A few months ago, No Impact Man drew a graph showing his interpretation of the connection between quality of life and consumption.
Yesterday’s pictures of the Cuban people eagerly snapping up electronics in the stores, made me think of how the No Impact Man‘s graph can be applied not just on a personal, but also a country level. Cubans want in on the consumerist orgy, and we cannot deny them that right, even in the face of the looming global warming threat. Just as we can’t prevent the Chinese or the Indians. Similarly, some of the poorest developing countries in Africa are lacking even the most basic necessities, and yearning for material goods to improve their lives. All are on the left side of the curve. Our job as good neighbors should be to help them get what they want and need, so that they can catch up to us and reach the apex.
Maybe we should listen to James Speth, author of “The Bridge at the End of the World” as he suggests that “We need a new story”? What he means by that, is we, the Western folks, are on the right side of the curve, where more things not only do not make us happier, but instead lead us to become more and more dissatisfied with our lives. At some point, we have to stop and ask ourselves, how can I lead my life differently so that I am more ful-filled, not ‘fake-filled’? New happiness research shows that we are happiest when we give, not when we take. Place this in the context of the people on the left side of the curve, and you can connect the dots.
La Marguerite 
I agree that there needs to be a “new story” or vision, which needs to be genuine, achievable, healthy, and etc. of course.
And I agree that it needs to incorporate the latest understanding of human health and happiness. For example, a great book that I’ve mentioned before is Sir Richard Layard’s “Happiness: Lessons From a New Science.” (I like the concept of the curve and the basic point you are making, but we’d want to make sure that we all reasonably understand the real, though approximate, shape of the curve, the assumptions, and so forth.)
Although the “task” of doing this involves substantial thought and balancing of factors, of course, I actually don’t think that the substantive task is as hard as another task, namely, getting the best people together to do it. Put another way, I think the thinking is actually easier than the “getting together.”
People, it seems, usually get together with other people in their same disciplines or, in some cases, with other people (perhaps in different disciplines) who have the same ideologically-driven solution in mind even before the analyses and creative thinking begin. So, we have scientists getting together with other scientists, economists with economists, philosophers with philosophers, children with children, and so forth, OR we have people on the far right getting together with others on the far right, or people on the far left getting together with others (you guessed it) on the far left.
In any case, that’s it for now.
Cheers.
Thanks Jeff. I agree with you that multidisciplinary tends to be shunned from the English language. This is too bad, given that global warming requires that all disciplines do not just work in parallel, but together, with lots of cross-pollination to speed up the discovery and implementation of solutions.
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