WHY ECONOMICS IS A FAILED SOCIAL SCIENCE

Have you ever taken time to reflect on your life?
To be at peace with yourself and really reach in and peel all the layers back and honestly assess your level of happiness?
Will you take a moment and ponder the last moment you were truly overjoyed?
What was that moment, that segment of time? Who was there with you or were you on your own? What about that moment made you happy, made you glow and feel warmth?
Finally did that happy moment involve something you bought from a store or was it a personal moment with a person close to you?

 I ask these questions because I think many of us have been plugged into a life we have accepted as normal conforming to what we should be doing, how we should be doing it and why we have to do it. You know the drill, you are born, you go to school, then when you graduate you go to work, get married, buy a home, have 2.3 kids yada yada yada.

We need the latest and greatest, we throw out and waste and replace instead of fix and reuse. I am not just talking about our phones, computers, couches. I am talking about relationships, marriages, family, human interaction and all the really good things in life that bring true happiness. The simple things in life are those that make you most happy and human beings are warm and nurturing creatures at heart. It is difficult to remain focused on what really matters when we are being distracted by a constant barrage of consumerism and marketing campaigns leading us to believe that happiness is achieved from materialism and monetary wealth.

My last visit to church I noted that the simple act of shaking a strangers hand and offering them "a sign of peace" had the whole congregation smiling. That smile is happiness, it comes from the exchange between two people that forms a human connection. When you really think about it, instant gratification in the form of buying, obtaining and owning can never give you what connecting with another person can.

It seems to me we fill our lives with good intentions and a bunch of clichés that we push out one after the other in support of the way we should live our lives. It really frustrates me when I hear them. Money cant buy you love, money doesn't make you happy, nothing really matters other than family, friends and your health. How many of you reading this have trotted out one of those lines recently then immediately went on living your life as if they only apply if they directly affect you? Answer honestly.

So why does it take something profound to happen to your life directly before you spring into action and do something? If it is not your family or a close friend many have a moment where they feel a sadness before pushing it aside and moving on with their own life not giving it another thought. What is it that is distracting us from what really matters in life? Why do we pay it lip service and nothing more? After all nothing matters more than YOUR health and YOUR family. You know that money can't by YOU love and you know that money doesn't make YOU happy right?

But perhaps we should try and replace the YOU and YOUR with OUR and US and those clichés take on a whole new meaning, a more wholesome one and I would think a happier one. See if Johnny was YOUR son that was born with a terminal insidious disease you would likely start a foundation to raise money and awareness to find a cure for the disease that is consuming your child that you love more than life itself. If he isn't then you would do what? ponder, think and move on?

So what if he was our Son? Would that change anything? Perhaps it would. It seems this is a matter of perception, just change the YOU and YOUR remember? If you do then think about where we would all be on wars and poverty. It would be impossible to send our kids to a war or support any of our family killing another. I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone of US hungry or ostracized, discriminated against or downtrodden.

Empathy is a powerful emotion the world must relearn because the ability to put yourselves truly in the position of another is to truly understand how to live life. It needs to form the backbone of how we build society and how we do economics. A social science should concentrate focus on qualitative outcomes. To be a social science it cannot ignore the "social" part or attempt to redefine "social" so that it can be measured numerically as if it were a weight or a quantitative number.

To me social is an emotive thing. A "social worker" is usually a counsellor that sits and listens as you pour your heart out as you come to see what is truly troubling you. They listen and try and help you so there is a human aspect to it, a care or perhaps a love or feeling of acceptance. How do you quantify that feeling? How do you put a number on it? How much does that metaphorical "weight" that gets lifted off a persons shoulders contribute to a GDP number and why the hell are we only using GDP to measure our quality of life or if indeed we are improving the living standards and conditions for all the people in everyday life?

Taken from Wikipedia GDP is provided below. I have taken the liberty of highlighting in bold the key parts. I would ask as you read them to consider if measuring these things really captures the essence of how you define your "quality of life" and then whether it truly captures the spirit for "improving living standards for all the people in everyday life"
Here it is:

Gross domestic product (GDP) is defined by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as "an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident, institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs)."
GDP estimates are commonly used to measure the economic performance of a whole country or region, but can also measure the relative contribution of an industry sector. This is possible because GDP is a measure of 'value added' rather than sales; it adds each firm's value added (the value of its output minus the value of goods that are used up in producing it). For example, a firm buys steel and adds value to it by producing a car; double counting would occur if GDP added together the value of the steel and the value of the car.^[3] Because it is based on value added, GDP also increases when an enterprise reduces its use of materials or other resources ('intermediate consumption') to produce the same output.
The more familiar use of GDP estimates is to calculate the growth of the economy from year to year (and recently from quarter to quarter). The pattern of GDP growth is held to indicate the success or failure of economic policy and to determine whether an economy is 'in recession'.

So the "social science" that is economics uses one of its indicators to determine success or failure of economic policy as the pattern of growth in GDP. Put simply we should all be happier and regard economic policy as a social success if (Wikipedia definition not mine)  we are growing our "aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident, institutional units" holy crap I cant be bothered with the rest because it is pure an unadulterated BS.
If we produce more we should be happier. If we have "more stuff" whatever that is, we will be more comfortable, have more leisure time, freedom and a rise in living standards for ALL the people in EVERYDAY life.

I guess its true on the surface. I mean just look at where we are now. Dishwashers, cell phones, laptops, email, microwaves, air conditioning, refrigerators, internet, navigators, food processors, electric tooth brushes vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dryers. Living standards have to be on the rise with all of those technology breakthroughs, imagine having to hand wash your clothes and put them on a line to dry and right after that go out and chop some wood for the fire oh don't forget the trip to the post office to send off your best friends birthday card!

I recall watching a speech Professor Michael Hudson made on this very topic, his explanation is simple yet brilliant. Paraphrasing the speech (to the best of my memory) he said "Imagine being able to travel in a time machine back to the 1930's and place yourself in a stereotypical household" setting the scene for his message.
"Imagine saying to the mom (who was often the home maker) you in 70 years time you won't need to hand wash your clothes, there will be a machine that does that for you"
"You won't need to buy blocks of ice to keep the ice box cold, a machine does it all on its own"
"You won't  need to hang the clothes out on a clothes line, a mechanical dryer will take care of that"
"In the future you will not need the post office, you can send notes instantaneously from your home, oh and if you forgot you needed something you could call your husband on his way home from work on a portable phone and save him arriving home only to have to leave again to run the errand you needed run"
"There will be a machine built to keep your home at the desired temperature and no need to chop and gather wood for the fireplace or a need to be sweeping the floor when a machine just sucks up the dust you would normally have to sweep into piles to collect"

If you could go back in time and if you told that stereotypical family they would have all of this "stuff" that makes life easier, the "mod cons" as we call them. I wonder what the 1930's family would say? My guess is the stay at home Mom would say "so what does the mother of the future do with all of her spare time?" It is that question that makes you realize that "Mod Cons" short for modern conveniences are perhaps just "modern cons" because the conveniences they provide are paid for by a rapid rise in women in the workforce, increases in hours worked, stress on family and a lack of personal relationships.

Households are being forced to have both parents working, children go to day care, slowly the family unit and bond is being weakened. The pressure to keep up puts additional stress on marriages leading to higher rates of divorces and a dramatic increase in social dysfunction. These "Modern Cons" are distracting us from what it is to be happy and the drive to build more and better "stuff" is by all weights and measures the way economists determine GDP and apparently how well we are doing.

It doesn't make sense, at least not to me. The USA counts building bombs as part of their GDP, does that make you happy? It doesn't deduct the damages the bombs do when dropped on perfectly good buildings that need to be rebuilt or put a value on a precious life which is taken by the bomb. Just because it is one of "your" people it doesn't matter, until it affects "us" directly nothing changes, well it won't until we see things as a collective. Change can be slow especially when it comes to mindset and power so the point of this blog is to try and creatively raise awareness by asking you to start to "think" and stop learning.

Economics has turned into a sick joke of metrics and numbers in an attempt to quantify success or failure of economic policy. We use GDP to determine happiness, a production number, an output number, how much stuff we now have. That is not a social science. Social sciences should focus on real life happiness, do we care about each other, are we doing our best to find cures for diseases not building bombs because we do not trust our neighbor. GDP cannot measure love nor can it put a price on happiness, the obsession with numerical and quantification of data has dragged economics to a dark place away from the people and happiness. If you disagree then let me leave you with the same set of questions I posed in the beginning of this article with a supplementary one for you to ponder after your finished.

Have you ever taken time to reflect on your life?
To be at peace with yourself and really reach in and peel all the layers back and honestly assess your level of happiness?
Will you take a moment and ponder the last moment you were truly overjoyed?
What was that moment, that segment of time? Who was there with you or were you on your own? What about that moment made you happy, made you glow and feel warmth?
Finally did that happy moment involve something you bought from a store or was it a personal moment with a person close to you?

If your answer relates to a personal experience or interaction then it cannot be measured by GDP, you cannot measure love, put a price on someone's personal perception on the lyrics of a song or on a single act of kindness that doesn't cost money. If you understand this you should clearly  see that the way we do economics is wrong and why it has failed miserably at being a worthy participant in the social science arena? We need a happiness index not GDP and when economics has that in its core I will consider it once again a true by the people for the people social science.