Community Portal June 2010

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In the Spotlight: Chip Conley speaking at TED on Measuring what makes life worthwhile

Chip Conley speaks at TED on joie de vivre, Gross National Happiness and what GDP doesn't measure. See the full presentation below.


Media

See in the section below contains news articles and blogs that were released in June.


Progress in the News (June 2010)

In June 1991, the country embarked on a bold adventure by exposing to market vicissitudes its insulated manufactories, regulated (but pockmarked with soft spots) financial markets and inexperienced economic players. An economy, in those days, was about people, not giant factories and ships with riches. Though successive governments have secured the reformative underpinnings of the liberalisation process, it is to the credit of players in India that the sublime quest for economic equity and social justice has not been abandoned.


The Philippines still has much work to do in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly reducing poverty, a report released by the Overseas Development Institute and the United Nations Millennium Campaign revealed.


The resignation of the Federal Government's top mental health adviser, John Mendoza, is just the latest episode in the unfolding mental health crisis in Australia. Professor Mendoza, the chair of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health, quit last week saying he was deeply disappointed at the Government's lack of vision and commitment to mental health.


A UN report says India has made significant progress in poverty reduction and the number of poor people in the country is expected to half of the 1990 level by 2015.


The world continues to make advances towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), despite the global economic downturn, but the rate of improvement remains too slow and countries must step up their efforts if the MDGs are to be achieved by their target date of 2015, a new United Nations report says.


The U.N. Secretary-General said Wednesday that despite the international food, fuel and financial crises, there has been progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, of cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015. Secretary-General Ban said economic uncertainty cannot be an excuse to slow down development efforts. Rather, it should be a reason to speed them up.


African countries are making the most overall progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. So says a new analysis by the London-based Overseas Development Institute and the U.N. Millennium Campaign. The report’s been released prior to the G8 and G20 summits at week’s end in Canada.


The economy is apparently out of recession, but national debt remains over $13 billion. Unemployment might be declining, but the trade deficit is growing again.


We are told that the cuts and increased taxes expected in tomorrow's budget are the only answer to the economic crisis. But on Saturday I was one of over 250 people who attended the first international conference on the steady state economy, which explored another way.


CafeMom, the #1 website for moms, has developed a proprietary new index to measure and track the quality of moms' lives on a quarterly basis across major dimensions of their lives. The results were featured on ABC's "Good Morning America" as part of a new content-sharing partnership between the two organizations.


According to the study, Caught in the Time Crunch: Time Use, Leisure and Culture in Canada, released this month by the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, a quarter of us are not “rocking around the clock,” but rather working 24/7, owing to extended hours at the bank, gym and stores, and use of that ubiquitous portal to enterprise otherwise known as the BlackBerry. As a result, we suffer from greater stress, less shut-eye, and fewer moments, quality or otherwise, with our families.


That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as far as the Chinese leadership is concerned. Outsiders who think Chinese policymakers care only about fast growth miss the growing focus on social stability, and concern about how quickly the labor market tightened and inflation surfaced after the downturn.


Most Australians live in cities. Our last census (2006) found that two thirds of us were based in a 'major city'. Apart from having implications about what this means for how we connect to nature, it also means that if we want an understanding of how sustainable we are as a nation, we need to look to our cities.


Aviva report claims that overall happiness and self-esteem are influenced by our sense of financial control and not by how much we earn each year.


A blog created in 2008 in Kenya has become a worldwide sensation: Ushahidi - 'testimony' in Swahili- is a free software that collates information sent in by the public. Any one can text or email about a crisis, catastrophe or during an election. Information is gathered on maps that are accessible online. It made the headlines recently, during the Haiti earthquake, which saw some victims rescued thanks to texts and reports published in real time


HH the Dalai Lama, speaking to a large crowd in Arizona, US, said, “I believe that very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is toward happiness.”


In tending the green shoots of an economy such as Canada's as it emerges from this current recession, attention is usually focused on key economic indicators such as the growth of Gross Domestic Product. However, simply using GDP does not capture the totality of economic activity - good and bad.


Measuring life by the old GDP only causes problems. Destroying the environment, for example, can be taken as a positive, and investments count for more when they happen in the short rather than in the long run.


The global economic crisis provides industrialized countries with an opportunity to change the way they measure the success of their economies, said Bhutan’s prime minister, Jigme Y. Thinley.


The world has become less peaceful over the last year, despite a drop in the number of armed conflicts, according to this year's Global Peace Index (GPI).

Figures published today show homicide rates and violent crime had increased around the world, particularly in Latin America, where levels of peacefulness showed the biggest slip over the past 12 months.


ABS Measures of Australia's Progress: Summary Indicators 2009 (1383.0.55.001) looks beyond GDP and provides a set of indicators relating to aspects of Australian life across the economy, the environment and society.


The global economic crisis provides industrialized countries with an opportunity to change the way they measure the success of their economies, said Bhutan’s prime minister, Jigme Y. Thinley.


A group of business innovators and economists put together by Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science are looking for a tool that indicates how innovative we are.


Highlights from last month

Learning across most of the country has stalled. Is your city a bright spot?


When it comes to mental health, the Internet gets a bad rap. There are countless studies that suggest regular access to the Internet is linked to stress, anxiety and addiction.


Does our quality of life improve when our economy grows by 2 percent?


What differentiates a thriving life from one spent suffering?


Blogs on Progress (June 2010)

We have to acknowledge that GDP growth was a good thing while the nation (and global economy) was like a little kid. However, we also have to point out that GDP growth has exceeded the optimum for the planet as a whole, and especially in certain nations that are already very wealthy or waste a lot of resources.


The African Development Bank (ADB) took the initiative to gather the African ministers and bank governors to debate the world financial crisis which has been raging for some time, and about which the world experts say that the poorest among the African countries will be the most affected.


Success is defined as an event that accomplishes its intended purpose. Countries around the world have their own definitions of success. These metrics determine how they rank against other countries and include; Gross Domestic Product, Press Freedom Index, Human Development Index, military spending and so on.


The fantasy bubble is fast approaching to an end with the peak oil forecasts as a visual reality in- waiting. Power, prosperity and poverty are all trials in human affairs and transitory phenomenon. Was the discovery of oil a conspiracy (“fitna”) for the Arabs to change the originality of thinking, beliefs, values and passion for Islam as successful system of human life?


In the time it takes to make a cup of tea, a nuclear missile can be launched from one country and detonated in another country.


There's been a lot of talk about happiness as a kind of sub-theme of the sustainability movement. At first it seems like a somewhat odd juxtaposition, until you consider the way that our consumer societies have been plundering the planet in search of that elusive state of mind.


This is a nice object lesson in the inadequacy of GDP as a measurement of societal well-being.


There's a new movement around the world among social scientists, economists and community leaders to measure quality of life — and to factor it into the metrics used to gauge the health of the economy.


You may have noticed that the subject of happiness is hot right now. But the interest in happiness is not entirely new. Once upon a time, in a far-off land of green valleys and soaring mountains, a boy of 16 was crowned King — and began in a quiet way to change the world. The year was 1972 — not so long ago. The faraway land was a tiny Himalayan Kingdom called Bhutan, thought of by many as the model for Shangri-La.


The Genuine Progress Indicator Could Provide an Environmental Measure of the Planet's Health


Highlights from Last Month

Those who cry foul over the lack of women in top political jobs are relying on faulty logic


While the notions of Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) dominate the American political and economic landscapes, Bhutan employs notions of "Gross National Happiness" to determine how it fares as a nation.


Gross Domestic Product - is a concept not much discussed outside economic circles.


(...) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has been engaged in a comprehensive project to examine the progress of societies in order to ensure that economic policymaking focuses on improving human welfare, broadly construed. But even though GDP or income should not be the only goal of our strivings, we can go one step further and recognize as well that happiness itself, at least to the extent that the term is associated with immediate rather than long-lasting feelings and emotions, should not be our only goal either. (...)


Debates

The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P, New York Times Discussion

Economists and even governments now claim there might be better ways to take measure of a country’s wealth and happiness.


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