Why sustainable development is important: Happiness and well-being

(intriguing music) - In this chapter, I want to begin to describe why the concept of sustainable development is so important, why it is so important that we orient towards the three objectives of prosperity, social fairness, and environmental sustainability. The core of my argument is that these will produce human wellbeing, and that it is human wellbeing, happiness if one wants to put it that way, that really should be our basic objective in choosing our economic, social, and political institutions. Of course, there are many ways that societies are organized, many ways that economies are organized, and thinkers throughout the ages have offered their thoughts about the goals, the proper orientation for politics and for economy. One of the most famous of these thinkers, somebody that I will refer to several times in this course, is Adam Smith, the great Scottish Enlightenment thinker of the middle of the 18th century, who wrote the most important text of modern economics, "The Wealth of Nations," and published that great book in 1776, the first year of the Declaration of Independence of the US states. Actually, also a key year in the world economy because it was a breakthrough year for the new steam engine, which would transform the world with industrialization. Well, in "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith asked a specific question: how can societies achieve wealth? And indeed, I think that question has been a motivating factor for thinkers and politicians and business leaders for the two and a half centuries almost since that time. The question is, how can we get rich as a society, as a community, as a world? And wealth is measured in a variety of ways. We measure the flow of annual production as the gross domestic product of each country, and we ask how countries compare in their gross domestic product per person. Well, a second idea is how can societies be most powerful? How can those at the top of the power pyramid stay in power? One great thinker associated with that is Nikolai Machiavelli, a Florentine who lived in the early part of the 16th century and wrote a famous book delivered to the Prince of Florence, to the Medicis, on how to stay in power. That book, "The Prince," is a manual of how to hold power. It is not specifically or even primarily about how to get rich, but how to stay in control. And this too is one of the aims that thinkers, strategists, and politicians, of course, have pursued for centuries. Now, there's a third idea that I find especially attractive. It actually started with perhaps the greatest thinker of all in the Western tradition, and that is Aristotle the great philosopher who almost single-handedly invented political science and invented the science of ethics. He wrote, of course, two monumental works in this area, the "Politics," which discussed ways that politics should be organized, looking at how the city-states of his ancient Greece compared. And he wrote famous tracts on ethics, the most famous of which is "The Nicomachean Ethics" for his son Nicomachus. And these were intertwined because for Aristotle, it was clear the goal wasn't wealth. Indeed, he more or less disparaged that goal. He said wealth is important but it can't be the end objective. It's not power. He said, "Power for what?" And his answer was wellbeing. That the purpose of politics is nothing less than the wellbeing of the polity, of the political community. For Aristotle, that was the city-state, the polis. And for Aristotle, the purpose of the polis, the purpose of this political organization, was what in Greek he called eudemonia, which we translate today as happiness or a thriving life. From my point of view, Aristotle had it exactly right. We are not in it for power per se. We shouldn't be in it for wealth per se. Wealth can bring misery, dissension, division. We should be in it for the wellbeing of the people. And it turns out, 2,300 years after Aristotle conceived of this core goal of politics and described in his thoughts how that could be achieved, that we have better and better tools to measure wellbeing, analyze how different parts of the world are actually achieving or failing to achieve wellbeing, and thereby get some guidance on what kinds of economic, political, and social institutions are truly conducive to produce the wellbeing for their people. Now, when we speak about wellbeing or happiness, there generally are two different kinds of ideas that modern psychologists have explored. One is the short term idea, are you happy? How do you feel? You feeling fine? That is called affective wellbeing, emotional wellbeing. Psychologists ask people, "Are you smiling? Did you smile? Did you feel good yesterday?" There's a second kind of wellbeing, a more reflective or contemplative kind of wellbeing, really the kind that I think best corresponds to Aristotle's eudemonia. That is called evaluative wellbeing. How do you evaluate your life? Are you living a good life? Are you having the kind of life that you hope to have? And psychologists also ask people this question. They ask it, in fact, all over the world to hundreds of thousands of people each year in a particular survey carried out by Gallup International. One that I know well, because with colleagues I've been studying the results of that survey for many, many years and publishing the results in the annual World Happiness Report, which you can find online. Now, that survey asks people a particular question about their evaluative happiness. Here's the question in paraphrase. "Imagine that life is like a ladder and that the bottom rungs of the ladder are the worst kind of life you can imagine, and the top rung of the ladder is absolutely the best life you can imagine. Suppose that the rungs of the ladder go from the bottom at 0 to the top rung at 10. Where on the ladder of life do you stand? Think about it for a moment. How do you feel about your life from the 0 rung to the top rung, 10?" People are asked that question in more than 150 countries around the world, thousands per country, and we can study the results. That question is called the Cantril Ladder, named after the psychologist, Cantril, who devised this. And psychologists have come to appreciate that the answers that people give to this are meaningful, thoughtful, and a window into what it is that produces sustainable development. Well, we can compare these different views of what society should do by looking at the rankings. How do countries actually compare if we look at them from the point of view of their life satisfaction, or their income per capita, or their achievement of sustainable development, meaning how their societies are producing, coming close to the three objectives of prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability? We now have good measures for all three of these dimensions, all three of these rankings. We can look at the Gallup International survey to look at life satisfaction or evaluative happiness. We can look at the national income accounts produced in a consistent manner across the world to see how countries rank in wealth or in income per person, the kind of variable that Adam Smith would be perhaps most interested in in terms of the wealth of nations. And we can now look at how countries are or are not coming close to the triple bottom line, the economic, social, and environmental bottom line of sustainable development by looking at an index that the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network produces every year measuring how close countries are to achieving these Sustainable Development Goals. If you look at the top dozen countries in progress towards the SDGs, and the top dozen countries in terms of reported evaluative wellbeing or happiness, you find that eight of them are on both lists: Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, and Netherlands. All European countries, mostly Northern European countries, and, as I will describe throughout the course, mostly social democratic in orientation, this idea that the particular institutions adopted in Northern Europe and especially in Scandinavia have a special affinity towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, but apparently also towards achieving happiness. Now, if you look at the richest countries in the world, it's quite a different list. Qatar, Luxembourg, Singapore, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, the United States comes in 10th, Saudi Arabia, and the Netherlands. There are a couple of overlaps with the Sustainable Development Goal countries, there are some overlaps with the happiest countries, but by no means are the richest countries per person also the happiest countries. Indeed, I take special note as a citizen of the United States that the US does not rank well in its progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. The US ranked 35th in the 2018 rankings. The United States does not rank very well on the happiness goals. The US ranked 18th in 2018. While the US is quite rich, it's the richest large economy in the world. Well, it seems that you can get quite rich but wealth doesn't necessarily get you the happiness. And that indeed is a major theme of these lectures, that if we're really after wellbeing it's not enough to pursue the wealth of nations. We have to pursue the sustainable development of nations. (intriguing music)