An Incredible Book: Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton
I guess I always knew I was a kooky beyond-the-Leftist, but this book is incredible. It's like reading Noam Chomsky but with organized, sequentially sensical, focused chapters and without the same overtones of intellectual bullying. I'm only halfway through the second chapter, but here are a few quotes I found myself jumping up and down inside screaming YES! YES!:

From chapter 1, describing Growth Fetishism (in the religious / metaphysical sense of the word "fetish", i.e. idolatry):

John Maynard Keynes, John Hicks and Simon Kuznets first developed the system of national accounting because their governments needed better ways of managing their economies in the face of dramatic swings in the business cycle between the world wars. These economists repeatedly warned against using measures such as GNP as indicators of prosperity. Kuznets, the originator of the system of uniform national accounts in the United States, warned Congress in 1934, 'The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income...' Kuznets watched in dismay as his warnings were ignored and economists and policy makers grew accustomed to equating prosperity with growth in national income. By 1962 he was writing that the construction and use of the system of national accounting must be rethought: 'Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and returns, and between the short and the long run ... Goals for 'more' growth should specify more growth of what and for what'. The warnings went unheeded. (p. 13)

On NPR the other day (in 2008) there was a piece on exactly this: that maybe the GDP shouldn't be considered a single-variable barometer of the health of the economy, and what else do we need or how do we need to change the GDP to better get a handle on what is good for the economy? To me, this means that nothing has changed since 1962: we are still maximizing a variable whose growth no longer correlates with the populace's wellbeing.

Governments of all persuasions are now mesmerised by economic growth and find it awkward to think about national progress more broadly. Growth, investment, development, competitiveness, free trade - these aspects of the market system are powerful political symbols, before which political parties of the Left and Right kneel. In the last 25 years, politics in the West has been marked by the ideological convergence of the main parties. The process has been one in which social democrats have abandoned their traditional commitments and converged on the free-market policies of the conservatives. It is now a commonplace [sic] to observe that the conservatives, seeing their political ground occupied by the parties of the Left, have purified their neoliberalism, discarded the old ideas of social conservatism, and moved further to the Right. ... The convergence of social democratic politics on Thatcherism was possible because the fundamental goal of both social democracy and Thatcherism had become the same - more growth - and once the socialist method of attaining more growth lost credibility there was nowhere else to go. (p. 18-19)

Growth fetishism and its handmaiden neoliberalism ... undermine democracy. They have eroded democratic practice and democratic awareness in ordinary people. Social democracy is being superseded by a sort of market totalitarianism. When older people bemoan the corruption of modern politics, they nevertheless feel that it is a historical aberration impinging on the constancy of democratic rights and that in the end the people can still have their say. Disturbingly, younger people hear only the accusation that the system is incurably corrupt - and they believe it. (p. 21)

And from chapter 2, on the interaction between growth and wellbeing,

These studies confirm what many people know intuitively - that the goals of wealth, fame, and attractiveness are hollow. They show that when people pursuing these goals achieve them they do not feel any better as a result. Indeed, the research shows that people who have extrinsic goals tend to be more depressed than others, and they suffer from higher levels of psychological disturbance as well as scoring lower on measures of vitality and self-awareness. ... On the other hand, those who have intrinsic goals concentrated on closer relationships, self-development and helping others improve their levels of wellbeing as they attain their goals. (p. 38)

I understand that psychological studies can be terribly slippery and I haven't checked sources here, but as he opened the paragraph, it coincides with my intuition. He's also talking there only about the non-poor; he does go into how growth does increase wellbeing when the incomes increased are those of the poor.

The authors of these studies - staid, careful psychologists - draw a radical conclusion, one that presents no threat as long as it remains safely confined to the academic literature: 'Thus it appears that the suggestion within American culture that wellbeing and happiness can be found through striving to become rich, famous, and attractive may themselves be chimerical.'

The implications of this research for public policy and social development could not be more far-reaching. The results strongly suggest that the more our media, advertisers and opinion makers emphasise financial success as the chief means to happiness the more they promote social pathologies.

He then begins talking about children, which is what made me get up from my chair and write this post:

When doctors reach for their prescription pads [for Ritalin to treat ADD] they send a series of powerful messages, especially to children. Deviations from the norm, defined increasingly by the imperatives of commerce and the need to secure employment, are medical conditions and the answer is to take drugs to fix them. Trying to understand who you are and how you fit into social structures is a waste of time because the problem is neurological. Reconciling your emotional responses is not something you do through relationships with other human beings and self-understanding; you do it by correcting your faults through outside intervention. As Diller puts it, a 'living imbalance' has become a 'neurochemical imbalance', and at a time when we are no longer willing to intimidate children into compliance we are willing to drug them into it. ...

A society obsessed with 'making it' - in which the markers of success demand extraordinary commitment to paid employment - has little time to nurture its children with the care they require and deserve. Once a part of the age-old process of reproducing and attaining emotional fulfillment as an adult, children are increasingly expressions of their parents' preoccupations and abstract desires. Thus they become an encumbrance. The 'epidemic' of ADD says more about the changing structure of families, absentee parents, crippling pressure to succeed, a culture of winners and losers, and economies that are ever richer but can devote no more resources to education than it does about brain chemistry. It says more about drug companies' manipulation of the medical profession and parental demands for instant fixes for children deemed deviant. The ADD craze and Ritalin are making children sick, but society would sooner believe that behavioural problems are caused by neurological disease than confront its own sickness. In this way no one is to blame - not the parents, not the education system, not family structures, not social expectations, not changes in work patterns, and not the pursuit of wealth.