Income Outcomes

The Business Herald Friday 13th August published an extract from Ross Gittins “The Happy Economist.”

In this article, Gittens suggests economists in the last hundred and fifty years have equated happiness with consumption but that material gratification is a narrow perspective given the complexity of the human psyche. Gittens says the human psyche is [only occasionally] “…capable of making carefully reasoned decisions because most of our decisions are instinctive, intuitive and emotional.” Therefore, if economists continue to promote “… economic growth as the solution to every problem,  they are exhibiting  a form of  “model blindness” that “…gives little consideration to such desirable “goods” [as] love, mental challenge and absence of stress.”
  
Qualitative felt values such as love etc are, of course, emotionally driven and this according to Gittens  is both a problem and a virtue. A problem because emotions are easily manipulated and, certainly history gives clear evidence of this.  Our landfills are testament to the way we’ve been conned into buying things we don’t really need.

On the other side of the ledger, Gittens argues that if we were totally rational and without emotion we would have no motivation as “…we would be constantly weighing up the pros and cons to such an extent we would fail to make any sort of choice at all.”

From all of this we can take it that Gittens main thesis for “The Happy Economist”, is that we need to recalibrate our values and move away from our dependence on consumerism to gratify our emotions.   To this effect Gittens cautions “…were resources infinite then there’d be no need for efficiency. Since resources aren’t infinite, we need to use them efficiently unless we enjoy being poor….”

Such a message is unambiguous in suggesting that we should balance our rational and emotional imperatives and look closely at our incomes and re-adjust our thinking about the value of the goods we are purchasing.

Gittins does not suggest this will be easy given how much our realities have been shaped by external influences such as the driving competition for possessing manufactured goods and our need to impress, friends, family and neighbours. However if we can ration our desire for consumer goods and see “goods [such] as love, mental challenge and absence of stress…” as desirable then we could more fully utilise our capacity for being intelligent, compassionate and creative beings.

As French Christian philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin says “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.”

De Chardin’s message gains traction for most people by clearly suggesting we all have all the internal resources we need to create a meaningful and purposeful life.

Of course there’s going to be no quick fix to our current economic woes but, survive it we will, and, if we choose to take more responsibility for our decisions by reassessing our values and reapportioning our incomes accordingly, we may well stand to increase our happiness quotient immeasurably.