The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy.

[lectrobyte]

So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us?

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/03/reversal_of_fortune.html

An excerpt:

In some ways, the invention of the idea of economic growth was almost as significant as the invention of fossil-fuel power. But it took a little longer to take hold. During the Depression, even FDR routinely spoke of America's economy as mature, with no further expansion anticipated. Then came World War II and the postwar boom—by the time Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House in 1963, he said things like: "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do. Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all.... We can do it if we believe it." He wasn't alone in thinking this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, "Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system."

Yet the bad news was already apparent, if you cared to look. Burning rivers and smoggy cities demonstrated the dark side of industrial expansion. In 1972, a trio of mit researchers released a series of computer forecasts they called "limits to growth," which showed that unbridled expansion would eventually deplete our resource base. A year later the British economist E.F. Schumacher wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful. (Soon after, when Schumacher came to the United States on a speaking tour, Jimmy Carter actually received him at the White House—imagine the current president making time for any economist.) By 1979, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that only 30 percent of Americans were "pro-growth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain."

[whistle]

1. Why, because fascism has taken over

[CrispyQ]

2. Greed.

There are always those who want more & more & more & more ......

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Greed is mistaken for security and fear from creditors. n/t

[The2ndWheel]

4. That's just good stuff right there

We won't stop voluntarily, but it's worth reading.

[hfojvt]

5. Do they mention "An Inquiry into the Human Prospect"

by Robert L. Heilbroner? 1974 "But even if we make the heroic assumption that all these difficulties will be overcome, so that another century of uninterrupted industrial growth, with its thousandfold increase in required inputs, will face no constraints from resource shortages, there remains one barrier that confronts us with all the force of an ultimatum from nature. It is that all industrial production, including, of course, the extraction of resources, requires the use of energy, and that all energy, including that generated from natural processes such as wind power or solar radiation, is inextricably involved with the emission of heat.
The limit on industrial growth therefore depends in the end on the tolerance of the ecosphere for the absorbtion of heat."

[lectrobyte]

6. No, the article focuses more on happiness and materialism. I'm

going to have to google Mr. Heilbroner, I'd not heard of that one myself. I think it's ok to quote up to four paragraphs, so I throw in one more. Articles like this may be real familiar to a lot of you, but I'd not heard some of these statistics, such as the number of confidants per person etc. In other words, recommended reading for the blue glow time behind the curtains.

One more paragraph:

It's not so hard, then, to figure out why happiness has declined here even as wealth has grown. During the same decades when our lives grew busier and more isolated, we've gone from having three confidants on average to only two, and the number of people saying they have no one to discuss important matters with has nearly tripled. Between 1974 and 1994, the percentage of Americans who said they visited with their neighbors at least once a month fell from almost two-thirds to less than half, a number that has continued to fall in the past decade. We simply worked too many hours earning, we commuted too far to our too-isolated homes, and there was always the blue glow of the tube shining through the curtains.

[hfojvt]

7. happiness and materialism

Then it should mention Paul Wachtel's "The Poverty of Affluence" which covers alot of that. One problem is increased mobility. We do not talk to our neighbors becuase either we and/or our neighbors are transients. This is more true because I live in a rental neighborhood, but even when people own their homes, they get promoted and move, or decide to get a bigger or nicer house. The same is probably true in the workplace. Co-workers come and go, and so do I. At 45, the longest I have been with an employer is my current job at 4.5 years, and in that time have had nine different co-workers in our team of four.

On another point - wealth has not grown in the last 30 years. Not for people below the median income. See my signature line.