It has finally struck some members of the British Government that repeating over and over again “the economy, stupid!” isn’t making the country any happier. Why is this such a surprise?

3MT : Worshipping the great god GDP [ 4:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (193)

In Communist East Germany the electorate occasionally refused to co-operate with the authorities when it came to rubber-stamping elections. This was frustrating for the authorities, but there was a solution, as Bertolt Brecht satirically identified:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?¹

Similar thoughts must have been coursing last week through the mind of Tom Harris, transport minster and MP for Glasgow South. On his blog he wrote:

In our own country today… our citizens have never been so wealthy. … when we do go shopping, whether for groceries or for clothes, we spend money in quantities that would have made our parents gasp… So why is everyone so bloody miserable?

Of course, following this, the fan was hit. Mr Harris was actually attempting to ask an interesting question², but the galling thing is the question comes from a minister in the government which for so long has said that the over-riding concern and measure of the country’s well-being is “the economy, stupid”. How we pay people, how we organise our education and health systems, how we arrange the legal justice system, how we entertain ourselves, or travel, or work, all these areas of public and private life have been subject to the needs and interest of “the economy”. If it affects GDP, Gross Domestic Product, then we want to think twice about doing it.

Thank goodness that we are beginning to see the beginnings of some scholars and thinkers who are willing to attack the rule of the great god GDP. Richard Layard, of my alma mater the LSE, is advising the British government that national happiness is not simply dependent on economic growth: in fact, “Happiness is inversely related to income at higher levels of income because of the declining marginal utility of getting richer”³. In other words, making GDP bigger actually makes people unhappier (and that also has an economic cost). But it goes further: Jonathan Rowe (political commentator for the Washington Monthly), appeared before a US Senate Committee on Commerce in March this year, in which he forcibly and convincingly argued that GDP is not only a meaningless measure, but positively harmful. GDP and “the economy” are just concepts that measure quantity; they say nothing about quality, and, in fact, actions and choices which enhance people’s quality of life (and thus their happiness) actually damage the economy:

Cooking at home, talking with kids, talking instead of driving, involve less expenditure of money than do their commercial counterparts. Solid marriages involve less expenditure for counseling and divorce. Thus they are threats to the economy as portrayed in the GDP. By that standard, the best kids are the ones that eat the most junk food and exercise the least, because they will run up the biggest medical bills for obesity and diabetes.⁴

To which, my response, and the response of the Church, should be “No surprise there, Sherlock!” After all, didn’t Jesus tell us the parable of the rich man, who made the dreadful and deadly mistake of placing his happiness, his meaning and his soul in the quantity of possessions he had accumulated? (Luke 12:14-24). Won’t worshipping the great god GDP lead us to the same awful conclusion:

“You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

1. Bertolt Brecht (1898 –1956), Die Lösung, from John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds., Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956, (New York: Methuen Inc., 1976), p. 440. [↩]
2. it wasn’t entirely a so-called Kinsley Gaffe. [↩]
3. Stuart Jeffries, ‘Will this man make you happy?’, The Guardian, Tuesday June 24, 2008 [↩]
4. Testimony of Jonathan Rowe before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, on “Rethinking the Gross Domestic Product as a Measurement of National Strength,” March 12, 2008. [↩]