We are joined by Amanda Janoo, Economics and Policy Lead at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance where we unpack the fundamentals behind the Wellbeing Economy. What happens when we stop treating people and the planet like they're here to serve the economy and start treating the economy like it's here to serve us? Through clear examples and policy strategies, Janoo illustrates the cultural and metaphysical transformation that can occur within communities when social and ecological wellbeing become our primary goals, and the economy becomes the means to help us achieve those goals by putting our fundamental needs for Dignity, Nature, Purpose, Fairness and Participation at the core of its activities and getting things right the first time around. We also discuss the work of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance in leading the collaboration of organisations, alliances, movements and individuals working to transform the economic system.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Amanda Janoo 0:00
While the wellbeing economy really begins from a different starting point, and I should say that the wellbeing economy movement comes under a lot of different banners. So we see circular economy, post-growth, degrowth, solidarity economy, business for the common good, and many others is all part of this concept or this movement. But at its heart is this recognition that we have to stop treating people and planet like they're here to serve the economy and start treating the economy like it's here to serve us. So starting with social and ecological well being as our primary goals, and then recognizing that the economy is just the way that we produce and provide for one another.
Alan Ware 0:36
That was today's guest, Amanda Janoo, Economics and Policy lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. We'll be talking with Amanda about efforts around the world to build more socially just an ecologically sustainable economies in this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:24
I'm Alan Ware co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals.
Nandita Bajaj 1:43
And just before we introduce our guests for today, we've got listener feedback and response to our last interview with Dr. Naomi Oreskes on market fundamentalism and population denialism. The first one is from Jeremy in the UK. He says, That was a terrific interview. I've listened to it twice. So many issues were discussed - free market economics, libertarianism, Malthus, Reagan, Clinton, Adam Smith, big tobacco, climate change, denial, overpopulation denial, the list goes on. It made me want to further research several of the issues discussed. Great guest. Thank you for branching out the overpopulation discussion into economic and political systems. It was enlightening. And here's another one from John in California in the US. Your episode with Dr. Oreskes is fantastic. She is awesome. Her discussion of market fundamentalism was hard hitting and enlightening. Effectively, market fundamentalists would say we need more people to have more consumers and more people to provide cheap labor. Regardless of the impacts and planetary limits. The talk about disinformation is so important to we all need to do more to expose the false narratives or willful abuses of language and received truths that are part of growthism. Thank you so much for that feedback. We're glad you enjoyed the interview with Dr. Oreskes about market fundamentalism as much as we did. And now on to today's interview about a wellbeing economy - an economy that can offer a welcome antidote to the perils of market fundamentalism.
Alan Ware 3:22
Amanda Janoo is an economic policy expert with over a decade of experience working with governments and international development institutions around the world. Her work aims to build just and sustainable economies through goal-oriented and participatory policy design processes. Amanda currently works as the Economics and Policy Lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance - WEALL. Prior to joining WEALL, Amanda worked for the United Nations and the African Development Bank as an industrial policy and structural transformation expert. As a Fulbright researcher, she explored the relationship between international trade and informal employment. She graduated from Cambridge University with a Master's in Philosophy and Development Studies and grew up in, and currently resides in, the US state of Vermont.
Nandita Bajaj 4:11
Hi, Amanda. We are so excited to have you with us today. In seeing the work you are doing at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, we see tremendous value overlap between our two organizations. You might have seen that all of the work at Population Balance is based on the principles of justice and sustainability for the planet, people, and animals. And one of the main forces that most of our lives are organized around is the economy. And our current global economic system is neither just nor sustainable. So we're grateful to have a chance to speak with you today about the critical work you're doing in helping lead all of us toward an economy that puts people and the planet ahead of profits and wealth. Welcome to our podcast.
Amanda Janoo 5:01
Aw, thank you so much for having me, Alan and Nandita. I'm thrilled to be here.
Nandita Bajaj 5:06
And Amanda, the premise of this episode with you is to help us unpack the goals and policies of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. But before we do that, can you give us a primer on what you see as the goals of our current system of global capitalism?
Amanda Janoo 5:23
So I would say that our current global economic system, the primary goal is for it to grow itself. And when we think about economic growth, that really means increasing production and consumption as quickly as possible and to do that through greater profitability, greater efficiency, greater wealth creation - all through the systematic exploitation of people and planet.
Nandita Bajaj 5:47
And so how does that differ from the goals of a Wellbeing Economy?
Amanda Janoo 5:51
Well, a Wellbeing Economy really begins from a different starting point. And I should say that the Wellbeing Economy movement comes under a lot of different banners. So we see circular economy, post-growth, degrowth, solidarity economy, business for the common good, and many others is all part of this concept or this movement. But at its heart is this recognition that we have to stop treating people and the planet like they're here to serve the economy and start treating the economy like it's here to serve us. So starting with social and ecological wellbeing as our primary goals, and then recognizing that the economy is just the way that we produce and provide for one another. And so it's a means and not an end in and of itself. And so we have the capacity to produce things in a way that is regenerative and equitable by design and to provide things to one another in a way that fosters real connections and meaning and purpose in our lives. And so, with that starting point, I think a lot of it is also about challenging this growth narrative, this idea that economic growth is a primary goal, and then under capitalist logic, believing that it's somehow going to trickle down and make everything better, or in a more traditional socialist logic, thinking that we can just have the government take some of that wealth through taxes to fix the damages done to people and planet in the process. And so, Wellbeing Economy as a concept is about getting the economy to do more of the heavy lifting. So actually designing it in a way that delivers on our social and ecological goals the first time around.
Nandita Bajaj 7:20
And it seems to make a lot of sense to look at it that way, given that so much of our lives are organized around the economy. We all live to work for the most part, and we're all made to believe that we must earn our living. And of course, there's gross inequality, even in how that is happening. There are of course, billions of people who live very poor lives and work for a small minority of people who are benefiting from that system. So it's a very refreshing and kind of obvious recalibration of our organizing systems, so that people's wellbeing is at the center of their lives, you know, rather than the economy being at the center. And you are also the Economic and Policy Lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, which is, from what we see, is an umbrella organization. Can you briefly describe what the Alliance's goals and policies are and how is it organized?
Amanda Janoo 8:14
So I can speak from my own experience a bit that after the global financial crisis, I think a lot of us felt like that was going to be the moment when all of our conventional approaches to economic thinking and management were going to transform overnight. But it took a little bit of time to percolate in and lead to quite incredible renaissance in economic thinking and initiatives around the world. And so about four years ago, a wide range of different academics and organizations that were in kind of the quote unquote new economy space came together and felt that it'd be really useful to have an organization that was supporting, not with the conceptual part, but as more around the movement building. So how do we get as many organizations and individuals and businesses and governments that see that we can no longer afford to just keep dealing with the symptoms of this system, whether it's inequality or climate change, etc., but really need to move upstream and to redesign the system itself. And so our aim is to support in building that movement or that power base needed to shift our economic paradigm and systems through feeding new narratives that can help us to move beyond just critique of the current system to really envisioning an alternative, hopeful idea of an economic system that is regenerative and just by design, and then to ground that in accessible knowledge. And so for me, I work as the Economics and Policy Lead, so a lot of what I do is try to make these new economic ideas and initiatives as accessible as possible to a wide range of audiences. Remind people that we are the economy. It's not something that's out there abstract that's happening to us, but we really have a right and a responsibility to transform that system in line with our values and goals. And to also illustrate the how of going about doing that. And one of those being policy as well as, of course, many other avenues of change we have.
Alan Ware 10:07
Yeah, before becoming the Wellbeing Alliance's Economy and Policy Lead, you worked for over a decade with governments and international development institutions like the UN in over fifty countries I think I heard you mention in a podcast. Could you describe some of the experiences you had in all of those dozens of countries over all those years that left a lasting impression on you, that helped move you toward a deeper critique of the current system and moved you towards this more balanced, holistic wellbeing economy approach?
Amanda Janoo 10:40
Well, to start off with, I guess, I would say I grew up in like a small rural town in Vermont. And so I grew up going to a town meeting. And for people who aren't familiar with those, it's for the small rural towns that don't have a municipal government, like the town comes together and votes and deliberates and discusses how much money is going to go to the roads or the schools or, yep, different policies or procedures for the town. So that was really my introduction to economics and politics. And so when I started studying economics, I was pretty blown away with this assumption that seemed to be embedded within it, that the economy was governed by its own natural laws, and not by us. It felt very undemocratic from a starting point. And also really disempowering in terms of the discipline was all about understanding how the economy functions, not how you change it, or how it could function. And so that, for me, is what led me into economic policy, believing that there's a role of policy in shaping and transforming our economic systems and specifically industrial policy, which is kind of old school development policy in the sense that it's was at least I think, increasing, there's more, but the last bastion where governments are supposed to protect and promote certain economic activities relative to others, in line with their development goals. And so I started with the UN and I think like a lot of maybe young economists or policy experts like came in and just thought this was about bestowing my wisdom on what kind of trade or economic policies are going to help them to break out of these neocolonial trading patterns, etc. But quickly realized that very few of these governments were writing these policies themselves in the first place. So it was mostly McKinsey, Ernst and Young, maybe the World Bank, maybe even consultants from my own UN organization that were coming in and writing these beautiful but suspiciously similar strategy and policy documents that were all about, we're in order to develop, you need to get more skills, tech, finance, from the global markets. And what I realized was that at best, these, like, multimillion dollar documents would sit on a shelf somewhere, and no one would ever look at them again, or at worst, they would actually try to implement policy and strategy that they didn't own or understand and were often not aligned with their interests. And so I worked with a team around like taking a step back and actually building facilitation tools that could take governments and multi-stakeholder coalitions through a process of designing their own strategies and economic policies. And the most important thing I realized in that was that starting with the question of why, like keep asking why, like, why do you want foreign direct investment? Why do you want economic growth? Why do you want export competitiveness? Like those questions were pretty much never asked, they were taken as implicit that those were the goals. So once you did, you got to their real development goals and, and they varied across countries. And so you know, when I was working in Myanmar, it was all about rural-urban inequality reduction. And then in Ukraine, when I was working there, it was about peace. And in Mozambique, it was about resilience. Like they had different development goals and the goals you set matter, because then the kind of economic activities or behaviors you want to support will vary. And so in Myanmar, for example, the standard approach will be to attract huge textile multinationals. But they know how to concentrate wealth better than anyone. Right? And so for them, it was really about, "Okay, let's look at the informal rural firms and cooperatives and think about how we can really support them to create a more balanced and equitable development approach with more linkages and multipliers, etc." Right? And so that led me, I think quite naturally to the Wellbeing Economy movement, because here was a whole community of people who are asking the question, what the purpose of the economy was, and how do we design and evaluate it by its capacity to support our social and ecological goals?
Alan Ware 14:39
Did you see much of the kind of stereotypical commodity export model where they're just extracting natural resources? They don't really want to build up their capacity. I'm assuming with you being interested in industrial policy, or at least interested in the value added of them doing something with those natural resources in country, is that commodity export model still going strong?
Amanda Janoo 15:02
Absolutely. And that was a lot of the entry point. So let's say, for example, I worked quite a bit in southern Africa and in the SADC
(Southern African Development Community) region or in Mozambique, when they were talking about resilience, they were really talking about diversification, their economies being so dependent on just a few raw material exports that are very vulnerable to global market fluctuations, and really start to also produce more things themselves so that you have a more resilient and diversified economy. And the challenge being though, I worked at the African Development Bank for a while, the neoliberal logic is so embedded that I remember we were talking about this community in Nigeria, that after the structural adjustment programs, I don't know if you're familiar with those from the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980s. So they tied their lending to certain prescriptions that required them to roll back their social safety nets, to liberalize their trade, to privatize public enterprises, all in line with this, like sort of free market logic. There were once thousands of enterprises and it was a big industrial hub for West Africa. There were now only maybe like, a hundred and fifty. And so they brought in McKinsey to develop a strategy for this community and their entire strategy was how do we attract more European, US, and Chinese investors to support greater manufacturing industrialization? And I was so uncomfortable because I was like, "How am I the person, as an American here, who is asking the question, why are you not focusing on the African firms of the African Development Bank that have somehow weathered this crisis, they clearly have the capacity to, you know, produce things within the region." And so that logic of always looking to the outside world, and what the outside world wants is cheap resources. And so they don't have an incentive to try to allow or encourage greater diversification and a movement away from really commodity, low value added production and exports.
Alan Ware 17:01
So very much money is still talking in a big way. And recently, I've heard a lot about China, right? Developing a port or highways or something to, I assume, extract wealth out of these countries. So it doesn't sound like the model's changing much.
Amanda Janoo 17:17
It's interesting. So China, and particularly in Africa, is now a huge investor, and they're just a lot more upfront about it then we were. So we would come with sort of good faith efforts. And I remember talking to a colleague who worked at USAID, for example, which is like the US development agency, we come in and give agricultural aid in exchange for a certain percentage of their land to be owned by US multinational corporations, right? And so it's like everything we would do, we would come and say, "We're giving you aid to support your interests, but it comes with a lot of strings attached." Whereas China tends to be a lot more upfront, where it's like, "Look, we're gonna take this, and we'll give you this." in exchange, either in terms of money or oftentimes infrastructure development. So yeah, it's not better in terms of its outcomes. But there's also a little fairer, I think, in terms of the process.
Nandita Bajaj 18:05
Your experience reminds me of a film that I've shown in my classes before called Life and Debt. It's about twenty-five years old. It's a documentary that examines the way that policies of the IMF and the World Bank and some other aid organizations, as you're saying, have changed the Jamaican economy through this very conditional aid support model. And I wanted to mention that in case listeners want to get a window of what that looks like, we see that exploitation happening left, right, and center, in so many of the Global South countries. And on that point Amanda, I'd like to go a little deeper. You've also mentioned that economic logic is colonizing more and more of our world and our minds. And you just shared some examples of how that's happening at an international level. Could you talk more about what you mean by that?
Amanda Janoo 18:55
So I think one of the important things to recognize is that our current economic system has a growth imperative, right? Like it's been designed to require growth. And what we mean when we say growth is actually the commodification of more and more areas of life, whether that's because there's debt, so you need to make more wealth than you had originally taken out, right? Or then there's only so many, let's say, apples that somebody is going to be able to buy. So eventually, you're going to need to start producing something else. And that keeps going and going. And so, in many ways, the idea that you could own a song or an idea would have been ludicrous at a certain point of history, right? But we had to create intellectual property rights in order to create markets and ways to profit off of really intangible aspects of our lives and of our culture and of these fluid things that connect us. And I think we're seeing that now. Where really it's a lot about the commodification of our attention. Ways to be profitable on that basis. And so there's very few aspects of our life that aren't subjected to a particular market logic, that I would say in the US, for example, as soon as you even have a hobby, you're thinking, "Oh, is there a way to make money off of this, right." And part of that is because, you know, people are really struggling financially. But it's also, we view the only way that something can be valuable is if we're paid for it. But ultimately, the things that are truly priceless are the things we value most. But there are fewer and fewer dimensions of that in our lives. And I think we lose a sacredness of something once you put a price on it, because you start to say that this is equivalent, that my care for my mother is equivalent to $20,000 a year, right? And so that's interchangeable and interchangeable then therefore with a nice new patio set. Because once you put a price on things, and they're all interchangeable. And I think you can get really deep with this, too, like Nandita, you were saying earlier, you know, like our lives feel so controlled by work. And it strikes me that we don't find the idea of a labor market grosser. Yeah? Like the idea of a market for people is a pretty gross concept. But we really accept that as an idea that we are able to like buy and sell each other's time, really, which is our lives in some way. And that that doesn't feel off. And so I think a lot of this, there's varying degrees of it, but how much we accept the false commodification of ourselves and of others and of our interactions and of nature as a result of this system and its colonization of more and more aspects of our life. I equally came to economics from a feminist perspective of learning a little bit about economics and the assumptions around our human nature as being we're all, across space and time, inherently selfish, individualistic, greedy, competitive, rational entities. And in the traditional dichotomy, those are all masculine characteristics, right? And you would always have the counterbalance of cooperation, compassion, interdependence, and those were all missing. And so I was interested in one, where did these ideas come from and what are the implications for the world? And obviously not great. We tend to really encourage pretty sociopathic behavior because to be purely self-serving and not care at all about anybody else is, in many ways, our definition of a sociopath. And so for me, a lot of this is about how do we also reintegrate into our economic system those alternative values of recognizing that the system, you can look at it as a massive entity of competition, or you could see it as a tremendous amount of cooperation, right?
Nandita Bajaj 22:35
Yeah.
Amanda Janoo 22:36
And that's a worldview question, as well. And I think the care economy, how much of the activities that give us the greatest sense of meaning and purpose, are often the non-monetary aspects. Like how do we make more space for those in our lives as well, for both men and women, to be able to value them in a way that doesn't require putting a price tag immediately on it, or in the same way, I know that you were speaking with Dasgupta recently, and I'm always on the fence about this a little bit like, I don't think that the solution for caring about the environment is to put a financial price on everything, I think it might slow it down, right, like to remove it from being viewed as just an externality, but it requires really integrating and starting with the social and the environmental in its own terms.
Nandita Bajaj 23:22
Absolutely. And you know, your point about what's become the dominant modern worldview of rewarding greed and selfishness and the competitive nature of the worst aspects of human behavior, which have come to be seen as part of just human nature. It reminds me of our conversation with one of the integrative thinkers we spoke to, Jeremy Lent. And he talked about how this worldview is not just dangerous, but just plain wrong. Of course we saw, what ten thousand years ago, the real separation worldview with the rise of agriculture, where we began to see ourselves as having dominion over nature. And then that became really concretized, a few hundred years ago with the Judeo-Christian Western philosophical movement that then spread across the rest of the world through of course, a lot of colonial practices, a lot of extermination of non-Western civilizations, as well as the evisceration of the planet. And has come to be seen as this driving force behind human nature. Meanwhile, as you said, we are far more cooperative and interconnected and driven by many more of the positive qualities that you mentioned, then we are by the things we are currently being rewarded for, which is self-serving behaviors. And we appreciate that being at the center of the thinking behind the Wellbeing Economy - that it's not just changing the economic models, but also really challenging us to confront the modern worldview of what constitutes human nature.
Amanda Janoo 24:59
Absolutely. I think as I was mentioning in my now long love-hate relationship with economics, I did a lot of history of economic thought. And I had to self-teach it because they used to teach it in economics programs, but they no longer do, which I think is quite problematic. But I couldn't understand where these assumptions came from without understanding the historical context and the people who came up with them. And it makes a lot more sense once you have that information. And so so much of our understanding around like homoeconomicus are the assumptions around human nature, exactly, as you're saying, came from a very particular Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition, embedded in a lot of Judeo-Christian assumptions around Original Sin and a lot of other ideas that ended up permeating into these like fundamental theories. And like, I'm sure Jeremy Lent articulated much more eloquently than I will. There is, of course, a lot of evidence to counter that point. And I read a study once that was amazing about how every time that you engage in a, like you give somebody a gift, just because you want to, your stress levels are reduced, your immune system is boost, and it reinforces social trust in your brain with that person. Whereas every time you engage in a market transaction, which is seemingly neutral, actually, it has the opposite effect - our stress levels are slightly increased, our immune system is depressed and it reinforces social distrust, right? So we are wired to want to actually give more than we are to want to create this profit-oriented exchange or the seemingly equitable exchange depending on on the structure. But I personally tend to find human nature arguments a little bit lazy, I feel like, you know, what about us right now is natural? When you look around, like we clearly have a lot of autonomy to restructure, and to guide the way that we want to live and personally embrace a little bit more of a Buddhist perspective maybe on this, that we all have good and bad qualities in us. And the point of life, you know, and the point of society is, is to help to nurture the positive and to dissuade some of those negative. The one thing that the happiness literature is really clear on, and we can talk about a lot of like the societal structural aspects that determine our personal at least wellbeing, but they stay at a personal level, the two personality characteristics that are most highly correlated with happiness are generosity and contentment. And everything in our economic system is telling us to do the opposite of that, right? Sort of hoard as much as possible for ourselves and to never be content, no matter what, to always want more.
Alan Ware 27:36
Yeah, and that with the some of the studies showing that the longer someone studies traditional economics, the more selfish they become.
Amanda Janoo 27:44
Those studies are amazing, too. I were, yeah, economic students lose their understanding of the notion of fairness, which you see in children how deep that is, like just instinctual - the idea of what's fair or not is, and I think we all lose it a little bit as we grow older and more accustomed to the systems in which we live.
Alan Ware 28:03
Yeah, I think you might have mentioned one in five fortune 500 CEOs show evidence of sociopathic tendencies. And I've heard studies of people who drive expensive cars, they look at how they violate traffic laws, stop signs, other things that people driving more expensive cars are much more likely to feel entitled, in some sense, to neither be content or generous.
Nandita Bajaj 28:27
Right.
Alan Ware 28:28
Let's look at how some of these Wellbeing Economy ideas are put into practice through exploring some of the ideas and the case studies you have in the Wellbeing Economy policy design guide that you created at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. But first, at the big picture level, how would you describe the overall process of Wellbeing Economy policy design?
Amanda Janoo 28:49
So within this guide, and I should say that it was very much inspired from my work in international development, so really focusing less on the what, right? Like what is wellbeing? These are the indicators you should use. These are the policies you should adopt. And more of the how - how does one go about understanding what matters for wellbeing or selecting or identifying relevant indicators. And so the first phase is a lot of, and I think it's probably the clearest one, because I should also say that this movement is very emergent. And so that's also the hard thing. We can't point to a particular place and say that's a Wellbeing Economy and that's how they got there. We're, we're all trying and a part of this journey. And there's bits and pieces and exciting case studies we can learn from along the way. But it starts with a new vision of progress. So if you ask people what they love about the way that they live, nine times out of ten it's the people and the nature. So it's engaging in those kinds of dialogues, like what really matters for our current and future wellbeing and, and to be able to articulate those as a new North Star that can help to guide and shape new narratives and also indicators of progress that can then be a starting point for then designing and evaluating your economy by its capacity to support that vision. And this, I know it sounds intuitive, but this is another example of how much our contemporary economic logic has really seeped in is that, for example, I've engaged with a WHO on an economy of wellbeing initiative they've been doing, and they often still feel the need to make the case for why health is good for the economy. That the burden of proof is on making the financial case for something always rather than feeling that they can swap that burden of proof, say, "How do we evaluate the economy in terms of its contribution to our health? What information would we need about the economy to understand which aspects are positively or negatively contributing to our health or our connection to our environmental sustainability and thriving of all species?" Right? And so to put a different frame and lens by which to look at the economy and to identify what kind of strategies and approaches would be best aligned, and to really embed a core principle of this is really in participation. So deliberative democracies, in the sense that people are broad-based participation is a route of developing the strategies and also the policies and have power around implementation and also the evaluation of that overall design process.
Alan Ware 31:21
Yeah, I've heard you mention that it's very contextual, policies are going to vary enormously by where they're situated, who's participating, what their goals are. So very hard to create a any kind of one size fits all. And then to be experimental is very important. So yeah, like any policy design guide, to be general enough for it to be useful is very important.
Amanda Janoo 31:45
And humble enough, right? To know that there are many roads to heaven, right? Like there are always multiple routes that you can take to achieve similar aims. And the contextual point is, I think, quite probably from my experience also working in international development, but we talk about the Wellbeing Economy, but it's important that we're clear, we're talking about Wellbeing Economies, right? Because if the economy is the way that we produce and provide for one another, then clearly the way that we're doing that is going to be influenced through our culture, and our geography, our history, our policies, and many other factors. So not only may the vision itself be different, but the path and the approach and what that will ultimately look like will also vary according to context and should do, but it's hard, especially when you talk about the economy, because it's so correlated with economics, which is the theory or study of the economy, which has been really founded in a universal model that assumes across space and time, how economy should function, right? And I think that that's one of the most damaging aspects of economics, actually, is that that universal assumption, but that's often what people are yearning for, is an alternative, universal model that can be imposed and fix all of our issues, as opposed to feeling like we need to be the active agents in building that better system we desire.
Nandita Bajaj 33:06
And how would you describe the process of a community creating a Wellbeing Economy vision that you just spoke about.
Amanda Janoo 33:13
So there are a lot of different ways that communities have gone about this. And I would say with varying levels of participation, so some are based on research, others are based on surveys - we generally advocate for community deliberation, because the process of actually discussing what we value I think can be very powerful for communities to recognize that there's more that unites us than divides in terms of their vision for the future and for this better world. And that's an important starting point for solidarity throughout the next design process. And while I say this, I should also mention that this idea of wellbeing that a lot of these deliberation approaches are happening in the global north, like in high income countries that are in a state of existential crisis or a midlife crisis, some way of saying, you know, like, we've developed these really wealthy economies with this great wealth generating systems and everybody's miserable and the planet's on fire and like, what's the plan? But the idea of, you know, intergenerational wellbeing or of this higher North Star to orient towards is not new, and it's not our own. So it comes from Indigenous like paradigms and perspectives. We see it a lot and like the buen vivir movement in Latin America or Ubuntu in southern Africa or Swaraj in India, many others, right? And so some communities already have, I think, this cultural paradigm that exists there that they can also elevate as their North Star while others, like our cultures, have just lost sight. So we need to go back to first principles and really wrestle with this idea of where we're trying to go and what we're trying to achieve together.
Nandita Bajaj 34:57
And that really speaks to also just how young the Western civilization is and hasn't really had the tens of thousands of years of trial and error, you know, learning from failures and successes that so many of the Indigenous communities around the world have had, of the traditional wisdom to build those communities around. And so not only seems natural for some of our Global North countries who are starting to recognize that these principles that we have exported to the rest of the world as the North Star of being an indicator of success is not actually working. It's actually destroyed a lot of other local economies and a lot of other ways of being in community with one another. And we are called now to reclaim those values. But then, as you say, it's also about creating new narratives that both transcend and include the best of what's come before us and all of the new learnings we've had since then. What are some examples of a government or group that you think is doing or has done an especially good job at developing a wellbeing vision?
Amanda Janoo 36:06
My favorite example is probably Wales in many respects. They went through a process of asking their citizens, "What kind of Wales do you want to leave for your children and grandchildren?" I think Australia did similar kinds of research that when you ask people about their own wellbeing, they tend to focus on, let's say, more material or short-term issues. Whereas if you start thinking about like children or of future generations, they tend to identify qualities like love, right? And play and connection, right? As aspects that are important. So that framing I think was significant, not only to bring in the environmental dimensions of that longer-term thinking, but also to widen the scope of what we would envision as important. And on that basis, they developed seven core wellbeing goals, which were around resilience, which was all about biodiversity conservation, around even their definition of prosperity was one of an innovative society that respects planetary boundaries, and is like carbon neutral, they had ones around culturally vibrant Wales, around the Welsh language, around social connectedness. And really critically, I also love that about global responsibility. So anything they were doing to improve their national wellbeing wouldn't come at the cost of others in the global community as like a principle and a starting point. And they actually passed legislation that then required all government agencies to work collectively towards the achievement of those seven wellbeing goals. So it created the first Wales Future Generations Commissioner who's meant to be in charge of representing voices and perspectives of those who have yet to be born or of future generations, and to facilitate this breaking down of silos, and this much more linear, kind of mechanistic ways of thinking to more holistic and systemic approaches. And they outlined principles of decision-making, which were around preventative thinking, this longer-term thinking, collaboration, but also participation. And so for me also, as somebody who's very into participatory governance, they were clear that they needed to have the high level goals and clear metrics to monitor and measure success and, and certain kinds of policies at that level. But also, they decentralized and allowed each city or municipality to develop their own bespoke strategies that they saw as aligned with achieving those higher level goals, right? So to allow that more bottom-up, and a lot of governments get stuck at the point of indicators, like the beyond GDP, they develop social and ecological indicators. And then nothing really happens, because the logic and the process of decision-making is not also being transformed with the implications of having a very different North Star. And one example, and this is that they were wanting to build a big highway last year or the year before. And they had to go through a process of making the case for why this highway would contribute to all seven of their wellbeing goals. And they couldn't make the case really, for any but one. And so ultimately ended up putting a pause on any additional road infrastructure and using that money for active travel and public transportation instead. So there have been ways in which decision-making has been transformed as a result.
Alan Ware 39:23
So as you've emphasized with that Wales example, too, the very core of the Wellbeing Economy policy design is meaningful participation. And why do you think that is so critical to have?
Amanda Janoo 39:34
Well, personally, I see the political and economic crises of our time as very much intertwined and interconnected. And I don't think you can really disentangle one without the other, they have to happen simultaneously. And luckily, they are happening simultaneously. I was talking with a woman from the OECD a while ago and she does research on participatory democratic initiatives across OECD countries from the 1950s today and she said the last few years it's just been exponential. There's just so much energy and demand by communities at all different levels to have a voice to really feel that they have a voice over their collective livelihoods. And so with the concentration of wealth that is embedded within our current system, comes a concentration of power. And oftentimes that power concentration is being maintained through the consolidation of political power as well. And so in order for us to really redistribute out the economic system, we need to also redistribute power in the political system so that we're all feel that we are meaningfully able to contribute to the design of that system and the evaluation of its outcomes.
Alan Ware 40:48
It is frustrating that the market logic partly has turned us into consumers, not citizens, and were subjected to advertising, political campaigning that's full of an economic logic that doesn't really require us to deliberate, compromise. And to the extent we've lost those abilities since the town hall of your Vermont upbringing, where people really had to settle matters to liberate and compromise face to face. So there is a concern about those skills of citizenship, but we're never going to get them back unless we're given the ability to start participating again.
Amanda Janoo 41:26
Absolutely. And I'm sure you can tell I'm a bit of an optimist. So I believe in our capacity to regain those skills. And I think that for myself at least, social media and a lot of the political discourse being moderated through those spaces also gives us a sense of way more polarization and radicalism than there really is and an inability to compromise or to find common ground. When people are together in person, it makes a big difference. Like I remember in our town meetings, you know, if somebody's like, "Oh, I don't think we should be doing school lunch," they're just going to be like, "Shut up, Ralph, sit down." There's some immediate accountability to those kinds of opinions. And so as much as we can do it in person as part of, of course, you know, I know technology. And there's amazing technological platforms like the Dedicim platform, which New York City has actually been using. Barcelona has been using it. Coming out of the global financial crisis, everybody had lost faith in government. And so they were like, "Okay, fine. Like, here's this digital platform, you can propose whatever policies you want - debate, upvote them, whatever. And if it gets a certain level of support, we promise we will just immediately pass them into law." And it's just revived, like political participation so much, and I think it's a big part of why Barcelona has one of the first city climate policies that was actually in line with the Paris Agreement, and had one of the best representations of environmental justice and the sense of social justice really being at its heart, because it was practical, it was people were talking about, "Well, we know a bunch of old people live in this area. And so shade is going to be really important." And, you know, so it was less from this theoretical model of strategies coming from the heavens and the experts as people being like, "Practically, this is what we're gonna need in this particular area, or this area in order to really make this a sustainable and equitable city."
Alan Ware 43:20
And you also mentioned La Paz, Bolivia as an example where they, they had all these poverty programs forever, right? With embedded agencies and experts who had different ideas of how to fight poverty, and they just decided to give that over to the citizens?
Amanda Janoo 43:37
Yeah, I know. And it's tough. I mean, I think we've all internalized a little bit of like paternalism. And it makes me sad sometimes in these conversations how much that can come up, where our negative perception of one another leads us to be very wary of the idea of democracy. It's like, "Well, we wouldn't want everybody to be making decisions." And so we underestimate I think our capacity to think systemically and to also do things in a way that are going to be best for the collective whole. And I don't know if you've come across Spain's recent Citizen's Assembly that they did on climate?
Alan Ware 44:15
You've mentioned Citizen's.
Amanda Janoo 44:17
Yeah, they did one just last year. And it's amazing. So they started with climate, right? And so again, starting with the environmental goal, had a Citizen's Assembly of one hundred randomly selected citizens who came together in a process for deliberation, they came up with over a hundred recommendations. And so many of them are like circular economy, regenerative agriculture, green infrastructure, thinking about intersections between ecology and human health and all of these very systems-oriented and economic transformation-oriented. And so I think when you start with the economy, the problem is then you get in the weeds of ideology really quickly. Whereas when you start with the social or the environmental goals, you automatically get that you need to change the economy, right? In order to align with those, and and I think it opens it up to more visionary proposals.
Alan Ware 45:07
And those Citizen's Assemblies have experts kind of on call, right? To serve the citizens who are trying to deliberate about different policies.
Amanda Janoo 45:16
Yeah. So they'll come and they'll give inputs. And of course, I'm sure that that ultimately ends up influencing and in different ways, but Spain's was exciting because the Citizen's Assembly was instigated by the government. So all of these proposals have gone to Parliament and the Prime Minister now for consideration, and I don't know where they're at now. So I mean, to follow up on that.
Alan Ware 45:37
That's a good way to fight what you call the participation fatigue, which I've seen in different processes where you ask for people's input constantly and nothing gets done?
Amanda Janoo 45:48
Well, and I think it's a big part of the participation fatigue as well is that people will make it ask at the visioning stage or the agenda setting stage. They're never asked to engage in the monitoring or the evaluation. So there's like, "Okay, so you just didn't do anything, or I haven't seen an impact on the basis of like all of this time?" And that's like closing the loop of the policy cycle and ensuring that we're really a part of it throughout.
Alan Ware 46:12
So right now, there are six countries - I heard Canada recently joined with Finland, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, and Iceland, are the six WEGO economies, right? Wellbeing Economy Governments. So how do you feel they're doing so far? And what are their biggest obstacles they face in implementing these policies?
Amanda Janoo 46:31
Well, I already mentioned Wales, which is definitely probably my favorite. They've all gone through a process of developing alternative indicators to GDP. So alternative national performance frameworks or frameworks that are assessing their national progress on the basis of different social and ecological indicators. Now, Wales has actually removed GDP altogether. Some of them include GDP, but also other indicators to sort of supplement and counterbalance, there's diversity in terms of their shape and form. Another exciting example is actually Canada, where during COVID, people, I think, probably all around the world, but particularly, I guess, in Canada, we're really losing faith again, in government and the questioning the appropriate role of government and business and society at large in terms of making decisions, and what are we trying to achieve? And so they had already been attending some of the Wellbeing Economy Government partnership dialogues and policy labs, because they share best practice challenges, lessons learned, and sort of try to be an informal community of support around this work. But they developed their living standards framework, and one of the things that I love about it is that they included an indicator on meaning and purpose as one of their headline indicators, and they didn't currently have any measurement approaches for it. So they recognize that they would need to create new data for this, but it was really important. And coming back to the point is that, you know, there's employment indicators that are there. There's air quality indicators, and biodiversity indicators, connection, trust, etc. And understanding the interrelationship between all of these can be really complicated. But I think that over time, once you start to really look at the system dynamic between these different variables, you'll start to see that, "Okay, my hypothesis is that the jobs, the type of employment that provides the most meaning and purpose are the ones that are contributing most of the social and ecological indicator improvement, right?" And so you start to be able to develop more of an insight on what kind of areas you want to grow of the economy and why, and that kind of relates to the major challenge I'm seeing with these governments as well, which is that most of them have put the social and the ecological and the economic indicators all together in one suit. And they're not commensurate. But they're trying to reconcile the trade offs and the interrelationships rather than recognizing that the economy is a part of our society embedded with a larger ecosystem. So a lot of work I'm trying to do right now is to get some more governments to downgrade the economy and to really start to disaggregate economic information. So we have a better sense of what are the business structures, production processes, provision systems, non-monetary monetary mechanisms of exchange, etc., that are positively and negatively contributing along with different goods and services, of course, but we have data for that, so that we can start to create better insights on what areas of the economy we want to support and which we need to also hospice or sunset because they're very damaging as a part of that system too. And I think that's the part that's hard sometimes, like we don't want to let go of the aspects of the system that aren't serving us and we keep trying, like look at us right now with the financial system, like we just constantly do everything we can to keep it going. Even though we're all just like wait, "What's happening?" And I think that that type of process will be useful moving forward and to build a Wellbeing Economy.
Alan Ware 49:58
Yeah, psychology of previous investment that things get locked in, we've already got so much invested in roads and bridges and everything for whatever system transportation, for example, it costs so much to move away from it, we got people trained to think of it in a certain way. So yeah, and reminds me of the role of crisis is in the big world historical events, it's often depression, World War, COVID, great recession allowed for a lot of this rethinking when it's just obvious that the old system is, is not working anymore. And as you mentioned, and a lot of us thought that great financial crisis would have opened up things, like you said, it did start a multi-year building a momentum of these Wellbeing Economy ideas and alliances and people. But we're still, as you said too, we have this lock-in of trying to save this system at all costs. So it often does feel like a crisis may be what needs to precipitate, whereas Milton Friedman of the Chicago School, that the ideas lying around are the ones that are picked up. Reagan picked up their ideas that they'd been developing about libertarian, neoliberal economics in the 70s. So hopefully, when the time for the crises come that opened up people's minds, there'll be much better developed ideas that you're helping create.
Amanda Janoo 51:21
I would say we're in that moment, actually. I think COVID was pretty profound in a lot of ways. And I can just say that from my own experience, and we all like it's just accelerated in a way that we couldn't have never anticipated since COVID. And I think there was a lot of, one a breaking of the expectation that the future is going to look the way it does now.
Alan Ware 51:43
Yeah.
Amanda Janoo 51:43
I think a rupturing of that, which opened up our imaginations a little bit, but also our sense of security about what the future might look like in a way that has precipitated a lot more passion into these kinds of ideas. And I mean, another thing that I, I feel like COVID was really powerful around was the, you know, identification of essential workers. Like that, across pretty much all governments, there were some variations but they're pretty similar around who was viewed as most essential to keeping just the country going. And it was not the hedge fund managers, right? And the giant CEOs and the financial execs who are currently really provided the most incentives in our system, because they're viewed as the most efficient at wealth generation that is then going to be trickled down or reinvested in some way. But when it came to the time, it was mostly a lot of workers we call low-skilled, and therefore low paid or precarious employment, who are deemed the most essential. And I think we've seen how that's been percolating with a revival of a lot of labor movements, a lot of challenging around the great resignation, and all of these different shifts in our perceptions of what kind of work matters and why.
Nandita Bajaj 52:55
Yeah, I was thinking, you know, when you mentioned that Canada is looking at meaning and purpose as new key indicators of success and wellbeing, and it's so fascinating the response that COVID precipitated with respect to essential work and what's considered meaningful work. And I think, in addition to all the hedge fund executives, that there were also a lot of bullshit jobs that went completely silent during the time. You know, production and consumption really slowed down. We weren't seeing as much flying happening, people weren't driving as much. And we were starting to see a return of the wild in beautiful ways. And another aspect, I think, with the work you're doing with trying to embrace degrowth principles is actually just scaling back the degree of work that we participate in and cutting back the number of work days and work hours. And to really confront this growth paradigm that requires us to keep undermining our own wellbeing to maximize efficiency, to work long hours, etc. And the meaning and purpose indicators would, I would imagine also accompany just a scaling back of production of consumption, of working long hours. Is that your sense as well?
Amanda Janoo 54:10
Yeah. And I'm pretty sure that Canada has actually a specific indicator on time use as well. Because in the 1960s, this was the whole assumption by economists that with more efficiency, we would be at like a fifteen hour workweek, right?
Nandita Bajaj 54:25
Yes.
Amanda Janoo 54:25
And I remember, I remember being in, I think it was in Lesotho. And people were talking about something around, you know, American entrepreneurialism or blah, blah, blah. And he said something, which was like, "Yeah, well, you might have watches, but we've got time." And I was like, "Oh, damn, okay. Yes, true." Right? And the impacts of time poverty on us at the moment are so extreme, as well as, you know, the Surgeon General's recent announcements around the epidemic of loneliness in the US, for example, right? Like the lack of a sense of belonging that we're experiencing because of our current system that is hyper-individualistic and separates us in more and more and more ways and splinters us. But I do also acknowledge that, you know, many of these ideas and perspectives can feel like a great position to come from a position of luxury and of affluence. So most people who are having three jobs is because they have to have three jobs because they can't make enough just based on one. And so it's also not just about less time, but really understanding how do we ensure more equitable distributions of that wealth across various populations. And I do think cooperatives and social enterprises like alternative structures that are going to ensure more equitable distribution of wealth and time and voice from the get go, as opposed to continuing to rely on the government to try to redistribute that after the fact is probably the way to go in some ways to build a more pre-distributive system. But there's a lot of roots in and I think you were saying as well, you know, the meaningful work that doesn't always need to be part of a financial transaction, I think the commons of community-based systems of reciprocity and care that are separate from financial markets, or monetary transactions are really important to try to re-foster and support as in our societies, too.
Nandita Bajaj 56:19
Yeah, we were talking to Naomi Oreskes for our last episode, and she talks about how the free market fundamentalism and the libertarian kind of ideology has really made us question some of the better aspects of governments, where governments can actually help in a more democratic mixed economy kind of a setting. And as we see, you mentioned Iceland as a really great example of a country that has a mixed economy. But also, they have set very clear goals around which to organize that economy. So one of the things you've talked about is that institutions won't change without some type of power pushing them back. And much of the answer to the question we've been talking about is what is the economy for? You know, and as you know, it's answered through some kind of a political process that's ultimately about power and who chooses what the goals of any economy will be. And so what do you think the role of political power is in helping to create this kind of a Wellbeing Economy?
Amanda Janoo 57:20
Well, I think it's helpful. First of all, the way that I define policies is policies are mechanisms that aim to influence collective behavior in line with a particular goal or objective, right? And so often, they're then associated with the government or some sort of collective body. But you could similarly have, let's say, informal policies that somehow govern and regulate behavior and norms within a society. And that there's a lot of different kinds of policies, like we tend to think about regulations as just like banning things or requiring things. But often, the government taking a step back and allowing communities the space to do their own thing around the commons or it can be discouraging certain kinds of activities that are damaging. Right now, we often think about taxes as purely to generate revenue for the government to then spend on social support programs. But taxes are actually meant to dissuade behavior, right? Like to make certain behaviors more costly, but they're not generally used that way, right? And so if we were able to better identify more clearly, and I think we already have a sense of certain types of economic sectors, activities, production processes, labor practices, etc., that we view as detrimental - to put heavy taxes on those relative to the kinds of like circular economy or regenerative economy or employee-owned businesses, etc., that we see as positively aligned with this different system and to give them subsidies or grants, or at least some kind of other types of support. That's a powerful way that you can shift the system and dissuade certain types of behavior relative to others. And of course, there's other ways too, but to me, that's my starting point for why policy can be a powerful entry point or mechanism for transforming the economic system. But it's important to recognize like one of our original founders, Lorenzo Fioramonti, he like started WEALL, but then got a job as a minister in Italy, and was really trying to advocate for this Wellbeing Economy policies and initiatives. And he got destroyed. Yeah? Because there was just not the public support for this kind of thinking. And so pure political will or power is not sufficient. You need to have a broad base, like sort of buy in and multi-stakeholder support for this kind of work, which is why, once again, I think more deliberative and participatory processes, and also engaging not from a purely like I come from an more nerdy technocratic perspective around these things. But a lot of our team works on narratives and communication, and how do we support with accessible new understandings of what the economy is and can be. And so one of the things we've been doing in the US, for example, is starting to talk to journalists who report on the economy, but are reporting on the economy from a different starting point. Like it's clear that they're not coming from the classical maybe neoclassical or business logic to understand how they got there. What was their journey? What would it take for us to report on the economy, not in terms of Dow Jones is, is up two points, and you know, like GDP growth rates, unemployment figures, but really in terms of its contribution to social and environmental wellbeing. Like that's a long way away, but how do we get there, right? And how do we start with different kinds of messaging and understandings of how we evaluated success?
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:46
Yeah, exactly. And we know that a truly democratic government has to represent the values of the people that it's there to serve. And with so many governments currently subsidizing really extractive, exploitive, environmentally damaging work, such as the fossil fuel industries, such as the animal agricultural industries, is certainly not in support of the wellbeing of the people or the planet. What are your views on using policy to push back against the powerful market forces that have equally created this monopoly and undermined, I think, the positive role that government can play?
Amanda Janoo 1:01:24
So I've used the term markets like, like market logic quite a bit. And when we have these discussions, I think we often tend to think of it in in similar ways as like Milton Friedman would talk about the free market, but I remember there being a Marc A. Thiessen quote I read once that I really sat with and he was like, "Being against markets is like being against language, right? It's a mechanism of exchange." And so you can have a farmer's market and Amazon and financial markets, and they're very different, right? Those are all markets, right? But they look and they feel and they serve very different functions. And so when we're talking about the idea of free markets is kind of the idea that free enterprise or business as an entity should be a large structuring force for our economy and thus functionally for our society, because that's the premier goal in this sense. And so there's, of course, always got to be this balance between them. But I also think that the dichotomy of the state and the market is often why our imaginations are quite limited when it comes to the economy. And we get stuck in this duality of capitalism versus socialism as like our only options. And so that's why I think when you add in the commons, or community or the care economy, just like another dimension of the ways in which we connect and provide for one another and fulfill each other's sort of needs in this world, it breaks us a little bit out of that duality and it thinks about the appropriate balance of power between all three of those. Because I think if there's too much power for the market, state, or just community, like, they'll all become authoritarian in some way, right? Like so I think it's about figuring out the right balance of those. And right now, I think what we're in need of is a lot more community connection and care and definitely more political will to even try to take on any of the big corporate interests, which this was something that I would always have such a hard time with, because the US it's not as persuasive anymore, but the US government and our development agencies would often go in and and promote democracy, but really, they mean capitalism, and would talk a lot about how their underdevelopment is because of their corruption, right? And that would become an internalized narrative for a lot of countries I would work with are like, "We're too corrupt, our politicians are too corrupt, and we're never going to get anywhere." And I would just share with them that, you know, I'm from the United States, which is probably the most corrupt country in the world. We call it lobbying. So it's institutionally legal. Yeah. But it's a direct, you know, like development of policy on the basis of private interest and spending. And so this is, again, a little bit of a tangent, but my experience working in government has mostly been with like civil servants, and like mid-level bureaucrats. And it's always been incredibly inspiring how much they care and how much they're really trying to make a difference. I think that the process of, and this for myself as I thought about maybe running for office, but the thing that makes me most nervous, because most of the elected officials I've met seem to be pretty narcissistic. And I can't tell if they were already like that, which is why they ran for office or the process of running for office and being in office has turned them into narcissists because there is evidence that shows that when you have power, it changes your brain and changes your capacity for empathy and connection. And so that's another reason why allowing for too much consolidated power for elected representatives is problematic, or CEOs, or whatever it is like in this very hierarchical system that we designed, because it's it changes people.
Alan Ware 1:04:54
So it seems there are encouraging signs as you've talked about changing public attitudes. About the desirability of continuing with global industrial capitalism as we know it. And we were heartened to see a conference on the subject in the European Parliament of all places, titled the Beyond Growth conference just a few weeks ago, and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance is one of the supporting partners of that. So what are your impressions about how that went and how some of these, especially the economic degrowth arguments were received?
Amanda Janoo 1:05:26
Well, first of all, the fact that that conference happened is just very exciting. People really felt like it's a pivotal sort of illustration of some of the mainstreaming of this kind of thinking. It was an incredible opportunity for a lot of our movement and membership to be able to connect in person and felt like it's a lot of nerdy people. So they feel like they're rock stars, right? Like, everywhere, we've got Kate Raworth, and you know, like all these amazing people who are there speaking. And I think the general sense that I got is there was definitely some tensions between the degrowth and the green-growth perspectives with the parliamentarians. And the politicians tending to lean towards green-growth arguments, meaning that we believe that we can just keep on the way we're doing but with technological innovations, and the right sort of investments and renewable energies and these other things, that it'll be okay. Whereas the degrowth perspective was quite clear and I think in line with what you were speaking about earlier, Nandita, about we need to stop growing, right? Like we actually need to decline in a lot of the areas and to be clear on, on which aspects, like what we are producing and why and what we're consuming and why and how that actually relates to our wellbeing. And, and so there was quite a diverse audience. And so for the more activist-oriented audience, were loving the degrowth and more radical folks. And I heard that I think a lot of them were there on the last day and, and even got to a point of sort of booing some of the green-growth more perspectives, and it triggered a discussion within our own team as well, actually, because we do try to aim to be a movement, a narrative, and alliance that is calling in rather than calling out - to be a broad tent that a lot of people can find a home and a community in. We're always reconciling with what are those boundaries? And what are the times when we need to make it very clear, what is beyond the scope of what we envision as in lined with this movement or this type of transformation. And so that also came up because there was a B-Corp gathering in Amsterdam, I think two weeks ago, and my colleague Michael was there. And he was saying that Nestle apparently just got certified as a B-Corp. Yeah. If that's happening, we like we need to clearly the certification and criteria is problematic. And so, you know, again, like being clear on, on what are our non-negotiables in this space and how do we generate them in a way that is representative of a very diverse community and not of the world according to Amanda Janoo, right? Wellbeing Economy according to you know, a small group of people, but yeah, collective consensus.
Alan Ware 1:08:05
We saw an article in The Economist that had a pretty predictable, it was very dismissive and the connotations were very belittling. And to the extent there's anything substantive, it just seemed like, yeah, green-growth, "Green the economy, not throttle it," was one of their quotes. They said Europe's biggest problems, Ukraine, declining populations, and the energy transition can be solved with growth. So any of the problems of growth can be solved with more growth.
Amanda Janoo 1:08:31
I know. It's remarkable, right? Like, but when you're in it, like when you're in that worldview, it makes sense somehow. And so in my work, it's definitely like the economists that are the hardest, so much cognitive dissonance with the worldview that you develop to be able to start to question some of these fundamental assumptions. A lot of people have made that transition. And there's a lot of efforts to reform economic curriculum. That's exciting. And so I think we're seeing movements in that area.
Alan Ware 1:09:01
Yeah. And I've heard you mention that, I don't know if it's in the G20, that half of all people surveyed believe capitalism doing more harm than good, or is that around the world? I've heard you mentioned that.
Amanda Janoo 1:09:12
Yeah. So there's an Edelman Trust Barometer that did a survey. And yeah, over half of people globally believe capitalism is doing more harm than good. And it was even as high as like 74% in India, for example. And like, you know, there's a lot of particular countries where that was very high. And, and the other statistic I'll quote sometimes is by the Common Alliance survey that came out, I think it was 2021 now, but it found that at least across G20 countries, 74% of people believe that the economy should be working in a way that supports the health and wellbeing of like people and planet rather than just profit and wealth generation. And that is very exciting and quite encouraging. And even in the US, it was as high as 68%. And so one of the things I want to do this year, because Canada did this, like they put out a national survey to ask people if they agree that national progress should be measured by economic growth or by their quality of life. And it was so clear that I think it was like 74% said quality of life, 45% said economic growth and, and that those kind of surveys are really helpful to just illustrate the level of public support and the shift in consciousness that exists and start to light a fire sometimes under government as well to recognize that this isn't a crazy idea.
Nandita Bajaj 1:10:33
And hopefully, we would see a similar proportional shift in journalists covering these kinds of new narratives as well, because I think we see a real hesitation on behalf of a lot of these media outlets, you know, as Dr. Oreskes spoke about, that they've been really bought by the neoliberal free market interests that support economic growth. And one of our colleagues who is a climate corruption journalist, Rachel Donald, observed that there were a lot of degrowth academics that were speaking at the conference, but they had real trouble getting through to any of the journalists that were there to represent these bigger media outlets. They simply refused to cover anything that was critiquing our current growth-based economic models. So we'd like to see as you're saying, both a shift in policy discourse around this, but that also needs to happen through a more well balanced media reporting.
Amanda Janoo 1:11:28
Yeah, absolutely. I think my comms colleagues probably have a better sense of like the news coverage that has happened on the basis of that particular conference. But it has been interesting doing these interviews with journalists. And there's a lot of different factors that are here. Some are that they, you know, they've been trained as economists or in business schools where that certain like worldview, a lot of it is also just past dependency, where they'll look at past articles and how it was written, and then just really model that.
Nandita Bajaj 1:11:56
Yeah.
Amanda Janoo 1:11:56
And so and then the other part of it, I think, that maybe is also missed is the importance of anecdotes and stories. And so a lot of this world, and economic models and systems and approaches, like it can feel pretty abstract. It's important, right? But it's hard to make, like a catchy news article about it. And so I think that's part of the training we need to do for ourselves as well is like, how do we connect this to concrete stories that are illustrating the ideas?
Nandita Bajaj 1:12:26
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that seems like a nice place to end this conversation. Thank you, Amanda. This was such a lovely conversation.
Amanda Janoo 1:12:35
That was so nice to talk to you as well. You're both lovely. My goodness, yeah, I really appreciated it as well.
Nandita Bajaj 1:12:43
And we love the spirit of the work you are doing pulling together all of these different organizations trying to create new narratives, new policy frameworks. It's really critical work and we're just so grateful for your leadership in this space. Thank you for being with us today.
Alan Ware 1:12:59
Yeah, you're doing critical work. Very important. Thank you for staying at. And you're young enough to be in it for a while.
Amanda Janoo 1:13:10
Yes!
Alan Ware 1:13:10
That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. And also to help expand our listenership please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:13:37
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
