Prosperity and Happiness

This short article offers a simple but profound alternative to the economic dogma of continually seeking to maximize profit and growth—seek instead to maximize personal happiness. Drawing on the work of Donella Meadows and others whose updated study, produced 30 years after the original Limits to Growth thesis that found existing economic policies and practices to be already unsustainable, the author cites Aristotle and thinkers from other cultures who proposed centuries ago that it was happiness not wealth or reputation that human beings truly desired. Recent international surveys of what makes people happy, and research into the theoretical consequences of expanding prosperity without material growth by reducing time devoted to work, are offered as examples of how educators and policy makers can act to raise general awareness that happiness is not linked to excessive wealth and that a sustainable environment combined with the optimum development of each individuals” mental, physical, and moral potential can in fact be achieved. There might be more professional economists in our society than people in any other profession. Yet, most of them appear to still accept without question the idea that growth is always beneficial. Conventional wisdom says that growth is essential to control unemployment and promote stability. As our current recession shows, when growth stops, demand falls, and business revenues drop, all leading to a reduction in levels of investment and the laying off of workers. In fact, as a nation's economy becomes more efficient, it actually generates more unemployment. At the same time, since most nations run their economies in deficit, there are strong arguments to support the idea that growth is needed to pay off our high levels of personal and national debt. These arguments are hard to refute. But the other side of the coin is: more growth necessarily brings leads to greater depletion of resources, and destruction of the environment, all contributing to global climate change and potential ecological collapse. The consequences of not limiting our growth—the “business as usual” route that our world is on—are so dire that it is high time we explore what might be done to limit economic and social growth while maintaining a functioning capitalist free market system. Though we have long recognized that there would be a limit to growth eventually, few macro-economic models have seriously examined just where that limit might lie. In 1972, commissioned by The Club of Rome, Meadows, Randers and Meadows of MIT compiled a study entitled: “Limits to Growth. ” 1 Using system dynamic theory and computer modeling, they produced a model called “World3. ” With this model they produced 12 different scenarios for Earth's future. World3 showed how the interaction of population growth and natural resource use necessarily imposed finite limits to industrial growth. The idea of such a limit was novel and somewhat controversial at the time and many, as expected, dismissed it as an alarmist doomsday prophecy. At that point in time, the world's economy with a global population at about 3.8 billion 2 was still comfortably within the planet's carrying capacity. Thus it seemed to many that the Earth still had plenty of room to grow.