Upstream - Documentary #2: Welcome to Frome Pt. 3 – A New Cultural Vision

Episode Date: August 31, 2016

In this final episode of our 3-part series, "Welcome to Frome", we explore possible futures for the small Somerset town of Frome. ​ In this episode, we'll talk to some of the leading experts on why GDP and economic growth are flawed measures of wellbeing. Then we’ll travel to a small kingdom in south Asia, an indigenous village in the sierras of Peru, and the headquarters of Happy City in Bristol. We'll talk to the visionaries of new cultural paradigms. and ask them to reveal the secrets of happiness and wellbeing that are hidden right beneath our noses. How can Frome adopt a wellbeing strategy that helps to further the movements we discussed in episode 1 and which begins to bridge the divides we explored in episode 2? There's no simple solution, but we hope that this series will provide some food for thought in towns and cities like Frome all over the world. Featuring: Ha Vinh Tho PhD - Program Development Coordinator of GNH Centre in BHutan Martin Whitlock - Businessman, author, Co-Founder of StopGDP.org Inez Aponte - Founder of Growing Good Lives Martin Kirk - Co-founder of The Rules Liz Ziedler - Co-Founder of Happy City Richard Wilkinson - Co-author of The Spirit Level Maria Scordialos- Co-Founder of The Living Wholeness Institute Annabelle Macfadyen - Co-organizer, Home in Frome Music by: Molly Murphy (a million creatures) Annabelle Macfadyen Frome Street Bandits Theme music by Lanterns (Robert Raymond & Molly Murphy) This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A radio documentary series that is part of the Economics for Transition project. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

Join us as we journey upstream to the heart of our economic system and discover carnage stories of game-changing solutions based on connection, resilience, and prosperity for all. Imagine that you're standing

in a store. You're there to buy toothpaste. Lying in front of you, neatly on the shelves, you see all of your choices. Which do you reach for? Do you automatically scan for the cheapest tube? Would you rather have toothpaste made with all organic ingredients or all natural? How far away was it made? Does the company treat its employees well?

And what about you? How much money do you have to make this purchase? And how much time do you have to make this decision? Regardless of what you ultimately reach for, even if it is the least expensive choice, there are other things that are important to you besides monetary value. We are not homo economicus, even if our current economic system acts as if we are. The human being that underlies the current economic system, the so-called homo economicus, is actually sort of a monster. This is Dr. Ha Vin To, the program director of the Gross

National Happiness Center in Bhutan. Like a purely selfish, purely rational, competitive, just trying to maximize its own profit at any cost and minimize so-called disutilities like work and so so i think that's and in a way you could say the current economic system is a self-fulfilling prophecy you say okay that's the way human beings are so let's create a system that fits to these people. And then that's a system that you get, a system that is heartless, soulless, compassionless, competitive, winner-takes-it-all kind of approach to economics. And yeah, so we could go on and on. But these are the kind of some of the root problems of the current economic system. some of the root problems of the current economic system. It's these sorts of assumptions that have led us to the challenges as well as the impetus for innovation that we've heard about in Frum in episodes one and two.

In this third and final episode, we'll explore what could further support the changes that Frum is trying to bring about. But first, here's Martin Whitlock, founder of StopGDP.org. We think the economy is about money. It must be. Surely that's what it's all about. And that's exactly how governments, economists and big corporations would like us to think about the economy is about money it must be surely that's what it's all about and that's exactly how governments economists and big corporations would like us to think about the economy would like us to think about how we operate in terms of making our living and that sort of thing

but if you look at how people are how they live their lives actually money is way way down the list of their priorities money is a is a requirement in order to be able to acquire some of the things that they need but most of the really useful things we do in our lives we do for nothing so we look after our children we cook meals for ourselves and our families we clean the house we go for walks we do all sorts of sorts of things which are not directed in any way towards either making or spending money and actually i would say one of the most well the central of all of those is in our human relationships people value their relationships probably above anything else and there isn't or shouldn't be any money involved in that so people don't naturally live lives which are driven by money

values and and yet we are treated as homo economicus or economic person as it were as if we all are driven by our financial self-interests our material self-interests have always out to get as much as we possibly can for ourselves and we'll always do the best deal this was for example the principle upon which the denationalization the privatization of electricity and gas and water and telephones and things in britain was based on the idea that if it was an open market people had to compete, companies had to compete for customers and the companies would be more efficient and the customers would always go where the best deal was to be had. Well we know that's not the case. We know there's absolutely no evidence

to suggest that people are good at finding the best deal and particularly interested in finding the best deal and that any of this really improves the efficiency of the companies. what it does is it makes the companies very efficient at competing with their customers to get as much money out of them as possible but it hasn't made them very good at competing with themselves so people aren't like that people don't operate in the way that governments and classical economists and companies want them to and i'm pointing that out and saying let's organize a society around the way people actually are rather than the way in which we theorize that they should be. In ancient Greece, the word

crematistica referred to the practice of creating money or making money. And the word economics referred to the practice of how to get the most use value out of what we have for the longer term. This is Ines Aponte, founder of Growing Good Lives. So those are two different practices. So I'd say that economia in the way that it was practiced in ancient Greece is much closer to human scale development. And chromatistics is really what we have in a neoliberal capitalist society where the goal is to create as much money as possible.

And then we have the trickle-down effect and maybe people's needs will get met if we're lucky, but the focus of that economy is crematistic. Human-scale development is a development strategy that's focused on meeting human needs. We'll get more into that later. But for now, it seems that at some point, Western civilization began to conflate the separate ideas of money creation and economics, a dogma which has come to dominate politics today. Here's Martin Whitlock again. The mainstream parties, I think, have all become obsessed by the idea that wealth can only be created by wealth.

So all the focus is now on big business, it's on the corporate economy, it's on creating jobs, it's on trying to create money wealth that will filter down to other people and solve the problems in that way. And for more and more and more ordinary people, that simply isn't working and isn't going to work

and isn't going to happen. So what is not available, if you like, in politics is an argument which says we can more efficiently provide these sorts of economic frameworks for ourselves. We can work in a way which will support each other, which is collaborative rather than competitive, but the outcome will still be the sort of life that we recognise and that we want in our lives. And that, to me, doesn't seem to be on offer. Currently, the goal is economic growth, by and large. This is Dr. To again. The theory is that if you enhance economic growth,

all the rest will somehow naturally or magically or somehow come along and there will be the so-called trickle-down effect and people will become richer. A rising tide lifts all boats. Yeah, exactly. If you just think about it, a country is deemed to be doing well if its economy is growing. A country is deemed to be doing badly if its economy is shrinking. And that is such a simplistic logic. It's difficult to describe how simplistic that is.

This is Martin Kirk, founder and director of the organization The Rules. We heard from him way back at the beginning of episode one. We asked him about the number that everyone hates, but no one can get rid of. GDP is the measure of progress, which is the measure of measures, you might say, for how countries determine whether they are doing well or not. Well, GDP measures economic activity and has nothing in its own right to say about human well-being, health, sustainability, environmental sustainability. It is blind to most of that. It really doesn't make the difference between whether what fuels the growth has a positive or a negative impact on society. So last year, European Union decided to include drug trafficking and prostitution

in their GDP measurement, which is logical from a GDP point of view because it's financial transactions. is logical from a GDP point of view, because it's financial transactions. So you saw that the GDP was rising when you included prostitution and drug trafficking, because it's big business. And that's a typical symptom that, you know, even if what creates growth is something that is completely destructive for people, or for environment, or for society, from a GDP point of view, it doesn't make any difference and that's definitely one of the reasons why we have so many wars is that arms industry is one of the big contributor to gdp in many of the developed countries and and weapons are a fantastic product

they're self-destroyed you pay a missile i don't know like hundreds of thousands of dollars maybe a million dollars and then you shoot it and then it's destroyed. You have to replace it. So it's a perfect product from a GDP point of view. So to put it a bit more pointedly, imagine that the parents are very nice parents and take good care of their children and feed them well and give them a lot of support and educate them properly. And there's a wonderful atmosphere in the family,

so their children grow up to be happy and well and healthy. This will never happen in GDP, because none of that has been paid for. While if you're bad parents and you feed them junk food and don't educate them properly, and the kids get ill and stressed and have to go to the doctors and the psychologists, well, you will have to pay or someone will have to pay for all these services. So it will increase GDP.

So that's the absurd situation that being good parents is not as good for GDP as being bad parents. So it's a bit extreme, but just to make my point. but just to make my point, right? And likewise, many, many of the things that we know from our personal experience are really important in our life, like friendship and love and nature, but we don't pay for that. So it doesn't appear in GDP. Therefore, there's no focus on these things, because what you count counts.

What you measure is what you're attentive to, and public policies are driven by what is measured. So another example, if we think of rainforests, rainforests are a really useful thing that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, which we know is a good thing. It is also home to a great many biological resources. Most new drugs, for example, originate one way or another in nature and are

discovered in sort of odd parts of the world such as rainforests if we think of a rainforest as having value unfortunately none of that value is recognized by gdp until we cut the rainforest down we cut it down we turn it into logs or we put cattle to graze on the land or whatever we start generating a money income we start generating gd. But the rainforest itself has no value at all. So GDP is weird in that way. It only values things when we start to destroy them. It only values the environment when we start to consume it and use it. It has no value for the good things in our lives that don't have money transaction attached to them. I think many people working in the new economy are very aware now

that GDP is a terrible measure of anything which is useful in economics. So it's a technical measure of the amount of money activity in the economy, but it doesn't measure, and it was never intended to measure, how useful that activity is or to what extent it benefits people. And there are many organisations, the United Nations, the European Union, the OECD, the World Bank, these sort of organisations are very aware that this is a very deficient measure of useful economic activity. But it remains the only one which has widespread international acceptance

at a sort of government level. And it remains the measure upon which the markets rely when they want to consider, for example, the stability of an economy, the interest rate they may charge to their money into the economy, the soundness of an economy. It's all based on GDP. Is it going up or is it going down? So GDP is really hardwired into the way we think about the economy, but it's acknowledged as a really, really bad measure. If we measured the economy differently, if we measured what people value in their lives, and if we factored in many of the things which GDP measures as having value, if we factored them in as actually being costs,

which is what they are, then we would come out with a measurement which would favour looking at the economy in a different way. The idea of a cultural vision is the ultimate guiding logic to a culture or a society. And the guiding vision that we see in modern capitalist society is the idea of humans overcoming nature. Humans being superior to or overcoming nature and needing to perfect it and make it tame in order for us to live the richest, best lives we can. And the alternative cultural vision is the cultural vision that you see that has existed actually in the vast majority of cultures that have existed on this planet. We think that we live in a multicultural planet, and we do. And there, of course, are lots of different cultures. But at the highest level, capitalism is eradicating that diversity in our cultures, and placing above most cultural expressions, the capitalist cultural expression, which is this idea of constant capital growth,

in order to fuel innovation, in order to perfect the world, in order to make it safe for mankind. And I think we've become massively overbalanced and our cultural vision is now proving itself to be profoundly incommensurate with sustainability of life on earth, or life on earth potentially, but certainly of human life on earth. So that's the level of what you've got to be thinking. We've got to reorient our cultural vision. cultural vision is like the direction a river flows like down towards the sea it's the whole every bit of water in that river is flowing in that one direction a program is like a stick you stick in that river to change the movement of little bits of the water within it but still because they are part of the river however many sticks you put in

there you're not going to change the basic direction of flow of the river all you can do is stop it and so what you want to do is change the basic flow of the river the cultural vision that we're oriented towards and you know let's not say the policies and programs aren't important but they will always be insufficient until you get the cultural vision right. And I think that's what more and more people are increasingly realizing we need to focus on. And the cultural vision expressed through capitalism is profoundly suicidal. So what if Froome created a new cultural vision? The programs and policies we highlighted in episode one, the share shop, the community fridge, fair Froome, already demonstrate that Froome values things other than blind economic growth. But what would

it mean for Froome to change the direction of the river? To transition the entire goal of their economic system to something that included other areas of importance to Froum residents, areas like equality, belonging, and resilience. This is not impossible, nor delusional. Communities all over the world are already trying to make shifts like this happen. happened. So the long story started in the 17th century, really, when Shabdrung, who was the person who united Bhutan as a nation, first created Bhutan. This is Dr. To with the story of how the idea of gross national happiness came out of the country of Bhutan. He was a Buddhist monk, and so he created Bhutan based on Buddhist values.

And Buddhist values are very intimately related to loving kindness and compassion. And loving kindness is the intention to bring happiness and well-being, and compassion is the intention to alleviate suffering. So-being. And compassion is the intention to alleviate suffering. So they're the two sides of the same coin. So this kind of idea that that was the role of the leaders of the state, was to bring happiness and well-being and to alleviate suffering, has been enshrined in the history of Bhutan since the beginning. So that's a long historic story. The short-term story started in 1970s. In 1972, the third king of Bhutan died at a

relatively young age. He was 42, I think, something like that. And his son, who was at that time only 17 years old, Chigme Singyewantruk, the fourth king of Bhutan, ascended the throne. He was a very young man. And he was wise enough to understand that at this young age, he didn't know what he actually should do as a king. So what he did, and I think that's quite a unique feature, he walked around the country from village to village. And Bhutan is small enough that you can do that. So he really walked all over the country, went from village to village. And Bhutan is small enough that you can do that. So he really walked all over the country, went from village to village,

and sat down with the people and asked them, so I will be your king, what do you expect of me? So it was quite a unique sort of spontaneous participatory process of listening to the people. So he met with farmers and with monks and with women and with men and with young people and with old people and with all kinds of... So he heard many, many stories. What were the people's stories and what they hoped and so on. And then when he came back, he said, well, you know, I heard so many different stories

and each one is quite different. But really what all people have in common is they would like to be happy that's really what's a common thread so how can I take that as the main goal of my government of my my mission as a king to bring happiness and well-being to the to the country so that that was a very early kind of very general kind of vision that said well the goal of development is happiness and well-being and economic growth is one of the many factors that we need in order to bring happiness and well-being but it's not the goal it's just a tool one of the many tools that we have to bring happiness and well-being. goal. It's just a tool, one of the many tools that we have to bring happiness and well-being. Then a bit later, the same fourth king of Bhutan was in Mumbai airport and a journalist

asked him in a sort of sarcastic way, what's the GNP of Bhutan anyway? I mean, in the 70s, you know, GDP, GNP, in these days one tended to say GNP, Gross National Product, rather than Gross Domestic Product. It was like very, very small peanuts, really. And the king answered, I believe that gross national happiness is more important than gross national product. And that was the first time ever that the word gross national happiness was put out there. So that was a long time ago. That was like mid-70s. But it was just a very general kind of vision, a very idea like, you know,

okay, we have to try to bring happiness and well-being. But then how do we actually do that? It took them many, many years to try to come up with a strategy, with tools, with indicators. And actually, the GNH as an index came much, much later. And it was something that came from outside. It came because donor countries or donor institutions said,

well, if you want to replace gross domestic product or gross national product with gross national happiness, well, gross domestic product is a measurement tool. It's an indicator. It's a statistic tool. So you could not replace a statistic measurement tool with a general idea. You have to have another tool that will have a similar function to monitor the development. So that's how the idea of gross national happiness index came. Today, the strategy of GNH is four things. It's a development philosophy,

a tool for measuring the conditions and overall well-being of the Bhutanese people, a way of filtering policy through a set of ecological, social, cultural, and economic criteria, and lastly, it's a shift in consciousness. Systems are not something that have a life outside of us. I mean, they do in a way, but they were created by human minds, right? So if we don't change the way we think, if we don't have a shift in consciousness, whatever system we will build

will be similar to the existing system. because the existing system is a result of our way of thinking interacting relating behaving so it's it's a product of a consciousness it's not a god-given thing you know we created them so the good news is because we created them we can also change them because we created them so we can create something else the necessity is we need to change our consciousness. Otherwise, if we just change the system without changing the consciousness, whatever system we will build, it would have the same results. GNH uses what they call the nine domains to assess happiness within Bhutan. These form the basis of GNH measurement, indices, and screening

tools. They include things like living standards, environment, psychological well- indices, and screening tools. They include things like living standards, environment, psychological well-being, and community vitality. But you might be wondering, how would one measure something like this? Here's Dr. To sharing some of the questions they use in their national survey. So community vitality is a very important indicator of happiness and well-being. And one of the questions that is asked is, if you face a serious challenge, how many people can you count on?

And other way around, for how many people are you willing to go out of your way to help them if they're facing challenges? I remember one of the farmers that was interviewed in Bhutan said, he was thinking, thinking, said, I can't say the number. It's just the whole village.

So he had this feeling, if something happens, the whole village will be there for me. But, you know, in modern Western cities, you have regularly old people dying in their flat. And then people only discover it because it starts smelling. That's the level of loneliness we've come from. I've just seen in a website, a lady has set up a business in the US where you can pay her to get hugged and cuddled. It's not like adult service. It's just to get hugged. And people will come and pay to get hugged and cuddled because they have no one that will hug them and cuddle them if they don't pay for it. So that's, you know, so that's the level of solitude that we've come to. So once you've collected data on things like community vitality through the survey, what comes next?

The goal of the survey is to direct public policy. So the results of the survey are shared with the government and with the public. It's, you know, it's available, it's transparent. And its function is to help the government set priorities. So that's like the general dimension, that the government should know where are the priorities and which are either the areas or the groups within society where they should put more attention.

That's one thing. The second thing is there's the Gross National Happiness Commission. The Gross National Happiness Commission is a planning commission of the government and its function is to screen every project that the government wants to implement in the light of gross national happiness. So on one hand, does it respond to the problems that were identified through the survey? That's one question. The other question is, what will be the impact of this project or this law or this, whatever it is,

on all nine domains? So that you don't take decisions that are driven only, for instance, by economic consideration, that, let's say, mining, if you increase mining, it will definitely bring a lot of income, but it will have also negative consequences on environment, and maybe there will be population displacement and things like that. So if you only look at the GDP model, then you will definitely want to develop mining, like South Africa did, for instance, right? Or Australia, yeah? Huge mining things, and a lot of money came in. But at what cost? Other costs than financial costs. And then when you look at a project with

the lens of the nine domains, then you will balance out and see, okay, there will be positive results financially, economically, and maybe, okay, there will be positive results financially, economically and maybe, I don't know, maybe that will allow to finance more healthcare and education but it will have a heavy price on nature and communities and then you have to and of course in the end the decision is a political one

you cannot expect a screening tool to take a decision it just gives you data but the data is just broad enough that you to take a decision, right? It just gives you data. But the data is just broad enough that you then take a balanced decision that takes into consideration all the different factors and not only one factor. The way it is when we look at development from the GDP lens. GNH has come out of Bhutan, which is a Buddhist country. So we asked Dr. To, how he thought the idea would be received in a non-Buddhist context like Früm.

It's not limited to Buddhism, because it's really about universal human values. So, for instance, let's say loving-kindness and compassion are very central to Buddhist values, but compassion and love are universal. You don't have to be Buddhist to be compassionate or to love. There's a strong emphasis in the doctrine in Buddhism on that, but it's not a Buddhist thing to be compassionate or to be generous or to be altruistic. So I don't think that it's limited to Buddhism. In the case of Bhutan, of course, it's been influenced by the Buddhist context.

For instance, the idea of sufficiency threshold. The sufficiency threshold in GNH is the level within each domain at which they've determined that you've sufficiently met the conditions for happiness. You can connect it to the idea of contentment, for happiness. You can connect it to the idea of contentment, which is a very strong Buddhist value that actually greed is a source of suffering. While our current economic system is based on the idea that greed is good, because that's what helps the economy to grow. So each time we are facing a problem, we're encouraged to consume more, go out and shop. That's the answer to the problem.

While from a Buddhist perspective, contentment is more important, but contentment is not good for genipil, because if you are happy with little, then you will buy much less. So that's a very Buddhist idea. And also the notion of altruistic behavior, like the bodhisattva ideal of serving others is very strong in Buddhist countries. But again, I think that the idea that there's a deeper happiness that arises from serving is something we even have now scientific evidence of it. So it's not only like kind of a more imperative given by monks and priests, you know, be generous and then you'll be happy. It's like that's the way we're wired, actually.

So I think there's something very fundamental about it. So JNH is born in a Buddhist country, but I think is applicable in non-Buddhist contexts. But what I believe is that if you would want to apply something like JNH, let's say here in this country or in the US, what would be necessary would

be to create a participatory process to find out what is important to the people. You cannot just copy-paste the nine domains, because that was born out of the Whitney's reality. You might end up finding they're very similar, but you cannot take it for granted that they're the same. I think it would be really important to have a participatory process so that people have a voice, because that's the whole idea, that people can tell you. Because the idea is not the government

will decide what makes you happy. It's the people idea, you know, that people can tell you because the idea is not the government will decide what makes you happy. It's the people who should say what they want. And then the government's responsibility is to create a conducive environment for that to happen. G&H was implemented nationally, but what would something like GNH look like at a town or city level? We took the train to Bristol, a city that lies an hour north of Froome, to visit Liz Ziedler, co-founder and director of Happy City. So if we need to make a shift away from GDP as the king, if you like, the thing that we all measure our prosperity and success against, if we need to make that shift at a global level we need to start doing that at a local level but actually for

normal people on the streets normal people in businesses and organizations and communities around the place that feels like a very big leap so we've always been trying to take some of the best thinking academic thinking that kind of global thinking and make it really practical for ordinary people who don't necessarily think that that's their role to try and shape society but actually are really passionate about shaping their lives. We asked Liz how Happy City was created. So we set up Happy City about six and a half years ago now it was set up by me and my husband and partner Mike Zeidler. Globally I'd been doing a lot of work around sustainability and social

justice and change. And Mike had been working much more locally and regionally around how do we get people to work better together. So a lot of partnership working, a lot of cross-sectoral support. And I think what we had seen at a global level, there was lots of really, really interesting conversations being started around the sort of beyond GDP agenda, that actually, perhaps, the reason we had so many of these huge crises at an environmental and a social level, were a lot to do with the economic system that we had, and people were recognizing that we needed to start challenging that. But then at a local level, we also could see that there was huge amounts,

really exciting amounts of things going on to try and create a new way of working and being and solving many of those problems at a local level. But there felt to us like quite a gulf between those two things. They didn't seem to be talking to each other very much. And a lot of the local activities seem to be focused on the symptoms. So we've got climate change challenges, we've got huge inequality challenges, and thousands of organisations are emerging to try and deal with the symptoms of those problems. But actually locally, remarkably little seem to be looking at what are some of the root causes. And if the economic system that we've got is one of the root causes, we need to be thinking about that at a local level, not just at this meta global level. So we wondered what would be different if we tried to translate some of that work that was going on in the UN and the OECD,

and some of the national governments were starting to think about it. What happened if we tried to translate that down into much more local initiatives? Because more and more people were talking about well-being as an important new way of thinking about our economy. But actually, when you talk to normal people, they don't think about their well-being in terms of, you know, international agreements or even national policy. My well-being is about me and my kids and my street and my community. And we felt that actually people could get quite excited about that idea if we took it much more down to a local level. So we slightly boldly stopped doing all the different things we were doing and taking the income from that and set up Happy City to see what worked in helping people to see beyond this idea that economic growth and the growth of consumption was somehow a goal that we should be aspiring towards and make that shift towards the well-being of people and planet being the thing that we're aiming at and seeing things like the economy as just a means to that

end rather than the end in itself. And what does Happy City do? Right from the word go, we've had sort of three key areas of activity that Happy City has been developing, modeling to support other places to pick it up as well. The first one is around communications and campaigns. So it's about those sorts of projects I talked about using all sorts of different mediums to get people thinking and talking and acting towards well-being so we've had all sorts of PR things social media things events projects you know where we get people out in the community taking photos and sharing them or having events where they're sitting and talking to each other about things or art projects in community centres, asking people about what works in their community

or what helps bring them lasting happiness. So all sorts of different things to get people thinking and talking differently. So that's the first of our three-legged stool. The second one is around training. So we've developed quite a lot of different training programmes and workshops to give people some of those skills, help people to develop the sorts of habits in their lives that can embed a well-being and happiness and resilience framework, if you like, in the way that they live their lives. So we run all sorts of different

workshops from, you know, an hour or two little introduction things to much longer courses that we've run, again, in all sorts of different places. So we've run them with refugees and prisoners. We've also run them in banks and big public sector organisations. And then the final one of the three-legged stool is measurement and policy. So we knew very, very early on that we couldn't question the fundamental role of GDP in cities if we didn't offer an alternative. And we looked, of course, around the world to say, is there an alternative at city level for the very simplistic economic model? And we couldn't find one that would really work at the three scales that we always work at. We always try and support individuals to improve their own well-being and take responsibility and feel empowered to improve their own well-being.

We try and help communities and organizations to embed the notion of well-being into how they work so that it becomes part of the system of how things happen. And then we try and help communities and organizations to embed the notion of well-being into how they work so that it becomes part of the system of how things happen. And then we try and support policymakers and decision makers to understand the influence of well-being on what they're doing and the influence of what they do on well-being. people from all over the world who are experts in this field to develop a range of different tools that can support decision makers to make decisions based on the impact that they have on well-being rather than just on the impact on our consumption levels that they currently have. So after all this talk about happiness, we thought we'd ask Liz what happiness means at Happy City. So we use the word happiness, but we try to come at it from a question point of view. So rather than going into communities and saying, this is happiness, this is what you have to do

to find happiness. We always come at it from the point of a question. What do you know about well-being and happiness? What do you already from your own experience recognize as some of the roots that really bring lasting happiness that help support you to find that resilience that you're looking for? So we have a very, very broad definition. And one of the things I think is most exciting about this subject is its universality. Actually, if you ask people, what are some of the key ingredients for happiness or lasting well-being? It doesn't really matter whether you're in rural Eritrea or Poland or Glasgow. The sorts of things that come up time and time and time again are things like a sense of belonging and community, a sense of purpose and feeling like you have some

meaning in your life, being able to access green spaces, feeling physically and emotionally able to bounce back when things go wrong. People understand what happiness and well-being means to them and what the real roots are. And they're incredibly binding because they bring us together regardless of our background and our culture and our age. And I think that's a very exciting thing about it because I think we're in a world that needs bridges rather than divisions. And I think the notion of well-being and happiness as a key goal really has the capacity to bring people together. And I think there's a huge amount of wisdom out there in the world about it that we just

need to tap into, which is why we tend to go out with the question rather than the answer. Because I believe personally that we have the answer within us. We just don't stop and think about it or talk about it often enough. Manfred Max Neff was a conventional economist who trained at Harvard, I believe. And he was teaching at Berkeley University. And then he ended up in the 70s and 80s working in Latin America. And he was working with some of the poorest people there

as an economist, trying to approach the problem of poverty from that, you know, economist's point of view, like how do we develop? And he tells a story about one day being up in the mountains in Peru, in a small village, and it had rained and rained and rained for many days. So the ground had turned into mud and he found himself standing opposite a young man who he knew, he knew this young man had four children, a wife and a mother to look after. And he didn't have a job

and he was standing there with no shoes on his feet. And he describes this moment as a real epiphany that he realized actually there was nothing he could say to this man that from an economics point of view that would make any sense i mean was he going to tell him that he should be happy that gdp had grown or imports had risen or so at that moment he describes it as looking in the face of poverty and having nothing to say. So he went back and started to think about what does poverty and wealth really mean? Not from a kind of monetary point of view

or a conventional economics point of view. What does it really mean to be wealthy? And he realized that a lot of the development models were actually doing more harm than good. This is Inez Aponte again, who we met at the beginning of the episode. Inez leads human-scale development workshops based on the work of Manfred Max-Neef, which puts meeting fundamental human needs as the goal of economic systems. Where human scale development comes in is that it works with communities and it asks them to kind of evaluate how well their needs are being met. So what are the satisfiers that are currently in place? Are they working? And where's the wealth? So where are the satisfiers really

working? Where is there maybe a wealth of identity and wealth of participation, but maybe there's a poverty in other areas. Maybe there's a poverty of freedom or a poverty of subsistence. And so what a community will do is start to map out the positive and negative satisfiers and then start to have a visioning process to say, what would we like this to look like? If we really were going to create a society or a community where our needs are satisfied, what's it going to look like if we really were going to create a society or a community where our needs are satisfied how are they going to what's it going to look like and then there's a process by which you identify the the actions to take to get to that place so what are the bridging satisfiers and so what people get is the awareness of that their wealth is actually based

on meeting their needs rather than the story we've been told is your wealth is how much money you have in the bank so what we see is people become quite empowered thinking about that because if you've been told your whole life that you're poor and you're poor and you're poor because you don't have money but someone comes along and says actually you have this wealth of other things in your community that are really working that's a very empowering thing to experience and to think that actually if you are given the chance you have the ability to change certain things in your community so it talks very much about local self-reliance and not the kind of development model where some westerner comes along and pumps some investment so to speak into the community and then raises GDP. Because as we

saw, a rise in GDP may actually have a negative effect on some of those needs. We asked Inez to tell us a little bit more about human scale development's idea of fundamental human needs. Quite often when you ask people what they need, what they answer with is the thing that's going to satisfy a fundamental need. So perhaps I need to explain what those fundamental needs are. So we have nine fundamental needs which we share across all ages, across all cultures and across time. He says these needs, they don't actually change or they change very, very slowly. So the proposal is that these nine needs, which are the need for subsistence, as I mentioned, so anything you do to keep your body alive and healthy and strong,

the need for freedom, the need for identity, so having a sense of where you belong, who you are, your history, the need for creation, affection, participation, having your voice heard, being able to join in with others. Protection, so feeling safe. Understanding, which is not just understanding as in human understanding between people, but actually being able to understand the world, so knowledge and information. And idleness, which is a much contested one in the West. So if you have those nine needs, what you see is that actually those needs are the same across the

world and across ages, but the way we satisfy those needs differs. So if you were born in a tribal culture in Papua New Guinea, you're going to meet your need for idleness or your need for participation in a different way than if you're born in Manhattan, for example. And what you can start to do is you can start to look at how well are these satisfiers working? Are they working in a way that meets other needs as well? So a synergic satisfier would meet other needs at the same time. An example with that would be if I invited you around to my house to cook a meal together, and maybe it was food that I'd grown myself, then I would meet my need for understanding,

because I know where my food comes from, my need for participation by being with you, my need for affection, my need for creation, I've cooked a meal. And so you have all these needs being met in one activity. So that's a very positive thing. But what you see is there's also ways in which we meet a need and harm another need. So an example of that would be when we're meeting our need for subsistence, let's say through money, and we have jobs that take us away from our families 40 hours, maybe 60 hours a week, then that's kind of harming our need for affection and idleness, and even participation, because there's no time for those things. Or on a kind of more sort of national, international scale, if we're trying to meet our need for protection through waging wars,

which is very topical, then actually we become less safe. So you can start to look at that there's a kind of historical element, a sort of story element to what we think is a good satisfier. Because we've been all, well, most of us or many of us have been made to believe that actually defence is a useful thing to invest in because we need to defend ourselves against this big enemy. And that story is perpetuated the whole time. We've gone to war because that's the story that we have. We don't have another story that says actually our protection would be better met

if we provided for the needs of people in other countries with the same amount of money that we're now using to go to war. But that's kind of not a narrative that's really existing at the moment. There are also ways when we think we're satisfying needs, but we're really not. I talk about needs and how well the current economic system is meeting people's needs. And it often isn't. Even for the wealthy, they're not necessarily, they're meeting some needs, but quite often they're sort of pseudo satisfying those needs. So, you know, all the shopping and buying their material goods isn't necessarily making them feel a true sense of belonging or, you know, a real sense of being valued. And they start to realize that it creates a language that they can then use. Okay, this is not meeting my need for affection.

It's not meeting my need for participation. It's a pseudo-satisfier. And the word pseudo-satisfier, which is one of the terms in human-scale development, is a very powerful word because when I introduce it, a lot of lights go on. And it's really that term that articulates what many people are feeling but don't quite know, you know, I have all this stuff. I have the car, I have the house, I have, you know, however many pairs of boots, and I still don't feel satisfied.

It's because they're pseudo-satisfiers. They're not quite doing the thing. Human-scale development workshops have mostly been facilitated in low-income countries in South America. We asked Inez how it would work in a place like Froome. This work has been mostly done with people who have, let's say, poverties of subsistence. So they're what we conventionally call poor people.

We know people who can't buy shoes, who don't have education, who don't have enough food. But it's very easy to see that actually we have multiple poverties in the west so if you sit together with a bunch of people and you think okay how well is my need for participation or freedom or understanding or protection met and you look very deeply then what starts to bubble up is actually we're not doing that well in the sort of more human scale economic sense. Our GDP is going up, but actually all these poverties are arising in our communities. When we see very, very high levels of addiction and social disintegration happening, so those are poverties. So that process gets people thinking very differently about what an economy is.

And then there is a step from there to start thinking, okay, what can I do? How am I an economic actor in the human scale development sense? And we know what we are, how we are economic actors in the primatistics or the conventional economic sense. We know that we go out and we get a job and how much money we make from that job determines our worth. And it's very different in human scale development. So people who are kind of invisible in the current economy that we have become visible. So mothers who are staying at home with their children, people who are caring for the elderly, the activities that you do just to kind of make life pleasant for each other, the kind of natural giving, friendships, community,

the kind of learning that happens between people that is not kind of official, all those things are really adding to the human satisfaction in that model. But they don't show up in any economic model. And we don't actually, it's not a matter of, oh yes, let's take those and let's monetize them so we can measure them. It's saying, let's drop the monetization. Let's start thinking of different, more qualitative ways of measuring how well we're doing. Having more higher material standards is really important in poorer countries where people haven't got basic necessities. This is Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level, who we heard from in episode two. But for us in the rich world, having more and more of everything makes less and less difference. It's no longer crucial to our well-being to have a higher material standard.

It's not just a matter of taking out the bads. It's that our material standards are high enough. And actually, the way we should now be improving the real quality of our lives, now that that's no longer an effective method, is by improving the quality of the social environment. It's highly sensitive. And it's highly personal to even speak in language of have and have not. This is Maria Skordialis, co-founder of the Living Wholeness Institute and co-initiator of the Art of Hosting. She worked in the Froome area for the British government for many years. To me, this is part of what has become and has been created from the 80s onwards with the neoliberalistic movement and the hyper capitalism that kind of emerged in our world

is that this gentrification is a narrative or a myth, a modern day myth that we are creating for ourselves as an aspiration of what we should all become. And in my life, I have lived with very affluent people and I have lived and seen and witnessed and been part of severe poverty. And from a child living in India, being in the slums in India, I used to always find it, I mean, this is really young age, seven years old, I could remember these thought forms going through my mind, is why do people that we call poor seem to be more happy and connected to their lives than the rich kids that I went to school with who were taking drugs because they didn't have a family or they had so much family pressure to be something that they were not.

So I was always confused at this paradox. So the first thing that I would have to say is that if I was to be invited to have those kinds of conversations, I would want to reframe the haves and have-nots into what do we really see as life? What do we value about life? What do we really ask to leave for our children and for their children as our legacy, I would want to have a more root system conversation about living a good life and leaving a good earth for the next generations. Because I think that would allow us to go to a more meaningful conversation than a conversation about who has and who hasn't and what we're trying to aspire. Because to me, that just goes into that modern day myth and narrative of trying to live in

prettiness. Pearl is created by the grit. So we need the diversity. So I feel that what we need to come back into is some more fundamental conversations or basic conversations about what does life really mean to us? And what are the things that make us as human beings feel alive and feel fulfilled? So that when we die, because that's the only certainty, we kind of can feel that we are leaving something for those that come, those that follow, that those that will take forward what we have brought in. And I feel that somehow we've lost touching that fundament. And that's why our Earth is in danger. And actually, we as a human species are in danger. We are facing our own suicide

the most. And so, I feel that we have to be very careful how much the gentrification has actually entered into our own selves. Because when we talk about haves and have-nots, to me that's a gentrified perspective immediately.

As opposed to, have I met my neighbor? Do I know who you are? Do I know your story? As opposed to me saying, oh, you've come from London, or oh, you were born in Froome. I feel the conversation needs to be more about how we humans want to live and work and basically save ourselves from our own extinction

that we're facing right now. In the 1990s, the street which we call Catherine Hill was in a pretty bad state. There'd been a decline, an economic decline. All of the shops, or very many of them, were boarded up. And we decided to do a little project, which was with some performing friends of mine we did some street theatre and we called ourselves the Froome Enhancement League and our role was to see how we could bring Froome up and thriving again so we did paintings on a

lot of the boards and put little installations up and one of them had written above it the heart of Froome and underneath a curtain and when you pull the curtain back a mirror seeing yourself so that's how we'd like to think of Froome as people seeing that they make Froome. And whatever they put in, they can make the heart of Froome. Annabelle McFadden. A big thank you to her and everyone else who shared their wisdom and their voice with us in this project. And one more thank you to the Froome Street Bandits, A Million Creatures, and again to Annabelle for the music you've been hearing in these last three episodes.

We've got a bunch of extras up on our website, including the full interviews with many of the folks you've heard from, as well as lots of photos and some resources if you want to dive deeper into anything we've talked about in this series. Visit upstreampodcast.org for more. For Upstream, this has been Della and Robert. We'll see you along the river. The snow keeps rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our hopes that break To the morning we run to shoreline

Calling us to speak outside Plates under the earth and the rocks Casting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea Snowgates rising in the hallways

Flowers blooming from our boats that break Into the morning we run To the shoreline Calling us to speak the sight Plates under the earth and for us Passing mostly in shadows