film: The Economics of Happiness

[phantom power]

The Economics of Happiness gives good reason for a thinking person to believe that a shift in values combined with physical restraints on economic growth could be just the combination needed to bring people in globalized societies, whether the US, Europe, East Asia or now Ladakh itself, back to a kind of contentment enjoyed by our ancestors or sought by today's kingdom of Bhutan with its Gross National Happiness Index.

And thankfully, even as it looks back to the past, the film is 100% free of nostalgia or sentimentality. A battery of experts as clear-headed as they are warm-hearted, from Vandana Shiva to Michael Shuman and David Korten to UK Member of Parliament and eco-heartthrob Zac Goldsmith, ensures that the film's ideas for an economy beyond globalized capitalism are well thought-out and based on convincing physical science, economics and psychology.

There's plenty in this film to make you mad too, but I wound up feeling more sad than angry over what the Ladakhis and the rest of us had lost when we let multinational corporations and banks loose to roam the world in search of cheap labor and resources to exploit for quick profits. Since I was already motivated to act on the issues of peak oil and climate change, the film's positive vision provided valuable reassurance that I was on the right track, that it's not futile to push for a more local, human-scale world because that world is both possible and better than today's globalized economy.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-03-04/economy-so-old-its-new