Film Review: The Economics of Happiness

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




Film Review: The Economics of Happiness
Why are we so lonely when we have so much? Beyond the unhappiness of a disconnected world are new—and very old—ways we can turn it around.

by Kristy Leissle
posted Apr 14, 2011


Economics of happiness poster“Lonely people have never been happy people. And globalization is creating a very lonely planet.” So says activist and author Vandana Shiva in The Economics of Happiness, an incisive documentary that links today’s global crises (climate change, terrorism, the financial crash) with personal malaise (rising levels of depression and the pervasive emptiness of consumer society). The cause? The macroeconomic structure of globalization, a massive conglomerate of megabanks, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions, all constantly expanding in a deregulated environment that takes profit, and never people, as the raison d’être of all things.

The cure? Localization. A return to community, where people can forge connections with neighbors instead of advertising models, and buy food from a nearby farmer instead of the industrial agricultural machine. It is the economic and social bond among fellow citizens, and their very interdependence, insists economic analyst Helena Norberg-Hodge, that allows them to be truly happy.

Interdependence is not something to which we aspire in a culture that glorifies the self-reliant pioneer and solo entrepreneur. Nor is the local, as the film poignantly shows through the case of Ladakh, a remote Himalayan village that went from self-sufficient, equitable, and compassionate to fragmented, poor, and violent due to economic development along a Western model and the introduction of cheap imported foods and Western media. Globalization convinced the Ladakhis that their culture was shamefully primitive, and they abandoned its best features within a decade, deciding, as so many of us do, to strive instead for a cosmopolitan, “global” life.

The Economics of Happiness captures the incredible waste of global capitalism through eye-opening examples: apples grown in the U.K., flown to South Africa to be waxed, then flown back and sold in British supermarkets; tuna caught on the East Coast of the United States, shipped to Japan for processing, then sold back in America. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/can-animals-save-us/film-review-the-economics-of-happiness

[closeupready]

1. The Western way of life discourages non-familial bonds, and rewards

those who sever such bonds when they conflict with the pursuit of material gain. And then the rich wonder why they are so lonely. :wtf:

[Hannah Bell]

2. You know, it's hard to believe that flying goods around the planet to have

various things done to them in the production process could be either cost-efficient or resource-efficient. They say it is, but personally, I don't believe it.

I think it's promoted because someone gets a cut off each move. In the same way that e.g. mortgages were oversold, then sliced & diced, then resold - because finance capital got a cut off each transaction.