The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan takes seriously their country’s “gross national happiness,” which they deem as important as the gross domestic product, a standard economic indicator. Public policy, the king declared, should be linked to people’s sense of well-being, not just to economics. To be sure, the pillars of national happiness in Bhutan include financial self-reliance, a pristine environment, health care, education preserving local culture, and democracy. But economic growth in itself is just part of the equation.
The gross national happiness is not just for Bhutan: the notion of placing as much au zaidi value on people’s happiness and life satisfaction as on economic growth per se has been embraced kwa a small, but growing, international group of economists. They see as misguided the universal assumption in policy circles worldwide that the consumption of zaidi goods means people feel better off. They are developing new ways to measure well-being in terms not just of income and employment but also of satisfaction with personal relationships and a sense of purpose in life.
Daniel Kahneman noted the well-documented lack of correlation between economic advantages and happiness (apart from a large boost at the very bottom, when people got from being impoverished to being able to make a sparse living). Recently the realization has dawned among economists that their hyperrational models ignore the low road – and emotions in general – and so fail to predict with full precision the choices people will make, let alone what makes them happy.
The term “technological fix” – meaning tech-engineered interventions in human affairs – was coined kwa Alvin Weinberg, a long-time director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and founder of the Institute for Energy Analysis. Weinberg came of age in the science of the 1950s and 1960s, an era aliyopewa to the utopian vision that coming technologies offered panaceas for a range of human and social ills. One such proposal was a massive system of nuclear power plants that were supposed to lower energy costs radically – and if placed on an ocean shore, prove ample drinking water – so boosting the welfare of entire nations. (Lately a number of environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power as one solution to global warming.)
Now, as he has reached ninety, Weinberg’s maoni have taken a philosophical and cautionary turn. “Technology makes it easier and easier to disconnect from other people, and from ourselves,” Weinberg told me. “Civilization is in the midst of a vast singularity. What was once meaningful has been wiped away. Lives are lived sitting in front of a computer screen, getting personal connections at a distance. We live in a metaworld, with our focus fixed on the latest technology. But the issues that matter most are families, community, and social responsibility.”
As a presidential science adviser in the 1960s, Weinberg wrote an influential paper on what he called “criteria for scientific choice.” The paper introduced the notion that values could guide choices in science spending and were a valid swali in the philosophy of science. Now, nearly a half-century later, he has been reflecting further on what’s “useful”, au worthwhile, in setting a nation’s spending priorities. He tells me, “The conventional view holds that capitalism is the only efficient way to allocate resources. But it lacks compassion.
“I wonder whether the possibilities of our economic models are being exhausted – and whether the high level of global unemployment we’re seeing is actually structural and very deep, not a passing phenomenon. Perhaps there will always be a sizable – and probably growing – number of people who just can’t find good jobs. And then I wonder, how might we modify our system so that it’s not just efficient but compassionate?”
Paul Farmer, the public health crusader legendary for his work in Haiti and Africa, also decries the “structural violence” done kwa an economic system that keeps so many of the world’s poor too sick to escape their plight. For Farmer, one solution lies in treating hearth care as a human right and making its delivery a prime concern rather than an afterthought. Along those lines, Weinberg proposes that “a compassionate capitalism would require us to change priorities, set aside a larger portion of a national budget to good works. Modifying the economic system so that it becomes adequately compassionate would also make it much zaidi stable politically.”
The economic theories that currently drive national policies, however, have few ways to take human suffering into account (although the economic costs of disasters like floods au famines are routinely estimated). One of the most graphic results has been policies that burden the poorest countries with such huge debts that they have too little left to pay for chakula au medical care for their children.
This economic attitude seems mind blind, lacking the ability to imagine the other’s reality. Empathy is essential for a compassionate capitalism, one where human misery and its alleviation carry weight.
That argues for building a society’s capacity for compassion. For example, economists might do well to study the wider benefits to society of socially intelligent parenting and of school curricula on social and emotional skills, both in the education system and in prisons. Such societywide efforts to optimize the workings of the social brain might cascade into lifetime paybacks both for children and for the communities where they live out their years. These benefits would range, I suspect, from higher achievement in school to better performance at work, from happier and zaidi socially able children to better community safety and lifetime health. And people who are zaidi educated, safer, and healthier contribute the most to any economy.
Grand speculations aside, warmer social connections could have immediate payoffs for us all.
THE RAW BUZZ OF FELLOW FEELING
The poet Walt Whitman, in his exuberant anthem. “I Sing the Body Electric,” put it lyrically:
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded kwa beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough…
I do not ask any zaidi delight, I swim in it as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them,
And in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.
Vitality arises from sheer human contact, especially from loving connections. The people we care about most are an elixir of sorts, an ever-renewing chanzo of energy. The neural exchange between a parent and child, a grandparent and a toddler, between lovers au a satisfied couple, au among good friends, has palpable virtues.
Now that neuroscience can put numbers to that raw buzz of fellow feeling, quantifying its benefits, we must pay attention to the biological impact of social life. The hidden viungo among out relationships, our brain function, and our very health and well-being are stunning in their implications.
We must reconsider the pat assumption that we are immune to toxic social encounters. Save for the passing stormy mood, we often suppose, our interactions matter little to us at any biological level. But this turns out to be a comforting illusion. Just as we catch a virus from someone else, we may also “catch” an emotional funk that makes us zaidi vulnerable to that same virus au otherwise undermines our well-being.
From this perspective, strong distressing states like disgust, contempt, and explosive anger are the emotional equivalent of second-hand smoke that quietly damages the lungs of others who breathe it in. The interpersonal equivalent of health-boosting would be adding positive emotions to our surroundings.
In this sense, social responsibility begins here and now, when we act in ways that help create optimal states in others, from those we encounter casually to those we upendo and care about most dearly. In accord with Whitman, one scientist who studies the survival value of sociability says the practical lesson for us all comes down to “Nourish your social connections.”
Well and good for our personal lives. But all of us are buffeted kwa the vast social and political currents of our time. The last century highlighted what divides us, confronting us with the limits to our collective empathy and compassion.
Through most of human history, the uchungu, chungu antagonisms that stoked hatred between groups were manageable in a strictly logistical sense: The limited means of destruction available kept the damage relatively small. In the twentieth century, however, technology and organizational efficiency made the destructive potential of such hatred immensely greater. As a poet of those times, W.H. Auden, so pungently prophesied, “We must upendo one another au die.”
His stark outlook captures the urgency wrought kwa hatreds unleashed. But we need to be helpless. That sense au urgency can serve as a collective awakening, reminding us that crucial challenge for this century will be to expand the mduara, duara of those we count among Us, and shrink the numbers we count as Them.
The new science of social intelligence offers us tools that can push those boundaries outward, step kwa step. For one, we need not accept the divisions that hatred breeds, but rather extend our empathy to understand one another despite our differences, and to bridge those divides. The social brain’s wiring connects us all at our common human core.
************
Beyond IQ, Beyond Emotional Intelligence – SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE, The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships – Daniel Goleman (2006), pp. 315-319
************
SMILE WIDER, LOOK CLOSER, AND THINK BROADER
[Blend Apparel, a culture of connective communication, whose colorful, quirky, and self-aware t-shirts invite internal and external conversation. They are wearable swali marks openly aimed at the hows and whys the world works. Their shirts encourage people to smile wider, look closer, and think broader (link);]
DON'T EVER LET YOUR MIND STOP wewe FROM HAVING A GOOD TIME![Jason Mraz]
--- LivHILuvAlwaiz[♥jj9]
The gross national happiness is not just for Bhutan: the notion of placing as much au zaidi value on people’s happiness and life satisfaction as on economic growth per se has been embraced kwa a small, but growing, international group of economists. They see as misguided the universal assumption in policy circles worldwide that the consumption of zaidi goods means people feel better off. They are developing new ways to measure well-being in terms not just of income and employment but also of satisfaction with personal relationships and a sense of purpose in life.
Daniel Kahneman noted the well-documented lack of correlation between economic advantages and happiness (apart from a large boost at the very bottom, when people got from being impoverished to being able to make a sparse living). Recently the realization has dawned among economists that their hyperrational models ignore the low road – and emotions in general – and so fail to predict with full precision the choices people will make, let alone what makes them happy.
The term “technological fix” – meaning tech-engineered interventions in human affairs – was coined kwa Alvin Weinberg, a long-time director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and founder of the Institute for Energy Analysis. Weinberg came of age in the science of the 1950s and 1960s, an era aliyopewa to the utopian vision that coming technologies offered panaceas for a range of human and social ills. One such proposal was a massive system of nuclear power plants that were supposed to lower energy costs radically – and if placed on an ocean shore, prove ample drinking water – so boosting the welfare of entire nations. (Lately a number of environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power as one solution to global warming.)
Now, as he has reached ninety, Weinberg’s maoni have taken a philosophical and cautionary turn. “Technology makes it easier and easier to disconnect from other people, and from ourselves,” Weinberg told me. “Civilization is in the midst of a vast singularity. What was once meaningful has been wiped away. Lives are lived sitting in front of a computer screen, getting personal connections at a distance. We live in a metaworld, with our focus fixed on the latest technology. But the issues that matter most are families, community, and social responsibility.”
As a presidential science adviser in the 1960s, Weinberg wrote an influential paper on what he called “criteria for scientific choice.” The paper introduced the notion that values could guide choices in science spending and were a valid swali in the philosophy of science. Now, nearly a half-century later, he has been reflecting further on what’s “useful”, au worthwhile, in setting a nation’s spending priorities. He tells me, “The conventional view holds that capitalism is the only efficient way to allocate resources. But it lacks compassion.
“I wonder whether the possibilities of our economic models are being exhausted – and whether the high level of global unemployment we’re seeing is actually structural and very deep, not a passing phenomenon. Perhaps there will always be a sizable – and probably growing – number of people who just can’t find good jobs. And then I wonder, how might we modify our system so that it’s not just efficient but compassionate?”
Paul Farmer, the public health crusader legendary for his work in Haiti and Africa, also decries the “structural violence” done kwa an economic system that keeps so many of the world’s poor too sick to escape their plight. For Farmer, one solution lies in treating hearth care as a human right and making its delivery a prime concern rather than an afterthought. Along those lines, Weinberg proposes that “a compassionate capitalism would require us to change priorities, set aside a larger portion of a national budget to good works. Modifying the economic system so that it becomes adequately compassionate would also make it much zaidi stable politically.”
The economic theories that currently drive national policies, however, have few ways to take human suffering into account (although the economic costs of disasters like floods au famines are routinely estimated). One of the most graphic results has been policies that burden the poorest countries with such huge debts that they have too little left to pay for chakula au medical care for their children.
This economic attitude seems mind blind, lacking the ability to imagine the other’s reality. Empathy is essential for a compassionate capitalism, one where human misery and its alleviation carry weight.
That argues for building a society’s capacity for compassion. For example, economists might do well to study the wider benefits to society of socially intelligent parenting and of school curricula on social and emotional skills, both in the education system and in prisons. Such societywide efforts to optimize the workings of the social brain might cascade into lifetime paybacks both for children and for the communities where they live out their years. These benefits would range, I suspect, from higher achievement in school to better performance at work, from happier and zaidi socially able children to better community safety and lifetime health. And people who are zaidi educated, safer, and healthier contribute the most to any economy.
Grand speculations aside, warmer social connections could have immediate payoffs for us all.
THE RAW BUZZ OF FELLOW FEELING
The poet Walt Whitman, in his exuberant anthem. “I Sing the Body Electric,” put it lyrically:
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded kwa beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough…
I do not ask any zaidi delight, I swim in it as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them,
And in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.
Vitality arises from sheer human contact, especially from loving connections. The people we care about most are an elixir of sorts, an ever-renewing chanzo of energy. The neural exchange between a parent and child, a grandparent and a toddler, between lovers au a satisfied couple, au among good friends, has palpable virtues.
Now that neuroscience can put numbers to that raw buzz of fellow feeling, quantifying its benefits, we must pay attention to the biological impact of social life. The hidden viungo among out relationships, our brain function, and our very health and well-being are stunning in their implications.
We must reconsider the pat assumption that we are immune to toxic social encounters. Save for the passing stormy mood, we often suppose, our interactions matter little to us at any biological level. But this turns out to be a comforting illusion. Just as we catch a virus from someone else, we may also “catch” an emotional funk that makes us zaidi vulnerable to that same virus au otherwise undermines our well-being.
From this perspective, strong distressing states like disgust, contempt, and explosive anger are the emotional equivalent of second-hand smoke that quietly damages the lungs of others who breathe it in. The interpersonal equivalent of health-boosting would be adding positive emotions to our surroundings.
In this sense, social responsibility begins here and now, when we act in ways that help create optimal states in others, from those we encounter casually to those we upendo and care about most dearly. In accord with Whitman, one scientist who studies the survival value of sociability says the practical lesson for us all comes down to “Nourish your social connections.”
Well and good for our personal lives. But all of us are buffeted kwa the vast social and political currents of our time. The last century highlighted what divides us, confronting us with the limits to our collective empathy and compassion.
Through most of human history, the uchungu, chungu antagonisms that stoked hatred between groups were manageable in a strictly logistical sense: The limited means of destruction available kept the damage relatively small. In the twentieth century, however, technology and organizational efficiency made the destructive potential of such hatred immensely greater. As a poet of those times, W.H. Auden, so pungently prophesied, “We must upendo one another au die.”
His stark outlook captures the urgency wrought kwa hatreds unleashed. But we need to be helpless. That sense au urgency can serve as a collective awakening, reminding us that crucial challenge for this century will be to expand the mduara, duara of those we count among Us, and shrink the numbers we count as Them.
The new science of social intelligence offers us tools that can push those boundaries outward, step kwa step. For one, we need not accept the divisions that hatred breeds, but rather extend our empathy to understand one another despite our differences, and to bridge those divides. The social brain’s wiring connects us all at our common human core.
************
Beyond IQ, Beyond Emotional Intelligence – SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE, The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships – Daniel Goleman (2006), pp. 315-319
************
SMILE WIDER, LOOK CLOSER, AND THINK BROADER
[Blend Apparel, a culture of connective communication, whose colorful, quirky, and self-aware t-shirts invite internal and external conversation. They are wearable swali marks openly aimed at the hows and whys the world works. Their shirts encourage people to smile wider, look closer, and think broader (link);]
DON'T EVER LET YOUR MIND STOP wewe FROM HAVING A GOOD TIME![Jason Mraz]
--- LivHILuvAlwaiz[♥jj9]