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You can always rely on the French to ask difficult questions such as: what is progress? And set up an international commission to find out. This is exactly what French President Nicolas Sarkozy did when, a few months ago, he asked Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, along with two economist colleagues, Amartya Sen from Harvard and Jean-Paul Fitoussi from Paris Sciences-Po, to come up with an authoritative answer.
Their findings, published this week, shed new light on something the French have known all along: money and financial wealth are not the right measure of success, wellbeing and social progress. In other words, money doesn't make you happy.
This self-confessed conviction has long been evident to anyone visiting France. In Paris, a day's work doesn't begin without a petit noir at the café with, yes, sometimes a croissant and a philosophical or political exchange with le patron. At lunch, even if the trend is increasing, swallowing down a sandwich at one's desk is considered more a sign of psychological imbalance than of professional dedication. And at 6pm, you'd be lucky to find anyone still working.
Sarkozy may have passed a law allowing Sunday trading but an overwhelming majority of French people actively oppose it. For them, weekends are made for families and contemplation, not for wasting one's life trying to earn an extra pittance.
It is ironic that such a commission should have been set up by the man who, unlike any of his predecessors at the Elysée Palace, has often acted as if he profoundly despises the French way of living. Sarkozy has always professed a blind affection for what he calls le modèle Anglo-Saxon — among other things, flexible working, free markets and unfettered corporate profits.
It seems la récession has changed him. Sarkozy now wants to see more regulation in the world's financial institutions; he has taken to praising French dirigisme (state control). He is even reinventing himself as a typical French citizen whose priorities in life are simple pleasures rather than financial gain.
Commenting on Stiglitz's report yesterday, the man who, as a 14-year-old in a three-piece suit, shunned the 1968 barricades and loathed student revolutionaries, called for a “great revolution” in the way international institutions measure countries' wealth.
In the audience, some pinched themselves, especially when Sarkozy said: “The current crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future and another world. It obliges us to do so.”
What the Stiglitz commission actually suggests is using GDP as only one of many indicators in a broader perspective. A planet-friendly environment, a good work-life balance, and access to good public services would complete the wider picture of a country's wellbeing. In effect, Stiglitz is suggesting replacing the GDP by a kind of HDP, the Happiness Domestic Product.
Sarkozy, who will arrive at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh next week with hundreds of copies of the Stiglitz report in his luggage, has more than one reason to want this new indicator to be adopted.
If it were, then France, whose GDP has been stagnating for the past 30 years, would suddenly skyrocket in the international ratings, perhaps to the number one position.
With the best health system in the world, first-class public services, a culture of long lunch hours, a soon-to-be implemented carbon tax and the highest fertility rate in Europe, France would undoubtedly resume its place as a beacon of civilisation, which would make the great revolutionary that Sarkozy has now become very happy.
Reader views (2)
It's not what people say. It's what's *behind* what people say.
France is the first country to at least indirectly open the debate on the case for 'steady state economics'. That is, an economy with no growth. Because what politicians aren't really telling us is that the future is about less. Less of everything. Except for (and with apology) the most uneducated amongst us, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that stuff is going to run out eventually, soon even.
The relentless pursuit of profit, corruption, rapacious greed will ruin us. Humanity has to evolve very quickly to a state of cooperation between individuals, companies and nation states where there is a continuous, fair exchange of value, rather than the notion of "I win. You lose", as the default position of business and government.
Sorry to burst your bubble but humanity's survival is going to have to be based on 'being' rather than 'having'.
- Leon Benjamin, Hertford, UK
The west in general is living on borrowed time and France in particular. So far France has paid for its outwardly laudable attitude to the work/leisure split through strong productivity. Good for them. But this is mainly technology based, although is also sneakily reliant on protectionism (informal and personal as much as governmental). Yet the tsunami of Asian hard graft and, increasingly, efficiency will, in time, sweep this advantage aside. France needs to wake up and smell the coffee (preferably "to go") if it is not to become an island of faded and ridiculous self-indulgence that becomes unattractive to, first, overseas investors and, second, to its own (rather good) companies. Already Renault produces as many cars abroad. Soon enough the economics will make less and less sense to produce in France. Tourism, real estate and the odd luxury good will be all that is left unless they roll up their sleeves and work harder.
And France is simply an extreme example of what is happening right across the west, especially in Europe (America is savable - it still has a strong work ethic, largely from immigrants). For too long we've spent our parents hard-earned industrial/commercial inheritance on indulgances, often supplied by hard working Asians. And day-by-day our relative economic power has declined. But hey, that's fine - because a leisurely lunch, a spot of yoga and a philosophical chat is soooo much better for the soul. Gawd 'elp us.
- Milton-Not-Keynes, London
