What is a Community, now and in future?

Have you ever wondered what community is?  Its an interesting topic.

It is a topic that has become increasingly important now that we are running out of resources which sets limits on growth.  The old economic ideas are just falling away.

The first ten minutes of this video challenges the basis of today's economic philosophy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8ZJCtL6bPs

Professor Al Bartlett makes a strong case for the end of capitalism two minutes into this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNN9BvNUsIU&feature=related

A community can be a location such as a neighbourhood.  Members of a community can share a common sense of identity such as coming from Bermuda, or the Caribbean, or the West.

 
A community can also be people linked by-

A common set of practices. See medical associations, acting guilds, or knitters

Or shared interests. See physicists, book clubs

Or similar values and shared intentions. See ecologists; or the Intentional Communities movement – http://www.ic.org/

So identity, practices, interests, values and intentions attract people together. They bring a level of organization to society.

Ultimately life seems to be about coming together to resolve our differences of identity, practices, opinions, values, intentions - and do this in as conscious ways as possible.

Today, with the internet to assist us, life could be about coming together to find mutual fulfillment and strength through collaboration.

I believe the internet is here to help neighbourhood communities advance beyond old ways of doing things.  I believe these communities will continue to reorganize internationally around the internet.

Why do I think this?  The biggest losers in globalization were national governments.  National leaders have given away much of their power to unelected officials within international agencies.  This has been a trend since about 1995.  And this is exactly when the internet started to catch on.

So it's time for change.  Let's use the internet to spread solutions internationally.  And let's organize locally where we can have an immediate effect on how things get done.

Gross National Happiness - despite everything

This post is about the world debut of Gross National Happiness measures, or GNH, to take the place of those tired Gross National Product figures, or GNP. 

GNP is used to monitor manufacturing economy activity in industrial societies but includes financial gains.  GNP led to managing of countries using information that has horribly distorted the overall picture.  And bear in mind that all forms of ignorance are unnecessary.

Perhaps now that rich donors have a complete stranglehold on what is taught under the term, economics, in universities, and the credibility of economics grads is at an all-time low, it's time to allow economic academics to briefly give up on ignorance and recognize the obvious. 

Our academics appear to be adopting new sets of indicators that look at fulfillment.  But this could be some of that ol' time tokenism.  Tokenism is the best way to suppress true reform and prevent our chances of adapting to reality.  You simply ensure that you can say, "Oh, we already have a department in place that's in charge of that.  (But we don't listen to what they say, and we don't give them money so they won't threaten the existing system which, let's face it, our donors ensure we continue to do well within.)"

But something really is going on.

The French government began publishing happiness indicators in 2009. 

The Office for National Statistics in the UK has a program in place to measure national well-being at the same time that prime minister, Cameron, is touring East Asia to promote sales of weapons made in the UK.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, is drawing up guidelines for members (mostly finance ministers of 'developed countries') to collect “well-being data”.

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics, is drawing up measures of “subjective well-being”. His group is financed by the Obama administration.  (We might wonder, "When is well-being not subjective?"  So look for answers, coming soon.)

The first World Happiness Report was published recently, commissioned for a United Nations Conference on Happiness, under the auspices of the UN General Assembly.  There's input from Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and two happiness experts, Richard Layard of the London School of Economics and John Helliwell of the University of British Columbia.

The happiest people are in countries in northern Europe:

Denmark,

Norway,

Finland,

Netherlands. 

Countries with the most misery are on the African continent:

Togo,

Benin,

Central African Republic,

Sierra Leone.

At the UN Headquarters in New York City on April 2, 2012 the country of Bhutan hosted 600 participants from governments, academia, civil society and religious bodies.  The conference focused on Bhutan's new economic paradigm. 

Prime Minister of Bhutan, Jigmi Y. Thinley: "It is now the intention of the meeting on April 2, (2012) to bring together people from around the world – ... we are looking at the launching of the initiative for the creation of a sustainability-based paradigm comprising of, basically, four dimensions. These are: 

1. well-being and happiness;
2. ecological sustainability; 
3. fair distribution; and
4. efficient use of the increasingly scarce resources."
   

The conference outcomes will inform negotiations related to Rio+20, the global conference on sustainable development in June of 2012.  Bhutan will present the revised plan.

Bhutan is a Himalayan kingdom.  But it's no Shangri-La.  There's wealth and then some estimates peg a quarter of the population of 700,000 as living on less than US$1.25 a day.  70 percent of the population is without electricity.  

It's a country which experiences large, ongoing problems with Nepalese migrants.  It borders on Assam (India) where there is political unrest, and Tibet, which was violently reabsorbed into China.  So the country remains rocky in more ways than one.

And in 2014, Bhutan will go further and hold a conference at home aimed at developing a new GNH-based agreement equivalent to the Bretton Woods Agreement to establish post- WWII global economic controls.  See previous blog post for the significance of the Bretton Woods Agreement and why it fell apart.

Note:  Coverage of Bhutan's conference at the UN was also given by:

Kuensel (Bhutanese news site)

Matthieu Ricard's Blog 

The Guardian

The Economist

New York Times

The Washington Post

CNN

as well as Canada’s CBC and Global News, plus Le Monde, and Time. 

Evolution within Economies

You may have noticed that all the manufacturing jobs have gone to China, Brazil, India, and other 'developing nations'.  As a result, for example, Ontario is no longer the industrial engine of Canada.  Ontario is apparently now a lowly province compared to oil-sands sucking Alberta.  However, Albertan people engage in bringing devastation of their province through oils sands exploitation, in effect reverting to large scale extraction industries as the main sources of revenue.  

Humanity came up with large scale extraction, soon after agriculture.  Extraction led to urban centres, (see the transition from a farming culture in Egypt to building cities and pyramids, about 4,500 years ago, for example).  Then look at England in the late 1800's when manufacturing factories were first introduced, when businesses made loaning of money safe, and capitalism possible.  Service businesses like banking and law made it safe for people to lend the large amounts of money necessary to build a factory.  

Its a long story.  But Ontario is now firmly post-extraction, and post-industrial.  And service industries like retail are in decline. So what do you imagine the 'developed world' is up to these days?

Some people are referring to 'what's next' as a transition into a creative economy reliant on arts-based professionals.  These are the people that provide entertainment, architecture, and run hotels, for example.  

You've read it here first, in earlier blogs, and you'll read it again:

All 'developed nations' have entered the beginning of a coordination-based economy which delivers savings on
time, money and resources through mutual fulfillment.  

Manufacturing required service businesses like advertising that conditioned us to consume more goods.  However mutual fulfillment requires that we release some of that conditioning and be in touch with 'what we stand for' or simply, our knowing our individual principles and values.