated societies might well fall. The
other deep wiring that needs double-checking is of course that of endless competition and individualist comparisons to define one’s own worth and value.
Interestingly, with these observations we come close to Asian wisdom that has
conceived of happiness as an existential and social concept all along. It stands for a
way of leading a life that is content overall and in which you feel able to master
challenges and enjoy what you are given. In Buddhist ethics and philosophy, as the
Bhutanese example of Gross National Happiness or GNH will show in Chapter 4 a
high degree of well-being for some individuals does not count as an achievement if
others in the community are suffering at lower levels. The Greek term eudaimonia,
as used by Aristotle, has a similar meaning. It describes happiness as an activity
rather than an emotional state: Happy individuals are capable of living up to the
3.1 How Mainstream Economics Views Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
79