The Economics Of Happiness (Video)

from ChaoticFate.com by qew

http://www.disinfo.com/2011/04/the-economics-of-happiness-video/

Posted by BananaFamine on April 9, 2011

I recently had a chance to attend a showing of the documentary The Economics of Happiness. It has a very strong message about the fiscal and social problems of globalization, especially its impact beyond the western world. As a solution, the film suggests a movement towards focusing on communities and localization. Here’s the trailer and a plot synopsis:

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, an unholy alliance of governments and big business continues to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, people all over the world are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

The film shows how globalization breeds cultural self-rejection, competition and divisiveness; how it structurally promotes the growth of slums and urban sprawl; how it is decimating democracy. We learn about the obscene waste that results from trade for the sake of trade: apples sent from the UK to South Africa to be washed and waxed, then shipped back to British supermarkets; tuna caught off the coast of America, flown to Japan to be processed, then flown back to the US. We hear about the suicides of Indian farmers; about the demise of land-based cultures in every corner of the world.

For more information, see this website for The Economics of Happiness. To get involved with the message through activism or setting up a screening, click here.