Kevin Tiller

I was up at 5.15am and went to Cronulla to swim with Stu & Steve again. Just perfect out swimming – weather was great – warm & sunny, sea was warm and clear. We swam from South Cronulla to North, then re-grouped then swam back the can at South before heading back in. Estimated water temp was 21-22C. Heaps of fit people running, swimming, boot-camping etc. Had a quick breakfast sitting in a cafe on a sunny corner in Cronulla. Everyone there had been doing sport of some kind, nice music playing – just feeling so lucky to be in a great place and be able to have these great experiences.

Whilst there I read this article in the Guardian – Let’s admit it: Britain is now a developing country

Elite economic debate boils down to this: a man in a tie stands at a dispatch box and reads out some numbers for the years ahead, along with a few micro-measures he’ll take to improve those projections. His opposite number scoffs at the forecasts and promises his tweaks would be far superior. For a few hours, perhaps even a couple of days, afterwards, commentators discuss What It All Means. Last Thursday’s autumn statement from George Osborne was merely the latest enactment of this twice-yearly ritual, and I bet you’ve already forgotten it.

Compare his forecasts and fossicking with our fundamental problems. Start with last week’s Pisa educational yardsticks, which show British teenagers trailing their Vietnamese counterparts at science, and behind the Macanese at maths. Or look at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) competitiveness survey of 148 countries, which ranks British roads below Chile’s, and our ground-transport system worse than that of Barbados.

Whether Blair or Brown or Cameron, successive prime ministers and their chancellors pretend that progress is largely a matter of trims and tweaks – of capping business rates and funding the A14 to Felixstowe. Yet those Treasury supplementary tables and fan charts are no match for the mass of inconvenient facts provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the WEF or simply by going for a wander. Sift through the evidence and a different picture emerges: Britain’s economy is no longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast lane, but an increasingly clapped-out motor regularly overtaken by Asian Tigers such as South Korea and Taiwan.

Gender equality? The WEF ranks us behind Nicaragua and Lesotho. Investment by business? The Economist thinks we are struggling to keep up with Mali.

Let me put it more broadly, Britain is a rich country accruing many of the stereotypical bad habits of a developing country.

… and on it goes! …

Obviously to a large degree, it’s pretty similar in Australia although the mining boom has minimised some of the worst aspects.

However it struck me that I always gravitate to reading the Guardian and now with a digital radio in my car, listening to the BBC World Service. (I know that makes me sound like a middle-aged tragic!). Of course a lot of the music I still listen to is overwhelmingly English however looking around me at this cool little spot in Cronulla, there is just no way I’d want to be living in the UK.

So what does it all mean … I have no idea, just stumbling through life trying to do my best and to keep healthy and happy and keep enjoying it.

I read this in the newspaper today : Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive although as usual the comments are a great read too.

I so agree with it.

That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying. But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram (and highlighted by the Guardian last week) that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing.

The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their possessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse. A girl’s head barely emerges from the haul of Chanel, Dior and Hermes shopping bags she has piled on her vast bed. It’s captioned “shoppy shoppy” and “#goldrush”, but a photograph whose purpose is to illustrate plenty seems instead to depict a void. She’s alone with her bags and her image in the mirror, in a scene that seems saturated with despair.

Perhaps I’m projecting my prejudices. But an impressive body of psychological research seems to support these feelings. It suggests that materialism, a trait that can afflict both rich and poor, and which the researchers define as “a value system that is preoccupied with possessions and the social image they project“, is both socially destructive and self-destructive. It smashes the happiness and peace of mind of those who succumb to it. It’s associated with anxiety, depression and broken relationships.

There has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness. But research conducted over the past few years seems to show causation. For example, a series of studies published in the journal Motivation and Emotion in July showed that as people become more materialistic, their wellbeing (good relationships, autonomy, sense of purpose and the rest) diminishes. As they become less materialistic, it rises.

In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify mental health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier.

In another study, the psychologists followed Icelanders weathering their country’s economic collapse. Some people became more focused on materialism, in the hope of regaining lost ground. Others responded by becoming less interested in money and turning their attention to family and community life. The first group reported lower levels of wellbeing, the second group higher levels.

These studies, while suggestive, demonstrate only correlation. But the researchers then put a group of adolescents through a church programme designed to steer children away from spending and towards sharing and saving. The self-esteem of materialistic children on the programme rose significantly, while that of materialistic children in the control group fell. Those who had little interest in materialism before the programme experienced no change in self-esteem.

Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.

A third paper, published (paradoxically) in the Journal of Consumer Research, studied 2,500 people for six years. It found a two-way relationship between materialism and loneliness: materialism fosters social isolation; isolation fosters materialism. People who are cut off from others attach themselves to possessions. This attachment in turn crowds out social relationships.

The two varieties of materialism that have this effect – using possessions as a yardstick of success and seeking happiness through acquisition – are the varieties that seem to be on display on Rich Kids of Instagram. It was only after reading this paper that I understood why those photos distressed me: they look like a kind of social self-mutilation.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons an economic model based on perpetual growth continues on its own terms to succeed, though it may leave a trail of unpayable debts, mental illness and smashed relationships. Social atomisation may be the best sales strategy ever devised, and continuous marketing looks like an unbeatable programme for atomisation.

Materialism forces us into comparison with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.

I should emphasise that this is not about differences between rich and poor: the poor can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.

This is the dreadful mistake we are making: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing, a belief possessed not only by those poor deluded people in the pictures, but by almost every member of almost every government. Worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual growth: these are a formula for mass unhappiness.

I have always been a voracious reader. of all things but in particular the news and in particular world news.

Well today in a very rare occasion indeed, I actually read some good news!

Don’t get me wrong, the world is still a big  ‘ole place with lots of bad stuff occurring daily, but lets celebrate some some improvements.

for all the seemingly bad news around the world, we are actually living in a golden age of global development. Today, millions of people around the world are living longer, healthier, freer, safer and more prosperous lives than ever before in human history – and we have the data to prove it.

Earlier this month, to little fanfare, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released its annual Human Development Report (HDR)and the results are both surprising and encouraging. According to the UNDP, over the past decade not some but, in fact, “all countries” have “accelerated their achievements” in education, health, and income. Not a single country for which data was available scored lower on the UNDP’s human development index than they had 12 years earlier.

According to the HDR, these improvements are disproportionately happening in the global south, “home to the vast majority of the world’s people” – most of whom are on the lower end of the income spectrum. Middle-range countries like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey have seen some of the most rapid advances. But significant progress is also occurring in places like Bangladesh, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda and Tunisia.

In fact, according to the HDR, the combined economic output of the developing world’s three largest economies (Brazil, China and India) will, by the end of decade, match that of the Canada, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom and the United States. The good news from the UNDP matches reams of existing data on the extraordinary advances in human progress that have been made in the past two decades.

For example, violent conflicts are on the decline and freedom (in the form of electoral democracies) is on the march. Indeed, inter-state war has largely disappeared from the global system; and when conflicts do occur,they tend to be far less violent.

In addition, there were just under 70 electoral democracies at the end of the cold war. Today, there are 117 (pdf).

But as the HDR makes clear, the advance on public health, poverty reduction and social progress are, in some respects, even more impressive.

Thirty years ago, half the people living in the developing world survived on less than $1.25 a day; today, that proportion is about one-sixth – and the average worldwide income is around $10,000, a significant increase from just a decade ago.

That means more and more people around the world are entering the middle class. In fact, according to the HDR, there will by the end of the decade be approximately 3.25 billion members of the middle class, a dramatic leap from the 1.8 billion of just 4 years ago.

More people around the world can read and write; more go to school, more attend college and more women are getting an education than ever before. The latter point is of critical importance because we know that female education is one of the single most important development tools and actually more critical to child survival than either household income or wealth.

Speaking of child survival, child mortality rate continue to decline thanks to expanded access to healthcare, proper sanitation, and vaccinations. In 1970, the global child mortality rate (deaths of children under five per 1,000) was 141; in 2010, it was 57. From 2000 to 2008 alone, mortality rates among children fell by 17%. And when those kids grow up, they are living longer and healthier lives. Since 1970, the average person is living 11 years longer, to the ripe age of 70. Americans are doing even better, living close to 80 years.

These numbers are the result, in part, of extraordinary advances in public health. Aids-related deaths, while still too high, have dramatically declined. Tuberculosis is finally on the decline; so, too, are mortality rates due to malaria, which have dropped by 25% since 2000.

All of this good news hasn’t happened by accident. As the HDR makes clear (pdf), they are the direct result of governmental policies on economic, trade and public investment, including a particular focus on investments in health and education. To the latter point, one of the more telling findings of the report (pdf) is a side-by-side comparison between South Korea and India in regard to education policies. In South Korea, young women are among the best-educated women in the world, which will result in both a healthier and smaller population (since better-educated women tend to have fewer children). In India, a less broad-based commitment to education means the country’s population will continue to grow, curtailing what should be even higher levels of economic growth and productivity.

In addition, countries that have succeeded the best are ones that have focused on tapping into global markets, maintaining robust trade policies and even enhancing internet usage. In short, success is not the result of “cutting taxes for job creators”, or enacting austerity policies, but rather consistent and deliberate government interventions.

More here from the Guardian.

Its funny but the Guardian newspaper has far and away the best articles of any newspaper in the world.

This article really hit home – I have lived over half of my life – and clearly touches a nerve I have been thinking about for a long time:

You grow up with the sense that the best years are ahead of you, and in your mid-40s that becomes questionable. You wonder whether you’ve peaked on all sorts of levels.

and also:

What do I want my midlife to be like? What about the rest of my life, that diminishing resource? I try to think, but I’m so often distracted: by working to deadlines, by going out, but especially by my children. They are young, so they are fun but relentless. That unremitting routine that kids need: up at the same time, bed at the same time, breakfast, dinner, tea, every day every day. It makes life pass so quickly, and that makes me panic.

I don’t want to wake up in 10 years’ time, when I’m 54, and feel the same way I do now. I’m scared of that. I’m frightened. Because I only have 20 years of working life left, and I have to combine those years with bringing up my kids. There is no way I can achieve what I want. Whatever that is (I don’t know).