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ShareRecently a small news item caught my attention. French President Nicolas Sarkozy had welcomed a report by a panel of the world's top economists including Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz that suggested Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is misleading as a way of measuring societal well-being.
The report recommends that GDP growth be used simply to measure market activity and that new systems take into account aspects like environmental health, safety and education, or what Bhutan had once coined as Gross National Happiness.
Coincidently, the news item resonated with something I was reading just then in Rajni Bakshi's book: namely, whether GNP (Gross National Product) or spending money was really all about quality of life.
In a startling illustration, Bakshi points out that a $700 billion food industry has not made Americans healthier and that $33 million is also being spent to combat the effects of over-eating. And, as she perceptively notes, social distress can boost GNP because they cause money and products to change hands.
For example, sales of anti-depressants put over $10 billion into the US economy. But is this reflective of society's well-being?
Her book, a timely journey of stimulating ideas and images on market culture and how it must be reformed, is based on the premise that bazaars or market places began as places of connection and conversations. Up until 200 years ago, the conversations were as much about civilization-making values and politics, as about material exchange; but then market fundamentalism essentially destroyed these values.
Today, the assumption made by market fundamentalists -- that "social good is best served by allowing people to pursue their self-interest without any thought for the social good" -- is under attack not just because of the economic meltdown of 2008 but because for some years now, diverse people have been challenging the tyranny of the market and market orthodoxy in a number of ways.
It is their struggles and ideas that the book describes, or in Bakshi's words, "the real story of our times is taking shape in the innards of what can be visualized as the global agora [marketplace in ancient Greece]. This is a vast interlinked realm of businesspeople, activists, crafts-persons, hackers and academics fostering bazaar spaces where exchange of goods and services comes second to the need to gather."
Her book chronicles narratives and experiences of currency innovators like Michael Linton of Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) to Ela Bhatt, whose focus has been on building institutions like SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) to deal with the market process and leverage a better bargaining position for self-employed women vegetable sellers, milk vendors, dais or midwives, and so on.
One chapter traces the links between a gift culture (which calls for more creative and just economies) and the open source movement begun by Richard Stallman. Bakshi writes of how Stallman became the leading philosopher of a community of hackers writing free software. Free, not as in a free lunch, but as in having freedom to distribute copies of modified programmes so that the entire community can benefit.
In a chapter on "Cosmopolitan Localism" Bakshi takes on the complex issues arising out of local versus global struggles. There is an interesting account of how Timbaktu Collective of Andhra Pradesh has set up production systems which benefit the disadvantaged and nurture the environment whilst also being financially viable.
The chapter "Who Cares.. Who Wins" looks at the changes unfolding in the corporate world. She writes about Amy Domini who was a cog in the military-industrial machinery, until the day she felt sickened at having to urge her clients to buy stock in an armament company, whose stock price was about to rise dramatically because of new government contracts.
Domini then went on to set up a string of enterprises that became leaders in socially responsible investing (SRI). Their success led to her being included in Barron's list of 30 people who changed the face of finance in the 20th century.
Bakshi's gift is in the story-telling and in the small humane nuggets like the above that enable her to argue her case or posit a position with persuasive ease and fluency. Though the sheer density of ideas and the innumerable detours can be overwhelming at times, for the patient reader, the journey can be rewarding and thought-provoking.
The author is a freelance journalist
