Alternative Perspective
 Issue 46, February 25, 2004
Compiled by Madhukar Shukla

Business/Economics as if Life Mattered

Alternative Perspective is an attempt to widen our awareness about issues related to business, environment, role and influence of media, geo-politics, culture, etc. It aims to share, on a regular basis, some of those pieces of news and information, which do not find place in the highly monopolised mainstream media. Please feel free to share/ forward/ distribute this newsletter to others who may be interested.

When TS Elliot wrote: "Where is the life, we have lost in living," he was perhaps not aware how prophetic these lines would be in describing the current paradigm of living, working, relating, and doing business. No longer the market is where you meet peoples, work/trade/occupation is what people engage in to produce something useful for the community (and in the process, participate in it), or growth of economy is necesarily an indicator of happiness and well-being of its members and the community. We live in abstractions and indices, and try to desperately believe that numbers add to our happiness... but luckily, there are still options worth reflecting...



In This Issue:
  • The Fiction of Numerical Growth
    What you measure is what you get... and we measure that which is easier to measure. So, we are sort of stuck/ fixated with measuring GDP as an indicator of human happiness - surprisingly, against much evidence of an increasingly negative correlation between GDP and Happiness of a society. Just think of this irony: the cost of cleaning up the environment from a man-made or natural disaster gets added up in GDP, and not deducted from it!!! - e.g., yesterday, Morocco had an earthquake killing around 500 people. In the economics of the day, this will lead to more business for the insurance, heavy excavating equipments, coffin-makers, hospitals, etc., each adding to GDP... it is a topsy-turvy world.
    http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/quality/2003/1103gnhappiness.htm

  • Conservation Economy
    Perhaps one of the fallacy of present-day economic measures is their narrow focus on consumption. So here is a framework to look at an economy, beyond the consumer economics paradigm. It is actually common sense, which we have sort of abondoned: a happy contented life, of course, is based on buying/possessing items of convenience. But happiness and well-being of a society/nation also depends on a clean environment, and a healthy, social life of its people.... sometime, it seems surrealistic that people have forgotten this simple fact of a happy life - that conservation and maintenance of things we have is as much important to our well-being, as consuming them!!!... Do explore this site.
    http://www.conservationeconomy.net/pattern_map/flash/index.htm

  • Living Economies: Learning from Life
    If one is searching for models of an economic system, which is sustainable, continues to grow and is capable to dealing with uncertainties, then it makes sense to look at Life itself: it has sustained and grown across unpredictable environment for eons. Surprisingly, the principles of Life contradict the contemporary economic wisdom. In a tangential way, it also highlights that making money (whether for oneself or for that nameless-faceless shareholder) is not necesarily same as creating wealth.
    http://www.yesmagazine.org/9economics/kortendave.html

  • Our Increasingly Disposable Planet???
    Any system which contradicts the laws of life is bound to create imbalances leading to collapse of the system; when the malignant cancer cells in the body start consuming all that other cells produce (or faster than what the whole body can produce), the body rolls down the path of self-annihilation. In the contemporary world - where 50mn people consume as much as another 2.7bn, where we consume 20% more from the earth than we can replenish, where consumption of oil, water, marine food, meat products, etc. has jumped 4-to-7 times within last half century, where top 20% consume 87% of what is produced, etc. - we are headed towards a destiny of the cancer-ridden body... a disposable planet!!!
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2002/disposable_planet/big_picture/default.stm

  • Check Your Ecological Footprint: How Many Earths Do You Need to Live?
    Unknowingly, we all contribute to this downward trajectory - by following our "life-style" (which has become a convenient off-the-shelf replacement of our identity). So before we get immersed in an intellectual dialogue about economic and ecological system, it is worth checking out our own contribution to this state-of-affairs. Fill up this quiz to see your own ecological footprints... or, to put it simply, find out: Am I consuming as much as I replenish? Or am I just another parasite, eating into the life of the generations to come?!!!
    ... as TS Elliot wrote: "Where is the Life, we have lost in living."
    http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/environment/quiz2.jsp



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