This week, the Canadian Index of Well-being was released. This is a measure with a depth of research that looks at 8 broad domains of Canadian life: living standards, community vitality, democratic engagement, education, healthy populations, environment, time use (the impact, say, of 24/7 commercial operations and the workplace leash of new technology), leisure and culture.
These areas are then stacked up against the GDP, which is the typical measure of how well an economy is functioning. The GDP notion is that as productivity increases so standard of living increases -- or at least that's what economists, capitalists and conservative politicians want us to believe. In fact, the report says that while the GDP increased by 31 per cent from 1994 to 2008, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing rose just 11 per cent.
The report says quality of life actually decreased over the period measured — in the environment, leisure and culture, and time use. In health, there have been only modest gains.
Roy Romanow, the chair of the CIW project board, says most Canadians are “running so fast, and basically standing still, that we do not have the opportunity to enjoy things that really matter in life.
“As individuals, we're switching more of our time away from family life, away from community involvement, arts, political activity. We're being affected in our health.”
He called the report a “major wake-up call” to governments at all levels that “we've got to rebalance our social and economic programs in order to give more meaning to individual lives.”
[read the Star report on this research here]
A 'major wake-up call' to governments?! I think this should also be a major wake-up call to Christians and Christian congregations...
In what ways are we re-orienting our lives to live more abundantly, and less frantically? When a government tells us to spend more to 'bolster' the economy, as a means of boosting a lagging GDP, when we already live under a burden of consumer debt, do we speak out prophetically against such policies? Should we not be urging our people to spend less, slow down, care for the distressed, and live more fully? This is the 'counter-cultural' life we see urged on us by the whole of Christian scripture, not least by Jesus himself.
I agree, Dan...but a pretty hard sell in our cultural context.
Posted by: Alan Adams | October 22, 2011 at 08:00 AM