Progress of economy = progress of happiness?

The country is growing with its economy. We all want the economy to grow which is the basic metric on which our happiness is measured. This is also a basic assumption with which most of us turn the economic times or business section of our newspapers. But a book and a jammed parking at select city walk mall in Delhi forced me to rescan the question of my happiness.

Let me start with the incident which happened in the mall at Saket. We were returning home from a late night movie and it took us approximately 45 minutes to crawl our way out of the underground parking. After 45 minutes of tiring wait Harsh paid 80 Rupees. It would have cost less than Rs 80 to reach home if we had opted to walk out and catch an Auto-rickshaw. I didn't pay the parking charge but I would have felt cheated if I had to pay. Harsh suddenly justified the parking charge based on the land cost at this location and equating it to the amount it would have cost to own the same size of land in Saket. Obviously, from his calculation the parking charge should appear more like the steal for the day. But from my point of view, someone is definitely cheating and its not Harsh!

Though Harsh was instinctive in his calculation but if provoked he would have come up with other arguments to justify the parking charges, which would have probably included, cost of maintainance, salary for 30 odd people standing at parking floor to guide the shoppers, electricity charges, window shopping charges etc would have definitely justified the Rs 80 charged for parking a car for 4-5 hours on a weekend. But shouldn't capitalism also promote free market in which price of goods should be regulated by mutual consent of seller and buyer? We live in a capitalist society where the distribution of wealth follows the bell curve, which means that most part of our society will not be as privileged in terms of inheritance, IQ, opportunity to earn enough to pay for window shopping at Malls. And no one should be given the right to assume that if a person owns a car, he would also be happy to pay Rs 80 for parking.

This is where I come to my main intension. As human beings, the way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion – political or economic or religious or social – which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time.

This is where we find something very big, like the select city walk mall in Saket, and we instinctively tend to justify the parking charge by looking at the size and forget what we are paying for... Eventually, not feeling unhappy about it but would definitely not feel happy if given a chance to vote. So capitalism does not promote democracy eventhough a common understanding says that democracy promotes capitalism.

Its obvious that capitalism has failed in human terms. It is not only affecting the human idea of happiness but also destroying the soil fertility, bio-diversity and atmosphere. Capitalism founded on the ideology of unlimited economic growth and industrialized mass production is not only unsustainable as we are constantly eating away the natural resources which will will be consumed eventually... it is blatantly harmful

In the age of ecology even socialism is not enough. It too is human centric, eco-destructive and advocates industrial mass production. It offers an economic system of the old paradigm. Now, if neither socialism nor communism nor capitalism, then what? We need new politics for the new paradigm, a system for the age of ecology, a system which is embedded in the interest of people, all people and also in the interest of the earth and all life upon it, human life as well as animal life, plant life, earth life, air life and water life. We need a system which replaces our capitalist world view with a naturalist world view, and shifts our society from capitalism to “naturalism”.

Counting money is not enough. Money is not wealth, it is only a measure of wealth, the real wealth is people, communities, cultures, land, forests, rivers. The bottom line has to include social and natural loss and gain as well as financial.