We Need A New Economic System

According to Time magazine, “the world’s 85 richest individuals now own as much as the poorest half of the 7 billion global population, according to a report released by Oxfam” last week.

Just contemplate that statistic for a moment. Eighty-five people. Own more than 3,500,000,000 people put together.

Imagine what a gathering of 85 people would look like. Eighty-five people wouldn’t even fill up the small music club I frequent; it’s an intimate club and it holds 225 people.

Now imagine a gathering of 3.5 billion (a little harder to do!). The two groups have the same amount of wealth.

Is it just me or is there something seriously wrong with this picture?!

The Time magazine article goes on to say, “The report calls on governments to crackdown on international tax dodgers and invest in public institutions such as healthcare, as well as implement progressive taxes and eradicate opaque political structures that encourage corruption.”

I think we need to go a lot farther than that. I think we need to rethink our economic system completely. Tom Toles, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, is a utopian dreamer like me. In his blog post today he wrote:

I know economics is really resistant to efforts to make it more equitable and fair and satisfying, but we’re going to have to take another run at it anyway. Marxism was an attempt to do it with a very blunt instrument, all cast iron gears and belching steam and hammers and sickles. It was a colossal mess. But we’re smarter now. Everything else works better, so why not a more sophisticated model of redistributed economic benefits? What would that look like? 

It would look like a conscious dedicated plan and effort to get all that grunt work [of labor] into the newly capable hands of computer-guided robot slaves. And distribute some of the profits from that endeavor and some of the Do What You Love (DWYL) opportunities to everyone. We can Do It If We Want To. (DIIWWT)

Here’s Mr. Toles’ cartoon today, in the same theme:

The Pursuit of Individual Excellence

As an American, I have been programmed to think that “pursuit of happiness” is my birthright. But what exactly does that mean? What is happiness?

Time magazine did a cover story on happiness last month. One of the articles, “Free to be Happy,” asked the question, “What did Thomas Jefferson mean by ‘pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence?”

I was surprised to read, “The idea of happiness…in Jefferson’s hands, may be better understood as the pursuit of individual excellence that shapes the life of a broader community.” Thomas Jefferson, I learned, was a fan of Greek philosophy, and “eudaimonia — the Greek word for happiness — evokes virtue, good conduct and generous citizenship.”

To me, this sounded like the self-actualization at the top of Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs.” It also reminded me of what Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi means by the experience of “flow.” I did a little online research to see if other people agreed that this was what Jefferson meant.

On George Mason University’s History Network site I found “The Surprising Origins and Meaning of the Pursuit of Happiness”:

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “the happy man lives well and does well; for we have practically defined happiness as a sort of good life and good action.”  Happiness is not, he argued, equivalent to wealth, honor, or pleasure. It is an end in itself, not the means to an end.Properly understood, therefore, when John Locke and Thomas Jefferson wrote of “the pursuit of happiness,” they were invoking the Greek and Roman philosophical tradition in which happiness is bound up with the civic virtues of courage, moderation, and justice. Because they are civic virtues, not just personal attributes, they implicate the social aspect of eudaimonia. The pursuit of happiness, therefore, is not merely a matter of achieving individual pleasure. That is why Alexander Hamilton and other founders referred to “social happiness.”

Jefferson and his peers lived this ideal: many men of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries used the leisure time afforded them by their wealth to pursue science, natural history, philosophy, and/or politics (Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, and many of the Founding Fathers are examples).

Another place I found that referred to the Greek meaning of happiness was in a review of a book by a positive psychologist named Martin Seligman. “Positive psychology” is a new discipline which, instead of studying mental illness, concentrates on helping people develop more fulfilling lives. Martin Seligman is a prominent researcher in this field, and one of his interests is what makes people happy.

From a review of his book, Authentic Happiness: 

[Seligman] makes an interesting and significant distinction between pleasure and gratification. He draws on the work of Aristotle and of the notion of “eudemonia,” a concept akin to gratification. The state of happiness or gratification (eudemonia) is attainable only by activity consistent with noble purposes. In a nutshell, when we focus on causes outside ourselves that benefit humankind and utilize our unique signature strengths, we transcend to higher and higher planes of authentic happiness. The book includes a lucid discussion of the distinction between gratification (deep, meaningful, and a social virtue) and pleasure (shallow and temporary).

So the meaning of “happiness” in the Declaration of Independence means developing ourselves to our maximum capacity in order to contribute to society. Fascinating. But this information stands in stark contrast to the main essay in that issue of Time, “The Happiness of Pursuit.” One-third of the this article concerns money and its relation to our happiness. The author mentions some recent studies showing an increase in “subjective well-being” that correlates with higher income, and concludes, “Rich isn't just better; it’s much better.”

The statistics in the article are pretty dismal; we seem to be an increasingly unhappy people:

Since 1972, only about one-third of Americans have described themselves as “very happy,” according to surveys funded by the National Science Foundation. Just since 2004, the share of Americans who identify themselves as optimists has plummeted from 79% to 50%, according to a new Time poll. Meanwhile, more than 20% of us will suffer from a mood disorder at some point in our lifetimes and more than 30% from an anxiety disorder. By the time we're 18 years old, 11% of us have been diagnosed with depression.

Maybe the reason we’re so unhappy is because we profoundly misunderstand the meaning of happiness. Too many of us confuse it with money and material possessions.

Dr. Seligman proposes that happiness has three dimensions that can be cultivated:

1. “The pleasant life” is realized if we learn to savor and appreciate such basic pleasures as companionship, the natural environment and our bodily needs.
2. We can remain pleasantly stuck at this stage or we can go on to experience “the good life,” which is achieved by discovering our unique virtues and strengths and employing them creatively to enhance our lives.
3. The final stage is “the meaningful life,” in which we find a deep sense of fulfillment by mobilizing our unique strengths for a purpose much greater than ourselves.

Money-Driven Medicine

Time magazine recently published a massive article on health care, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” by Steven Brill, that should be read by every citizen of this country. Prepare to be disgusted and outraged as you read it. The noble field of medicine has been turned into a machine to manufacture profits.

I have had a couple of personal experiences with this machine lately.

Last fall my husband had a respiratory infection he just couldn’t shake. When he went to his doctor he was given a chest X-ray and the technician who read the X-ray said there was a strange spot on his lungs. Later that day the doctor called Arthur and suggested he have an MRI the next day, as if this was a matter of life and death.

Arthur didn’t go for the MRI right away, but after a couple of weeks, when he still felt bad, he went. Maybe the doctor was right to be so emphatic about getting the test, we thought, maybe there really was something seriously wrong in his lungs and it would be crazy to ignore it.

Arthur’s doctor is associated with our local hospital system, which is connected with the huge diagnostic center where he had the MRI. The test was negative; there’s nothing wrong with his lungs.

Mr. Brill wrote about the part that diagnostic machines play in medicine’s manufacture of profit:

According to a McKinsey study of the medical marketplace, a typical piece of equipment will pay for itself in one year if it carries out just 10 to 15 procedures a day. That’s a terrific return on capital equipment that has an expected life span of seven to 10 years. And it means that after a year, every scan ordered by a doctor in the Stamford Hospital emergency room would mean pure profit, less maintenance costs, for the hospital. Plus an extra fee for the doctor.

Another McKinsey report found that health care providers in the U.S. conduct far more CT tests per capita than those in any other country — 71% more than in Germany, for example, where the government-run health care system offers none of those incentives for overtesting.

Before the MRI Arthur was injected with a chemical that caused a very uncomfortable feeling of heat in his entire body. He probably had pneumonia and was subjected to this MRI for very dubious reasons if you were just considering his health. But there was nothing dubious about the reasoning from the point of view of our local medical profit-factory: Arthur has insurance so he should be fed into the machine.