But things look grim from a deeper perspective, the question of well-being. Does money make you happy? Findings from the World Values Survey, an assessment of “life satisfaction” in more than 65 countries conducted between 1990 and 2000, indicate that income and happiness tend to track well until about $13,000 of annual income per person. After that, additional income appears to yield rather modest additions in self-reported happiness, to put it mildly. Although most governments make ongoing growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) a leading priority, under the assumption that wealth delivers well-being, the truth is that undue emphasis on generating wealth -- particularly by encouraging heavy consumption -- is hardly working. Overall quality of life is suffering in some of the world’s richest countries as people experience greater stress and time pressures, along with less satisfying social relationships.
Based on World Health Organization data, British psychologist Oliver James showed that English-speaking nations are twice as likely to suffer from mental illness as mainland European ones over a twelve month period. Deeper analysis exposes a direct link between mental illness and social inequalities generated in the context of neo-liberal capitalism, “which largely explains the greater prevalence among English-speaking nations”, according to James. “By this I mean a form of political economy that has four core characteristics: judging a business’s success almost exclusively by share price; privatisation of public utilities; minimal regulation of business, suppression of unions and very low taxation for the rich, resulting in massive economic inequality; the ideology that consumption and market forces can meet human needs of almost every kind.”
James encapsulates this specific tendency to generate mental illness linked to neo-liberal capitalism using the metaphor of a virus, which, he says, is actually a kind of disease: affluenza. “Selfish capitalism causes mental illness by spawning materialism, or, as I put it, the affluenza virus - placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances (social and physical) and fame. English-speaking nations are more infected with the virus than mainland western European ones. Studies in many nations prove that people who strongly subscribe to virus values are at significantly greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder. Follow the logic? Selfish capitalism infects populations with affluenza; it fosters mental illness; English-speaking nations are more selfish capitalist - ergo, more prone to illness.” So what’s the bottom-line for us Brits? “Blair’s encouragement of free market capitalism has boosted spiralling levels of British mental illness. The net consequence for true Labour voters has been to force us to become more or less severely virus-infected.”
The New Fundamentalism
Thus, consumer culture, itself a product of neo-liberal economics, is encouraging us to make disastrous life-style choices that are systematically eroding our quality of life, and in fact potentially killing us. So while the question of values might seem a surprising one to start off with, it’s now becoming increasingly obvious that the global political and economic order operates on the basis of a very specific value system rooted in what Oliver James depicts as a rampant materialism. Some of the most vocal critics of globalization have recognized this.
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