Monthly Archives: June 2012

Extreme Lifestyle Experiments: A path to happiness?

Posted on by
Reply

Our previous blog post looked at how Bohemians over the last 200 years have chosen to live an alternative lifestyle as a route to happiness.  This great TEDx Talk by Colin Wright is a fascinating example of a modern day Bohemian who has chosen to try a different path to happiness by carrying out extreme lifestyle experiments on a regular basis.  Check out this video and decide whether you think Colin Wright is trialling a happiness experiment which might work for you.

 

 

Posted by Shona Lockhart on 28th June 2012

What can Bohemians teach us about happiness?: Status Anxiety – Part 10

Posted on by
1

In Part 10 of Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton looks at the history of Bohemia and what it can teach us about how best to live our lives.

From the start of the 19th century onwards, a new group of people began to be noticed in the West. They often dressed simply, they didn’t much care about money or convention and they came to be described as Bohemian. There have been all kinds of Bohemian movements over the last 200 years: the Romantics, the Surrealists, Dadaists, the Hippies the Punks and the Naturists. These disparate groups were united by one thread which is the decision to stand outside the Bourgeois mainstream and to live for a different set of values.  Bohemians pose an important question for all of us: who are we going to get to judge us?  Whose opinions should we give weight to?  We can learn from the Bohemians that status is available from a variety of sources, above all from our friends. Our choice of audience can be our own.

The Bloomsbury Group started an experiment in living in the 1920s and 30s whose affects we are all still feeling today.  Being a Bohemian isn’t about having a certain job, income or house, it is about a  way of looking at the world.  In the words of the childrens’ writer Arthur Ransome “Bohemia isn’t a place, it is a state of mind”. What that state of mind boils down to is a spirit of independence and freedom and the commitment to live your life by your own values.  The Bloomsbury Group gave themselves a sense of validation by breaking the rules of their time.  Many of the freedoms which we now take for granted (to talk to whom we like, to have relationships with whom we like) were established by “Bohemia”.  The disadvantage of Bohemia, de Botton argues is that it can spiral off in to wilful eccentricity.  Take a look at the video to see him taking a lobster for a walk!

Posted by Shona Lockhart on 28th June 2012

 

Happiness lessons from Karl Marx and John Ruskin: Status Anxiety – Part 9

Posted on by
1

In Part 9 of Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton looks at how great thinkers and activists have been able to alter our values in society and to change our perception of status.

Who has high status today?  Who do we all look up to?  Who do the newspapers favour with respectable profiles? Rich people.  People who, through their own efforts and merit, have been successful in business, entertainment and the arts. People who make no secret of their achievements. This can seem shallow and unfair, de Botton argues, but it is made all the worse because we often assume that nothing can be done to alter the ideals of our society.  We tend to think that it is natural that certain groups have high status while others are marginalised. In fact it is not inevitable at all, it is possible to imagine a world in which their has been a radical redistribution of respect.

Karl Marx

The newspapers we buy contain a miriad of subtle and insidious messages about who in the world matters and who doesn’t. Karl Marx first brilliantly analysed the way that our values are being shaped without us realising it and he coined the word to describe this process as “ideology”.  He defined an “ideological” statement as one that sells itself as being naturally true when in fact it is made up to uphold vested interests. Marx thought we are bombarded by such statements all of the time. Acording to Marx, the ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.

The sociologist Max Weber has said that the ritual of buying the Sunday newspapers has now replaced going to church. He contests that it is now the media which is the main source of ideology rather than priests in pulpits who used to be the main source of ideology.  De Botton argues that reading the papers can leave us feeling dispirited as we are being subtly rebuked for all the ways in which our lives do not conform to the dominant status ideals, all the ways our careers aren’t as stellar, our house aren’t as fashionable and our social diaries aren’t as packed as they might be. We may end up feeling as guilty about our failings as if we had spent the morning being berated by a priest.  Marx argued that ideological ideas are phantoms formed in the human brain which keep prisoners in their cells without the need for bars.

Alain de Botton evaluates the teachings of John Ruskin who fought a passionate campaign to raise the status and conditions of the British working class. He hated the values of his Victorian contemporaries and their obsession with wealth.  He described them as the most wealth obsessed people who have ever existed on this earth. He argued that the ruling goddess of the age was the goddess of “getting on”.  Ruskin demanded free education, decent housing and access to green spaces for everyone.  He challenged the central idea of his age that there was something admirable about being rich. Ruskin too was desperate to be wealthy but he had a very different idea of wealth in mind.  What he wanted was not money, he wanted kindness, intelligence, sensitivity, godliness – a set of virtues which he referred to simply as “life” There is no true wealth but life he wrote.  ”That country is wealthiest” he argues, “which nourishes the greatest number of happy and noble human beings.  Most of the people commonly considered as wealthy are in truth no wealthier than the locks on their strong boxes”  Ruskin made a difference by setting in trend many of the arguments which were to lead to the creation of the Welfare State. He remains an inspiring example of how by making a lot of noise and by acting politically someone can change the values of his world.  Gandhi said that John Ruskin had been the single greatest influence in his life.

Alain de Botton goes on to look at how changes in society’s values have allowed progress for people to whom this would have been previously been denied.

The political response to status, he argues, has been to insist that our contemporary status ideals are not inevitable but are man-made and so they can be changed.  He looks at people who have chosen to live by different ideals.  Watch the video and see what conclusion he comes to.

 

Posted by Shona Lockhart on 28th June 2012

Status Anxiety – Part 8

Posted on by
Reply

In Part 8 of Status Society Alain de Botton argues that the benefits of a meritocratic system have been extraordinary.  People who for generations were held down in a caste like hierarchy have finally been allowed to fulfill themselves in whatever ways their talents allow. Race, class, gender and age have all stopped being obstacles to advancement. An element of justice has been introduced into the distribution of rewards. Alongside meritocratic educational reform has come efforts to promote equal opportunities in the workplace. We are repeatedly told that through effort and diligence we can make it to the top.

There is a pride in the way many people speak about how they got to the top, a pride that would have been impossible in the days before meritocracy when you only got places because of who your parents were.  Earning good money and having an important job title say more positive things about you than they ever used to. Unfortunately in a meritocracy having no money or no impressive job title say many more negative things about you than they used to. There’s a darker side to meritocracy: if the successful merit their success it  then logically follows that the unsuccessful merit their failure. In a meritocratic age an element of justice seems to enter into the distribution of success as well as failure. Financial failure becomes associated with a sense of shame that the unsuccessful of old were fortunately spared. Now the question of why, if you are in any way clever or talented, you are still unsuccessful, becomes a more difficult a question to answer. The rich come to seem as though they are deserving of what is going right for them.  Watch the video to see what conclusion Alain de Botton comes to about those for whom meritocracy has not delivered the status they desired. He claims that we have ended up with a curious paradox that our wealthy, opportunity-filled societies have had the odd effect of raising our levels of status anxiety.

 

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 27th June 2012

 

Wise Wednesdays – A morality tale from a tabloid hack

Posted on by
2

Today’s Wise Wednesday feature is written by Jules Evans, policy director at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. Jules is also a journalist and author of the book Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations and he is co-organiser of The London Philosophy Club.

This interview, which Jules Evans conducted with tabloid hack Graham Johnson, recounts how even a hardened hack is capable of shifting his mindset and finding a new route to happiness and fulfillment.  Johnson’s initiation into a new way of thinking began through reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton which has been featured in several of our blog posts.  Jules Evans goes on to recount how further discoveries of the teachings of ancient philosophers gradually encouraged Graham Johnson to re-examine his values and to adopt a radically new approach to journalism.  Enjoy the article.

A tabloid hack learns morality from the wisdom of ancient philosophers

Tabloid hack: Stoicism saved me from moral turmoil!!

It’s an interview I did this morning with Graham Johnson, who was a senior tabloid journalist at the News of the World and then head of undercover investigations at the Sunday Mirror. As you all know, British tabloid journalism is in a moral crisis at the moment,  thanks to the Leveson Inquiry’s endless revelations of immoral, illegal and negligent behaviour by hacks, editors and newspaper owners.

Graham, who in recent weeks has spoken out publicly against the toxic culture in tabloids, gave me a vivid inside view of newsroom vice, and how he feels his life was ‘saved’ by coming across ancient Greek philosophy five years ago. He heard about my book and got in touch via Twitter.

Here’s Graham in his own words (well, my transcript of the interview):

I joined journalism in 1994, did two years on the News of the World and eight years at the Sunday Mirror. For most of that, I was investigations editor, mainly doing undercover work on things like drug dealing, gun running, prostitution. I also did a fair amount of celebrity expose work. Rebekah Brooks might say she’s proud of campaigns like Sarah’s Law, but most of the campaigns the News of the World did weren’t for the common good, they were for the good of the News of the World.

A tabloid newsroom thrives on the vices and passions of others, and it fosters them in yourself too: greed, lust, deception, anger, fear. I instinctively knew I was doing wrong things, but I didn’t care. You don’t reflect on it – you’re moving too fast and living too extremely.  I hired private detectives to get illegal data, I lied, deceived, blackmailed people, basically giving them the shakedown for information. For example, you’d get evidence of a celebrity doing cocaine and having an affair, and you tell them: ‘either cooperate with us and give us a confession, or we’ll run the story anyway’. You’d see celebrities at their weakest – people would break down, some people even had nervous breakdowns. But you got de-sensitised to it. You start to think you’re all powerful and can manipulate people to do anything.

 

Graham Johnson

I remember one story with Steve McManaman, the England and Liverpool football player, whose mum had cancer. The News of the World were only interested in getting the story, ‘my cancer hell by Steve McManaman’. But we didn’t have the full medical records, so we needed to get Steve to admit his mother had cancer. I had to go and lean on him, in his own home, and say we’ll run this story anyway but it would  be better for him if he cooperated. He was desperately trying to convince me not to run the story. He even brought his mother in to try and show that she was fine and didn’t have cancer. It reminded me of people in a concentration camp rubbing blood into their cheeks to try and make themselves look healthy.

I also bought the video tapes of Wayne Rooney in a brothel, for £200K. I knew it could destroy his career and his engagement to Coleen, but I didn’t care. You don’t even try to justify it to yourself morally, as being in ‘the public interest’. It’s all about winning status inside the newsroom. It’s like a stock exchange, with your credit constantly rising or falling. If you win a big story, you get praised by the editor and for a few days your stock is up. But if you don’t get another big story, then quickly you get shouted at and called a dickhead by the editor. It’s a bullying culture. And it’s fiercely competitive. There’s a lot of simmering resentment of each other in the newsroom.

It’s such an extreme environment, and it fosters extreme behaviour. You do whatever it takes to get the story, to get on the front-page. And people adopted extreme coping strategies to stop themselves thinking about how they’re living. A lot of tabloid hacks would do cocaine, or drink a lot, or get pleasure in extreme ways. I remember one editor sitting on the toilet smoking crack cocaine on deadline. The Priory rehab centre was full of burnt-out tabloid journalists.

By 2007, I was exhausted. I was like a soldier with a thousand-yard stare, like a hunted animal. It was almost like I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, it was such an extreme environment. I went on holiday to France with my partner and four kids. I think I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I pulled a book off the shelf, called Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton, and read it in two days. After that I read his Consolations of Philosophy, then I read all the ancient philosophy I could find: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Seneca’s Essays, Epictetus’ Discourses.

They introduced me to the idea of the virtues – kindness, patience, justice and so on. I’d never come across them before. I don’t remember being given any ethical training as a young journalist – if I was I quickly abandoned it. But now I realised how important values were, simply for my sanity. For example, I realised the wisdom of not linking my status to the stock exchange of winning stories, because then it was linked to something out of my control and would always be volatile.

I also learnt to be more patient, not to get drawn into petty disputes. Patience in tabloid journalism is a total vice. Tabloid journalism is all about being impatient. But philosophy helped me in that very angry, competitive environment of the newsroom. So if someone started an argument, or if a company didn’t pay me on time, I don’t let myself get drawn in, I remind myself that I’ll be dead one day and it’s not worth it. I also don’t tell lies any more. I used to lie all the time. And it’s a relief, not to lie anymore, not to have to tap-dance between the raindrops and try to remember what you said to whom. I’m also more conscious of justice – if I’m working on a story and a person said to me ‘if you write that it would ruin my life’, I’ll back off.

I think more about what’s the right thing to do, and try to come to a wise decision. I might be asked to break the law, by paying a criminal for example. But that might be the right thing to do, morally. If I’m getting information from an ex-criminal, and I’m getting paid and my team are getting paid, why shouldn’t the ex-criminal get paid too.

It’s made me a better journalist than ever. I earn more than I used to, not that it’s the reason I do it. But I also pick my stories more carefully now.

So how, I asked Graham, could journalism be improved? How could we enhance the ‘moral education’ of journalists?

I was on a panel recently with Tom Watson, and I said that there needs to be more values education and moral training for trainee journalists. It needs to be drummed into you what the virtues are. And people need to be shown that the good life isn’t just virtuous, it’s good for your sanity. According to Stoicism, the good life is only down to you, but I think you also need good leaders too, like Marcus Aurelius. People take note of what’s around them and how their leaders behave. It might help also to have a compliance officer, like a moral guardian, actually within the newsroom. Or a media ethics committee within newspapers.

I think Graham would be a fantastic values teacher for the next generation of young journalists, and wish him all the best in his work. His book about his experience in tabloid journalism is called Hack, published in May by Simon & Schuster. I know other tabloid journalists who are into philosophy – some enlightened soul at The Sun keeps putting quotes from Epictetus and the Dalai Lama into the made-up interviews with the Page 3 girls!

If you enjoy this sort of real-life story of how people have been helped today by ancient philosophy, then you’ll love my new book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations.

Do you have an interesting story about how you got into philosophy and how it helped you?  Send your story to Jules Evans via the website Philosophy for Life.

Posted 27th June 2012.

 

How to profit from the happiness business

Posted on by
1

Yesterday’s blog post took a brief look at how happiness is good news for both business and employees.  This video with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, looks at his reasons for publishing the very successful book Delivering Happiness which tells the story of the launch and amazing success of Zappos, an online shoe store.  The book has now morphed in to a happiness movement also called Delivering Happiness and in collaboration with NEF the happiness message is taking the business sector by storm through the launch of the new Happiness at Work survey.   The article below from The Guardian examines the example which Zappos has set and looks at how other companies can learn from their business model - an amazing success story which puts employee and customer happiness at the heart of profits.

How Zappos profits from the happiness business

By focusing on the happiness and wellbeing of workers, companies can create a positive workplace culture that’s good for growth and profits, says Jim Witkin

Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh, chief executive of Zappos. Photograph: Zappos

Zappos, America’s largest online shoe retailer, has achieved success by nearly every conventional measure. Founded in 1999, the company reached $1bn in annual sales in less than 10 years and was acquired by Amazon in 2009 in a deal worth $1.2bn. Yet, it’s the company’s unconventional culture and a business model based on happiness that Zappos’s chief executive, Tony Hsieh, wants to share with the rest of the world.

Hsieh recently brought his message to the UK parliament, where he spoke on a panel discussion entitled Happy Workers = Business Growth? hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics.

By focusing on company culture, he told the parliamentary group, everything else such as building a brand with sustained revenue growth and passionate employees, fell into place. Zappos’s culture is guided by a set of core values which aims to empower employees, create a sense of community in the workplace, and serve a higher purpose beyond bottom-line metrics.

Employees should have a sense of control and progress in their careers, says Hsieh. Zappos developed a set of skills for their call centre reps, rather than a one-size-fits-all job description. Employees directly control their salary increases as they acquire the skills that interest them at their own pace, rather than waiting for fixed review periods or annual raises.

Zappos encourages employees to “create fun and a little weirdness” in the workplace and build personal connections with co-workers. To protect this feeling of community, Zappos carefully vets each new applicant for a cultural match. The company even offers new employees $4,000 to quit after their first week of training to weed out people who are there just for the paycheck.

“Is this someone I would want to have a beer with?” is one of the simple questions Hsieh asks himself when interviewing applicants. For companies examining their own values, he advises: “Ask yourself what are the values that the company is willing to make hiring and firing decisions on apart from job performance.”

Even measuring call centre performance takes an unconventional twist at Zappos. The amount of time the rep spends on the phone with a customer is the traditional measure of call centre efficiency, with an emphasis on reducing that time. Instead, Zappos has developed their own scorecard, tracking the personal and emotional connections made with customers, measured by the number of thank you cards and cookies the call centre reps send.

Profits are key to any enterprise, admits Hsieh, but he ultimately realised that a great company culture should serve a higher purpose. At Zappos, this means delivering happiness and “wowing” customers with exceptional service. By concentrating on the happiness of those around you, Hsieh believes, you dramatically increase your own.

All this focus on employee happiness seems to be paying off, as Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best places to work in annual workplace surveys from industry watchers like Fortune magazine.

Hsieh described his adventures on the entrepreneurial trail in the 2010 book, Delivering Happiness, which has been translated into 20 languages. He is now involved in a new venture, Delivering Happiness at Work (or DH@work), offering coaching and workshops for other companies hoping to get their culture right. DH@work has teamed up with Nic Marks, a social economist from the UK-based New Economics Foundation and founder of the UK’s Centre for Wellbeing.

Trying to impose the Zappos culture and values on other companies is not the point of DH@work, according to James Key Lim, chief executive of the new venture. “It’s about taking the DNA of what worked at Zappos – things like purpose, happiness, culture, and profits – which anyone can use as a framework to make happiness as their business model,” he says.

Jim Witkin is a journalist and regularly contributes to the New York Times

Article originally published in The Guardian on 14th June 2012

What does freedom mean to you? How to get rid of debt and live the life you love

Posted on by
Reply

Sell Your Crap, Pay Off Your Debt, Do What You Love…

This great TEDx talk by Adam Baker from Man v. Debt asks the very important question: What does freedom mean to you? He argues that your identity should not be based on your stuff but on your experiences.  He asks: How much more fulfilling would your life be if you started collecting experiences and not things? If you want to be happier, it is very important that you ponder Adam’s question: What does freedom mean to you? When you have an honest answer to this question you will be one step closer to choosing happiness.  Enjoy the video.

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 26th June 2012

Happiness Experiment No 8: Pay more compliments

Posted on by
Reply

This great short film by Kurt Kuenne, Validation, introduces us to Happiness Experiment No 8: Pay more compliments.  Have fun with this experiment and learn to show your appreciation for others, hand out some genuine praise on a regular basis and smile more. If you pay someone a genuine compliment it will make their day and their reaction may just make your day too. It’s a habit worth cultivating and it costs nothing so give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Posted by Shona Lockhart on 26th June 2012

Can happiness be a good business strategy?

Posted on by
11

Happiness at work is big news.  Take a look at this new video by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) who have worked together with Zappos to create a new happiness at work survey.  This new tool which was launched recently gives companies a simple way to measure happiness and well-being in the workplace and to implement improvements to create a happier workforce. According to the article below from the Guardian Sustainable Business section, having a happy workforce actually makes good financial sense.

A happy workforce is more engaged, creative and more focused, increasing the overall productivity of a company, says Tim Smedley

happiness-work

The link between happiness and productivity at work is increasingly understood. Photograph: Alberto Incrocci/Getty Images

How happy are you at work? Maybe you’re reading this at work right now? Which could indicate that you work in a friendly workplace culture where you’re empowered to do as you see fit and read whatever you want online. Or it could mean that you’re bored out of your brain, whiling away the hours until the clock clunks to home time. The former suggests that you’re a happy and productive worker; the latter, quite the opposite. And this link between happiness and productivity at work is becoming increasingly understood.

Nic Marks, of the New Economics Foundation (Nef), has spent the last 10 years of his life working in this field. It used to be known as ‘well-being economics’ until it was discovered that “normal people didn’t know what that meant”, says Marks. Happiness is what it’s really all about.

“People who are happier at work are more productive – they are more engaged, more creative, have better concentration”, says Marks. “The difference in productivity between happy and unhappy people at work can range between 10-50%. That’s 10% for non-complex repetitive tasks, or up to 40-50% in service and creative industries.” And that’s an awful lot in terms of business revenue.

The current poster boy for happiness in business circles is Tony Hsieh. A beneficiary of the dot-com boom he became a multi-millionaire in his early 20s by selling his web company LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265m. He then took over fashion start-up Zappos in 1999 because he missed working in a happy environment. “It began selfishly for me”, he admits. “I was in the financial position of not having to work again… so if I’m going to go back into an office it better be around people I would choose to hang out with. Otherwise, what’s the point? But it actually turned out to be a good business strategy.”

By 2005, Hsieh decided that a happy company culture was Zappos’s number one business priority, from which everything else would grow. In an ironic echo of the General Electric CEO Jack Welsch who advocated axing the bottom performing 10% of managers each year, Hsieh removed the 5-10% of employees who did not buy into the same vision. “The best way to make [a happy culture] stick is to get rid of the whatever percentage of people who aren’t living up to the company values”, he argues. “What we found is that short term pain was totally worth the long-term gain of strengthening the relationships with everybody else.”

By removing the cynics, says Hsieh, the remaining 90% “became super-engaged”. Empowerment policies then came thick and fast. The company moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas where they could recreate a college campus environment; the sole communication policy reads “‘be real and use your best judgement”; call centre staff are hired on friendliness – only 5% of calls result in sales but long-term relationships are built over time. By 2008 the company reached $1b in gross merchandise sales. In 2012, it is now over $2bn, with 5,000 staff. That sort of growth – especially through a prolonged recession – is hard to ignore.

The UK government is not ignoring happiness. For the last two years Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson has chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics. When it started out, two people came. The last sitting in May was standing room only. “Anyone who has worked in a business knows that when colleagues feel motivated, empowered and wake up looking forward to going to work – then they will work better. We all know that”, says Swinson. “And increasingly businesses are recognising that too.”

In light of this groundswell of interest, Nic Marks and Nef have just launched an online tool to help businesses measure and manage the happiness of their employees. Marks feels that the employee engagement surveys run by many businesses are too extractive, based on what employers can get out of their employees rather than what employees want. To avoid disappearing down an HR blackhole, as Marks puts it, Nef’s happiness survey gives employees instant results – including personalised action plans – as well as collating the results anonymously for the business.

One company who trialled the Nef approach – The Works, a recruitment agency in the north of England – ended up changing its working hours and internal communications practices on the back of the survey. “It’s given employees empowerment, hopefully it’s given them more job satisfaction”, says Joanne Shires, the firm’s head of people and talent. “And for us it’s a return on our social investment.”

So can happier people at work actually lead to a happier and more prosperous society? In down town Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh and Zappos are putting that to the test. Having bought the old Las Vegas city hall to house the new company headquarters, planning the obligatory cool workplace trimmings – funky break-out areas, an internal pub – all felt too insular, says Hsieh. So Zappos set up and funded a $350m project to invest $100m in local real estate, $100m in residential development, $50m in small businesses, $50m in education, and $50m in technology start-ups.

“What started out as a new office move has actually turned out to be a project to revitalise down town Vegas,” says Hsieh. And guess what, “we’ve seen our employees become engaged on a whole new level because of this. It all feeds back into the Zappos brand… we can do well and do good.” Which has to be more than just a happy coincidence.

Article by Tim Smedley originally published in The Guardian on 20th June 2012.

Sustainable development goals: a new way to measure happiness and wellbeing?

Posted on by
3

This interesting article on Jeffrey Sachs and sustainable development goals (SDGs) published in the Guardian today, looks at the debate about happiness and well-being from an economist’s point of view.

Rio+20: Jeffrey Sachs on how business destroyed democracy and virtuous life

The world famous economist on corporate control, the search for happiness and why a multi-disciplinary approach is the only way to find solutions to sustainability challenges

Jeffrey Sachs

Speaking at Rio+20, Jeffrey Sachs described how business has destroyed the US democratic system and created addiction to consumption. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Jeffrey Sachs, the economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, speaks with a velvet tongue but packs a mighty punch.

Big business, he says, is not responsible only for destroying the American democratic system, but has also transformed citizens into consumer addicts.

While multinationals continue to line their own pockets, what they leave in their wake is billions of people who are not only unhappy, but are suffering increasing levels of anxiety.

While a few companies are serious about dealing with the sustainability challenges of our age, Sachs says many more are still engaging in green washing, while he describes the fossil-fuel lobby, and the Koch brothersin particular, as “disgusting.”

A dangerous direction

Not only is Sachs clear that the old economic paradigm, which is based on a fixation of GDP growth, is leading us to disaster, but that we need to find a completely new way of measuring the success of society.

Sachs, who amongst many roles is special adviser to UN secretary-general Ban ki-Moon on the millennium development goals, believes the creation of a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) could be one route towards achieving that.

His particular interest is in developing a measure for wellbeing and happiness and he recently co-organised a major conference on the subject at the UN in New York, in partnership with the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

I caught up with Sachs at the Rio+20 conference where he is keeping up a punishing schedule, engaging in several public and private debates ranging across the public policy sphere, from poverty to education.

“The point of the move to better metrics is the realisation that not only does gross national product not measure properly what makes us well-off and satisfied, it is leading us now in a very dangerous direction,” he told the Guardian. “If we continue to follow that indicator we will follow a path right over the cliff.

“One of the key planks of the SDGs is that we need better measurement of wellbeing and one way is to ask people how well are you doing, life satisfaction. A legion of scholars have been studying this and picking up great traditions as brought by Buddhism and Bhutan in particular. We can now identify pretty systematically places were people are deeply unhappy, highly anxious and also identify systematically the reasons why.

“Money matters and especially for the poor. But once you reach a certain level of wellbeing, the additional gains are very small and perhaps not there at all. The US has tripled its per capital GDP over the last 50 years but there has not even been a twitch of the needle in raising wellbeing.

“Second, people are, like Aristotle said, social animals. We depend on our sense of participation in communities and if there is a lack trust, our lives are miserable, and if we live in unhappy places where people do not co-operate with each other and altruism is not a moral virtue that is defended, where cheating is rife and pervasive, then unhappiness soars and this is one of the most important findings of US sociology over the past 25 years.

“Americans do not trust each other, and there is so much cheating and illegality and this raises the third point, which is when people do not trust their governments to be fair honest and transparent, their own personal happiness suffers a lot.”

A breakdown of modern democracy

Sachs, who became known for his role as an adviser to Eastern European governments during their transition from communism, says business has a major responsibility for the mess we are in, but also has great respect for the ability of multinationals to operate effectively on a global scale.

“I deal with a number of businesses that I admire because they are better diplomats than the state department as they are actually doing things rather than talking about them. They are getting real things done,” he says.

“The other face of businesses is that they are too powerful in our societies. They write the rules, they pay the politicians, sometimes illegally and sometimes, via what is called legal, which is financing their campaigns or massive lobbying.

“Billions of dollars are spent and this is horrendous because if business writes the rules, it is not true their shareholder value is their value to society. It can reflect highly destructive practices which the politicians turn their eyes away from because of the political power companies hold. This has got completely out of control and is leading to the breakdown of modern democracy.”

Drawing a line between big business and politics

Sachs says he has spoken to a number of CEOs recently and that lots of them would love to sign up to a no lobbying platform, but they feel they can’t while their competitors are still engaged in it.

So he is pinning his hopes on young people leveraging the power of social networking to break the business stranglehold. One way would be to have a presidential candidate in 2016 who refuses to take any single contribution beyond $100 and uses social media to raise funds and get the message out to the voters, rather than using hugely expensive television campaigns.

He says: “The one thing these companies do not have is the vote, but the money to distort votes and the public is more and more onto this, but in the US they are profoundly cynical and very unhappy. Both political parties are in the pockets of big business.”

Social media and consumerism

It is not just the way business controls politics that worries Sachs, but also their use of marketing in such an insidious way that people now value their lives according to the goods and services they buy.

While social networking has the power to break the existing power structures, Sachs also recognises its power to enslave us further to consumerism.

“It is striking to me that you look at Facebook and social media and these are the hot things but what is the business proposition of Facebook – more personalised advertising,” he says.

“That is where the whole money proposition is that advertisers can learn how to more personalise the things exactly to hit your hot button.

“It is no secret we fell into a mass consumerist mentality. We fell into an era where the tools of mass persuasion are so powerful and bombard us daily so that happiness is defined by what is advertised.

“We have gotten into a self feeding cycle which is extremely dangerous. We are being sold things that are not raising our wellbeing and are often lowering it. Our health is breaking down, our anxiety is increasing, people not only watch too much television and eat too much fast food but they know it and then they spend tremendous amount of psychic effort and money to try to resist their own impulses which are built in and have become almost addictive.”

Sustainable Development Goals

Sachs says the SDGs could be transformative for society because they can fire up the public imagination. But he is very clear they need to be simple so that even a child can understand them.

“I have been involved in the MDGs for a dozen years,” he says. “They are not a treaty, they are not binding, they don’t have the force of international law, but have had the force of inspiration and changed behaviour and motivated communities, governments, NGOs, companies and the broad public to take action.

“The point of the SDGs is that they need to be globally agreed goals, clear and time-bound and understandably broadly, not highly complex and esoteric.

“We are here in Rio 20 years after the adoption of three powerful, well crafted, forward looking treaties, on climate change, biodiversity and combating desertification. Not one of those has delivered what it set out to do because they became hostage to technical insider negotiations rather than a broad public movement to save the planet and that is what we need right now.”

Sachs says it is vital that a clear framework for the SDGs is agreed by September 2013 when the UN holds a special assembly to have a final review of the MDGs, but that this is by no means a certainty.

“If we do that by then, we will keep the pace,” he says. “But they will not serve any purpose if we have another highly fractious bitter debate or a Christmas tree of demands that ends up 300 pages long like Agenda 21.”

A fresh approach

What is particularly interesting about Sachs is that he has taken a multi-disciplinary approach to seeking solutions to the world’s most intractable problems. At the UN conference on happiness, he held a day long workshop that did not just include the usual suspects.

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, explained how happiness is a skill that can be learned; public policy expert Robert Putnam showed the importance of social connections; economist Joseph Stiglitz highlighted the flaws with GDP; Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard explained the reciprocal benefits of altruism; and Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, reminded everyone that there’s much more to a flourishing life than just the absence of misery. How did a traditional economist start welcoming in such a rainbow of different views and traditions?

“I did not have this concept in my mind when I was younger,” he says. “I was an economist and was asked go and solve a problem, trying to end hyper inflation in Bolivia, and I quickly realised that any real problem is so far beyond your own discipline.

“I found there are great answers around if you step outside your discipline but it is in compartments. One of my gurus is E O Wilson, one of the world’s greatest thinkers. One of his concepts is concillience, which is the jumping together of knowledge and he propounded that not only the social and physical sciences, but humanities and arts, have to come together along with cultural and religious traditions.

“As we learn intellectually how to harness these linkages, we will be more effective at facing our most fundamental challenge which is wellbeing and sustainability of the planet.”

As Sachs prepares to dash off for his next appointment, I ask him what has most surprised him in his search for wellbeing and happiness.

“I find the most wonderful part of what I do, travelling to more than 100 countries, is the common humanity and the ability to forge meaningful bonds across every divide one can imagine, whether intellectual or racial and religious. It is powerful and it is the common shared human nature and human fate that makes it possible to see these matters in a more holistic way.”