Is making
concerns about the economy and wealth paramount over other concerns destroying
our health and the environment? How does
this issue manifest itself in a Slovak context as compared to an American
(or more specifically a Hoosier)
context? What can be done on an
individual, social and/or political level to make sure that profit does not become
the only factor in making decisions?
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Money makes the world go down
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GDP is a monetary measure of a market and although in countries with higher GDP there tends to be higher living standard, this is not a universal law. GDP does not reflect overall health, environment, or inequalities in society. Wellbeing is a fairly vague concept influenced by many factors difficult to measure. As the article states, “Unlike health or happiness, money can be counted, so we use it to keep score”. There are other alternative measures of economic wellbeing such as HDI (Human Development Index), OECD Better Life Index, Happiness Index etc. They have various indicators typically including national income per capita, education level, life expectancy, environment…
ReplyDeleteBut as you may noticed, these are far less popular measures of comparison of countries. The mentality is to gain more and more capital even at the expense of environment and eventually health. We often seek a “quick fix” to our problems and do not care much about the long-term consequences of our actions. We can take the burning of coal mentioned in the article as an example. There is an evident benefit of lower price, which allows greater spending on the wellbeing of citizens. However, the health risks listed in the article are not that apparent, as the causes of these conditions are difficult to trace back and provide confirming evidence. Their appearance is also not sudden. The cases are spread over long period of time thus they do not attract that much publicity. When there are casualties of a flood people find it unacceptable and consequent measures are immediately taken. But the slow deaths caused by air pollution do not get the attention. And so, we keep on shortsightedly polluting and destroying our environment “ignoring the cost in human suffering, medical bills, lowered life expectancy, and ecological damage, as well as the cost from extreme weather events”. Such as the above-mentioned flood, that could have been prevented.
A central theme of this essay is wealth perception. Sanders discusses how society’s perception of wealth is limited to mostly financial wealth. To support his claim, he brings up numerous aspects of culture, which seem to reflect the excessive focus on financial wealth. An important example, in my opinion, that Sanders only mentions briefly when discussing GDP, is corruption in politics. Corruption exists in part because of society’s skewed view of wealth. Consider a politician, who has been conditioned to put an excessively high value on financial wealth. He is less likely to examine the consequences of taking a bribe and therefore more likely to become corrupt. Admittedly, there are more critical reasons for corruption but wealth perception certainly plays a small role in this phenomenon. This goes to show that wealth perception influences many aspects of our lives, even more than we realise. That is the reason why this problem is so hard to tackle. But there is a possible solution – to focus public discourse on the issue and make people aware of the manifestations of this problem. This is what Sanders is trying to achieve by publishing this essay. One might argue that spreading awareness might seem like too much of an idealistic approach. Maybe it is, but it is the best we’ve got.
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