The Most Revolutionary Act

Economics of Happiness

The Economics of Happiness (2011)

Film Review

The term “economical relocalization,” which has been around about four years, describes the global movement of loosely knit Transition Towns and other grassroots networks working to strengthen local and regional economies and systems of food and energy production. I myself was unacquainted with the term until I came across it in the promotional materials for the Economics of Happiness. Most of the last six years of my life have been focused on grassroots relocalization activities. For four years, I helped run a local mutual credit system (an alternative monetary system allowing people on a fixed income to purchase goods and services from each other). During the same period, I have been a strong and vocal supporter of New Plymouth’s farmers’ market, as well helping to start a local community garden. Along with a group of local energy engineers and other members of Grey Power, I also (successfully) lobbied New Plymouth District Council to promote and support locally produced “distributed” energy (for example local wind farms and grid-connect solar electricity) systems.

What I like best about Economics of Happiness is learning I am part of a global movement to strengthen local communities economically and politically. What I dislike most is the title, which suggests the film relates in some way to New Age spirituality. I have found books and films that smack of New Age touchy-feeliness are often a turn-off for blue collar activists.

The 2011 film, narrated by Helena Norberg Hodge, is based on her 1991 book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh and her 1993 film by the same name. The book and both films draw their inspiration from the nearly forty years Norberg-Hodge has spent living and working in Ladakh, a small Himalayan region in the India-controlled (and disputed) state of Jammu and Kashmir. The beginning of Economics of Happiness includes footage from the 1993 film. It also includes substantial documentary footage on the global economic crisis and the impending global ecological crisis, a consequence of runaway climate change and mass species extinction.

In addition to examining extreme weather events, mass unemployment, extreme income inequality and skyrocketing energy and food costs, the Economics of Happiness also focuses on “the crisis of the human spirit.” It doesn’t do so from a religious or New Age perspective. Instead it looks at the epidemic level of loneliness, alienation and demoralization that seems to accompany wholesale industrial globalization.

The Psychological Devastation of Globalization

The film opens with the same narrative Norberg-Hodge recounts in her earlier Ancient Futures film. We are shown the “before” image of Ladakh, a rich thriving culture in which residents live in large spacious homes, enjoy respectable amounts of leisure time and have no concept of unemployment. Then we have the “after” image where, thanks to globalization, cheap (government subsidized) food, fuel and consumer goods that have flooded the region and destroyed most residents’ traditional livelihoods. Previously pristine communities face rising levels of air and water pollution, while Ladakhi teenagers are continuously bombarded with consumerist messages.

It’s heartbreaking to see the psychological effect of all this. Most young Ladakhi have come to regard themselves as backwards and poor, while the communities they live in face rising racial tensions, juvenile delinquency and epidemic levels of psychological depression.

The Destructive Nature of Urbanization

The film goes on to sketch the mechanics of globalization, stressing the deregulation that forces small self-contained regions like Ladakh to open their markets to foreign goods, which quickly supplant higher priced local products. Norberg-Hodge paints an even uglier picture of urbanization, an inevitable result of forcing millions of small formers off their land. In discussing the growing global scarcity of fossil fuels, water and food, she stresses that life in a large city is vastly more resource intensive than rural living. All city residents rely on food, energy and water transported from some distant source, while they burn up additional fossil fuels transferring their waste products as far away as possible. She stresses that most city residents tend to go along with the massive ecological and social devastation their lifestyle produces because they don’t see it. The damage often occurs on the other side of the world.

Rebuilding Local Communities and Economies

The solutions Norberg-Hodge offers for all these problems are similar to those proposed by an increasing number of “latter day” economists. First and foremost we must acknowledge that humankind has exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity – that the corporate drive for continual economic growth must end. Secondly people of conscience need to opt out of corporate economy to facilitate the creation of more efficient and environmentally accountable regional and local economies. In addition to transitioning to local energy and food production, people need to exert collective pressure to break up large investment banks and replace them with local retail banks and credit unions. State and local governments need to stop giving subsidies and tax breaks to large corporations and start supporting their own local businesses. Not only do small businesses create the vast majority of jobs, but they don’t pack up after a few years to move to overseas.

Norberg-Hodge also sees this process of rebuilding local communities as the only way to address the “crisis of the human spirit.” She believes the latter is a direct result of the demise of community engagement that has accompanied globalization and urbanization.  Although the process is most striking in remote regions like Ladakh, where it occurred suddenly, no region of the developed or developing world has escaped it.

The film ends on an extremely optimistic note, with numerous examples of international and community organizations supporting people in reclaiming their lives from multinational corporations.