World Flourishing and Gary Stevenson

I've been very interested to watch the launch of the World Flourishing report from Harvard yesterday. The Guardian picked one of the headlines concerning the low ranking of the UK in terms of flourishing (see UK among lowest-ranked countries for ‘human flourishing’ in wellbeing study | Science | The Guardian). The launch is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/iKTeNiEn9gU?feature=shared 

I'm grateful to Diana Wu David (see Diana Wu David | future of work consultant & coach), whose work on the Future of Work is very motivating and visionary, for pointing me to the Harvard study. As I've been thinking about this stuff, I've also been sharing my enthusiasm for Gary Stevenson, whose videos on economics have been a real eye-opener for me over the last two years or so. 

Flourishing is a complex phenomenon, but the lack of resources among the poor must inevitably play a key role. Gary's analysis of the Covid lockdown as a wealth transfer to the rich is a very compelling narrative, and his criticism of the academic establishment is spot-on: what anachronistic nonsense!

It is interesting to consider whether human beings have any kind of "innate" capacity to overcome adversity.  Is it easier if you have the emotional support of a loving family, than if you are estranged from your family and have been abused for the whole of your life? Surely these situations are different. So it really does matter "who your parents are" as Stevenson says - not just because of the financial resources available to the middle classes, but because the emotional support becomes more probable (but obviously not certain) under circumstances of material family comfort. 

As human beings we find ourselves caught between self-care in local communities - care which prioritises autonomy and personal choice, with the care that is provided by social institutions - health services, social services, education, etc. These latter entities are heteronomous, to use Ivan Illich's borrowing from Kant's distinction between autonomy and heteronomy. Illich's argument was to say that if the balance between autonomy and heteronomy gets out of whack, then we are in trouble. He further said that social systems and technologies start from a position of empowering autonomy, but end up as heteronomous behemoths (church, transport, energy, health service, education, etc)

The less wealth we have, the mechanisms of self-care become skewed towards subsistence rather than sustainability, while the subsistence mode is increasingly reinforced by the relationship between individuals and heteronomous public services. This is partly because the heteronomous side has no interest in the qualitative aspects of existence, but rather sees its role in terms of statistics and average outcomes. So it becomes a vicious circle. Also the heteronomous side will seek to maintain itself by selecting those people it serves for whom its interventions stand the best chance of working.