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Author: thomas.hutmacher@collective-zero.de
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Hallo Welt!
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Our adventure making this film began in January 2018, when I decided that we had to go to Scotland and start filming this story — it was unfolding and not waiting for us to secure funding. So we eschewed the typical process for developing a documentary film, and went ahead with our small company and started shooting.
Gladly, we made a lot of friends along the way. Early on, Kim Münster served as our producer and shepherd-like coach for this ambitious project. In the middle of 2019, production duties passed on to a new production partner with whom we have been developing this film ever since, and with whom we have particularly accomplished the feat of editing the incredible stories that our two protagonists have experienced into a compelling film. Somewhat hampered by the Covid pandemic, that process took about 18 months.
A few days ago — on January 30th 2022, pretty much exactly four years after we began working on the film — our executive producer gave us the green light for the rough cut that we now have.
The latest announcements that the new German Minister for the Economy and for the Climate, Robert Habeck, made in the run-up to the launch of the latest report on the German economy are very interesting — in many respects, he uses a vocabulary and terms that seem to come from the Wellbeing Economy school of thought.
The influential German weekly DER SPIEGEL reported on the new tone in the report, based on a draft that was circulated early:
The draft report states that “overall economic growth, measured in terms of growth in gross domestic product, is a necessary but by no means sufficient prerequisite for sustainable prosperity, employment, participation and social security”. For the first time, the German government will examine “complementary dimensions of material and immaterial prosperity as well as intergenerational sustainability” beyond gross domestic product (GDP).
And further down:
In addition, a “saturation with basic consumer goods” had been reached in the middle of society. Therefore, “a political promise of further and generally rising consumption levels cannot be made.”
In the center/conservative daily paper FAZ, a commentator says:
The Greens have long been at odds with the concept of basing the country’s well-being primarily on the value of domestically produced goods and services. As a consequence, they have negotiated a passage in the coalition agreement about a well-being report which is to be integrated in the annual economic report and “that covers not only economic but also ecological, social and societal dimensions of well-being”. A GDP framed green.
(Translations from German all mine.)
The actual report (German) that finally did come out has been toned down — most likely to accommodate the other two coalition parties that are not as progressive in their thinking about the economy. Overall, the report focuses less on a changed approach to running the economy, and much more on the climate crisis (which is still encouraging news, coming from a ministry that was in the hands of staunch fossil fuel defenders for decades). But I believe that the statements that were circulated beforehand are the real news that deserve our attention. Because that seems to be where Habeck’s heart is.
Today, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance have published a guest piece on their blog I have written. I am commenting on Habeck’s initiative from my point of view as a German, having spent most of my life surrounded by a society that was deeply marked by the unbridled adoration of GDP growth — no surprise there, Germany built its entire raison d’être around increasing the material output of its economy after the disaster of World War II and the Nazi era.
I personally hope that Habeck will get the support that he needs to see his vision through. If Germany adopted this way of thinking more broadly, it could produce a chain reaction in Europe and beyond.
As humanity is struggling with the Covid pandemic (and, in many parts, trying to get into a Christmas spirit, despite the virus), there is still some good news happening. Yesterday, the Finnish Government declared that it is joining the WEGo project:
“Joining the network will give us new opportunities to promote the economy of wellbeing approach, for example in the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. This approach makes it possible to create a sustainable foundation for a just, equal, climate-friendly and competent society which is better equipped to respond to future crises and to overcome them more swiftly,” says Minister of Social Affairs and Health Aino-Kaisa Pekonen.
To us, it is incredibly exciting to witness the development of this alliance. We started following the project when it was nothing more than a visionary idea in the heads of a handful people who wanted to establish a different approach to running our economies.
We were there, at the end of 2018, when it was officially launched to the world, at an OECD conference in South Korea.
Today, a little over three years after the first small meeting was held at the University of Glasgow, to discuss an approach to economics that finally puts the wellbeing of people and planet at the core of economic policy development, five regional and national governments have publicly declared that this is the right one for them.
This does not mean that these governments abandon GDP as a key measurement tool in their work. Not yet. Finland cannot, actually: As a member of the Eurozone, Finland is committed to the Maastricht criteria, which indirectly leads to requirements for GDP growth. But if you carefully read the press release that’s linked above, you’ll see that it makes no reference to GDP growth. And that alone is saying something. It is a starting point.
Earlier this year, at the beginning of May, the Welsh Government became first new member after the alliance’s founding:
Covid-19 has dramatically changed our lives and will have a lasting and profound effect on all of us, on our economy, on our public services and on our communities. We cannot go back to business as normal, and need to plan for a Wales, shaped by the virus, that is more prosperous, more equal and greener, rooted in our commitment to social-economic and environmental justice. Last week, we joined the Well-being Economy Government (WEGo) Network and will be working with Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand – who all have a shared ambition to deliver and improve well-being through their economic approach.
Katherine Trebeck has been fighting for years for this alliance to come about, and to this day, she is part of countless conversations that are happening all around the world — as governments are beginning to rethink their approach to economic development, and slowly moving into a wellbeing economy logic.
I am truly excited that we will get to tell the story about some of the amazing people behind all this in our film.
Which will come out next year. Just bear with us. Still working on that edit. And will keep doing that for a little while longer …
A Christmas season that may be as merry as it can — to all those who celebrate it, and also to those who don’t or can’t. And all the best for a year 2021 to all of us — may it make things come true that we currently don’t even dare dream of yet.
On Monday, the 30th of November 2020 at 7 pm (CET), German Professor and ‘transformational thinker’ Maja Göpel will meet with Lorenzo Fioramonti (one of the two main protagonists of our film) in a live debate, streamed online. The title for the evening:
WELLBEING
How can we recreate our societies and
thereby ensure wellbeing and quality of life?
The event is organised by Arts & Nature Social Club, in collaboration with the German Chapter of the Club of Rome.
Even though we are already deep in the editing process, we will attend and film the event — to capture what will surely be an inspiring and inspired discussion about how to make our societies future-proof.
For those who want to join, here is the YouTube live link for the evening. Musical support will be provided by Frida Gold.
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Relief In My Bones.
This film project — as well as most of my political work in the past four years — was directly inspired by Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The vote stimulated my disbelief, my anxiety, worry, curiosity — and as a consequence, it drove me to find out what was really going on in the world.
This film project would probably not exist if Hillary Clinton had won.
I do not live in America, I am not a US citizen, and it may seem surprising to some that the 2016 Presidential election had such an impact on my life. There are two reasons for this. The less important one is that I have always had a connection to the USA, ever since I went to live there as a teenager for a year, back in the summer of 1989. I have friends in America, I constantly observe and evaluate the impact that America has on our lives all around the world, and I am fascinated and frightened by the effects its culture has on us all. So I felt personally affected by an election in a country to which I feel this connection.
But the more important reason is this: For better or worse, the US President sets the tone for politics around the globe. And Trump maybe more than most, in ways that were so much worse than most. Sometimes his effect was direct and unmitigated — when he pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, for example. Sometimes it was indirect but no less horrendous — when his example stimulated other despotic fascist thugs or just plain old idiots in other high places around the world, to behave the way he did.
But I had no idea how deep that influence ran inside me. Until Sunday last. On Saturday, we all learned that Biden had won the election. And on Sunday morning, it suddenly dawned on me: From now on, everything would be different. Not for everyone or everything in the world, don’t get me wrong! But definitely for me.
And so I cried that morning.
Because only then did I truly realise the enormity of the last four years in my own life alone — how all my little struggles and attempts and projects had happened and existed under the black veil of the knowledge that the most powerful man on earth is against everything I am fighting for. Every single thing. How many times was Trump the first thing on my mind when I woke up in the morning! We live in a truly globalised world, the terrifying problems that we have as a species are shared by all of us. And in that one world, he was setting the tone – his monstrous, callous, sociopathic, global tone.
None of the problems are solved now, of course. They are still exactly as terrifying and enormous as they were a week ago. But the simple knowledge that from now on, an actual human being — with empathy, with the capacity to listen, to reason, to relate to other human beings — will sit in the White House does change everything for me.
The path for Biden and his people until January 20th and afterwards is going to be steep and long and hard, and the Republicans are showing a type of lax disrespect for, or outright loathing of democracy and its processes that is chilling to the bone. But I believe that the rule of law and the election results will reign. And that alone is an incredible victory. Which shows how low the USA have sunk.
But it is a light. Not the light at the end of the tunnel. But a torch that will allow us to carry on — so we may find the end of the tunnel.
A few days ago, I had the chance to catch up with Katherine – one of the two key protagonists in our film – about her thoughts regarding our current crisis, and what it means for changing our economies. This is a summary of the things she mentioned in our call.
“Corona is revealing to the wider community that it’s miserably paid armies of people in precarious work, hitherto dismissed as ‘low skill’, who really keep our societies going: the couriers, the nurses, the supermarket checkout staff, the care workers, the refuse collectors. They are now the ones who keep the shop open, who keep our streets clean, who deliver books and groceries to our door to help us get through lockdown. They are the ones who ensure our wellbeing these days.
Whereas the highly paid top managers are nowhere to be seen in such a terrain.
This should make us take a renewed interest in rather boring seeming and less glamorous aspects of our economy: schools, hospitals, the food industry (the so-called ‘foundational economy’). We should hold on to a new recognition of the importance of local supply chains.
And also ask ourselves new questions: what is the Care Economy really worth to us? How much do we value the “gift economy” — i.e. all the services that are provided in everyday life without payment (child supervision among neighbours, care for the elderly in the family, help here and there in the neighbourhood), which keep so much of our lives as individuals and as communities together.
And we should note that despite its vital role, so much of this is not calculated anywhere in the GDP of a country.
That is why now is the time to think new thoughts and imagine a better economy post-corona than the one we had going into it. This phase of crisis enables us to ask questions and give answers that were unthinkable only a short while ago. For example, the current UK Chancellor of the Exchequer seems to be thinking — or at least there were hints of this in some of his press conferences – in terms of the rich having to carry some of the burden of the mammoth income support programmes the government is having to bring in. We’ll see where that ends up, but it would have been hard to have imagined just a few weeks ago.
The risk is that this window of possibility will close again very quickly – that a “rollback” will come as people rush to return to how things were — forgetting or ignoring how grim that was for so many and for our planet.
There is a similar diversity in the corporate world — the wheat separating from the chaff: some companies are now putting profits aside and trying to live up to their responsibilities. One example that has caught my eye is the supermarket chain Morrisons which has promised all its suppliers that from now on they will pay all deliveries immediately, to help them with their cash flow. This is significant because supermarkets are notorious for slow payment. Another example is whisky distilleries reconfiguring their operations to produce hand sanitizers — and making it available at cost or for free to front line workers. But there are others going in the opposite direction: Amazon has fired people who didn’t dare to come to work because of Corona, a chain of pubs forcing its staff to work when the government was advising against it.
This is exactly why we must do everything we can to start creating a better world now. The opportunity is to build back better as my former colleagues working in humanitarian situations would say.
A lot of folks have been thinking long and hard for many years — decades even — about how our economy should be. Covid-19 may have just transformed the economic and political landscape so much that these ideas get the hearing they so urgently deserve.”
The development of this film project in 2019 was rather remarkable.
Our stories and protagonists took to the global stage!
Originally, we thought the final chapter in our story about the Wellbeing Economy Governments was going to be the big OECD conference in South Korea where the initiative was officially launched and publicly announced for the first time. But that event felt somewhat anti-climactic: It was a so-called “breakfast session” — very early in the morning, in a small room, with hardly anyone attending. And at the time, we asked ourselves: This is supposed to be the big breakthrough?
It seemed a little like the project had failed as it was succeeding.
But it turns out: A small launch can still lead to a big change. In the following months, all kinds of little things were happening in the three WEGo countries, and also between them. And then, another few weeks later, the big news broke that Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, was announcing and explaining the WEGo initiative from the TED stage. To this day, her talk has been watched over 1.7 million times — and that does look a lot more like the big event that we would have hoped for. And then towards the end of the year, Icelandic prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir gave a speech about the initiative in London, which got the BBC interested, and which finally even led to a brief radio interview I gave to the BBC about the WEGo initiative.
Lorenzo’s story also took an unexpected turn around the middle of the year — he was promoted from Vice Minister to Minister of Education in the surprisingly formed new PD/5-Star government. In this role, he made waves in Italy, he got plenty of pressure from many sides, his policies made him unpopular with many people — as he is proposing uncomfortable solutions to really transform the Italian society for the future, while he also got international headlines for his push to have Italian schoolchildren taught about sustainable living and the climate in all classes starting with the coming academic year.
All this culminated in him being invited to the Climate Conference in Madrid and to an audience with the Pope. (We were there with the camera for the former, but not for the latter.) And now, just before the end of the year he resigned from his job as minister. Which came as no surprise to us — on the contrary. But the background to his resignation doesn’t belong here, it’ll be in our film.
The key thing for us is that we were very lucky — which is a requirement for any documentary film project: When we met Lorenzo, he was not yet a member of the Italian parliament, and then he transformed into an internationally respected politician in under two years. When he resigned, the news was reported around the world. How often does the world take an interest in an Italian Minister of Education who has been in office for only a few weeks?
We found powerful partners!
Around the middle of the year we met a director and producer who is very well established in the German film industry and who quickly warmed to our project. In November we signed an agreement according to which we will finish and market the film together with his company. For the development of our film, the second half of the year was characterized by getting to know and discussing the film project with our new partners. In our exchanges we thought and learned a lot about how our film can work, how we should structure it and what the focus should be. This was enormously helpful for our understanding of what kind of film we are making. But it also took time, of course.
So … we are looking very much forward to an eventful year 2020 in which we will launch into the next phase of the production. Carving out a compelling story from all the material that we have collected. Happy New Year everyone, and wish us luck!
A couple weeks ago, I had to summarise the “Wellbeing Economies vision”, for an internal document that we needed. I am neither a scholar nor a practitioner of wellbeing economics, but I still felt that the exercise of writing down what I had understood in our project to be valuable. Clearing one’s thoughts by putting them into writing is often quite helpful. Here are the results. Interestingly, the real experts in the matter — the team at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) – also just happened to put out a document about the very same thing. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet. But it may be fun for some to contrast and compare.
The concept of Wellbeing Economies (WE) does not attempt to explain the world through a central foundational economic model, nor does it recommend a particular path for achieving its goals. Rather, it is essentially a very pragmatic approach that begins not with a “system”, but with the end goal: an economy that serves people and the planet as a whole.
Five central concerns are to be achieved:
- Dignity: Everyone has enough to live in comfort, safety and happiness
- Nature: A restored and safe natural world for all life
- Connection: A sense of belonging and institutions that serve the common good
- Fairness: Justice in all its dimensions at the heart of economic systems, and the gap between the richest and poorest greatly reduced
- Participation: Citizens are actively engaged in their communities and locally rooted economies
One of the reasons why there is no central (mathematical) model for Wellbeing Economies is that advocates of the “Wellbeing Economy” idea embed economics deeply in the social sciences and reject a purely model-driven, number-oriented approach — which tries to give Economics a false semblance of a natural science.
Rather, they acknowledge that the very particular social science “economics” is about the question of how the earth’s resources are to be treated and allocated in the best possible way, in order to achieve the above goals. And while there is no question that mathematical skills are required for this, at the same time it is also necessary to recognize that philosophical questions about the meaning of life, normative ideas about law and justice, and an understanding of human irrationality, emotionality and spirituality are just as important. And they are all factors that have no or only a very limited place in the traditional data-driven approach to economics.
Even though this may not always be explicit, a foundation of WE seems to be that they start from a different view of humanity than capitalism of the neoliberal school does. The latter assumes that the central driver of all human activity is personal benefit maximization (greed), which must be put at the service of economic development. WE, on the contrary, see a number of different needs in people, which are expressed, above all, in our social and cooperative behaviour. In the current design of our economy which is essentially based on greed, these do not come into their own. It is now necessary to change this orientation, in order to give other central human qualities more justice in a our economic logic.
But in order for this to happen, it is fundamental to acknowledge that every economic system is man-made and can therefore be rebuilt or readjusted.
For this readjustment, the Wellbeing Economies see a particular need in redefining the key measures of success of our economic systems: politics and the economy are profoundly influenced by what is measured as success and recognized as desirable.
A core requirement is therefore to abandon the goal of continued economic growth in the sense of a steady increase in gross domestic product (GDP) and instead to define and measure the prosperity and progress of our world’s societies in new, different ways. It is acknowledged that GDP growth in the western world after the Second World War certainly helped increase prosperity and improve living standards. But the resulting obsession with steadily rising GDP is now seen as a central cause for our world becoming more and more unjust and dealing with nature in an completely destructive manner.
The fight against the apocalyptic climate crisis, which results from the unlimited growth of the carbon industry in the post-war economic growth logic, is a central motive for many to work towards Wellbeing Economies.
Politically, Wellbeing Economists are therefore trying to convince governments to use other indicators, better suited to the goals of the WE, rather than classic indicators such as GDP, unemployment figures or stock market prices, to help define and verify the true goals of policies made for people and nature. Examples of implementations are the Scottish National Performance Framework or the New Zealand Wellbeing Framework.
A second demand on policymakers is that ministries in governments abandon their silo roles and understand that they can only create a better society in the sense of Wellbeing if they collaborate and cooperate intensively with each other. Many central problems in economy and society are at the same time the task of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Economy, Finance and Environment. Egoism or struggles for budgets within a government are very counterproductive. In a complex interrelated world, problems need to be approach jointly from all perspectives and then joint solutions need to be developed.
Further demands of the WE are:
- Decentralized economies: Instead of relying on huge central production facilities, whose products or services must then be shipped all over the world, local production close to people should be the goal. This applies just as much to energy production (local, sustainable, citizen-driven) as it does to sustainable production or provision of physical products (repair shops, 3D printers, recycling, etc.) and services.
- Plurality of approaches: The WE recognise that the objectives of the WE can be achieved in different ways around the world and that these different ways enrich the concept.
- Democracy and participation: There seems to be a general consensus that a WE can only be enforced if it involves the local people in its emergence and thereby makes them partners and co-shapers of the new economy.
- Experimenting and learning from each other: Wellbeing economies can only develop if we learn from each other – because much of what is not yet understood in one place has already been tried out in another. And we must experiment – because we still have to invent some aspects of how these Wellbeing Economies may function.
- Wellbeing as a social task, not as a private project: One concern of the pioneers of the Wellbeing Economy is that the term “Wellbeing” could be adopted by neoliberalism and made its own. This would turn the concept against itself: Wellbeing would no longer be a political project, but would be interpreted as a task for each individual within the existing system. Mindfulness approaches in start-up companies, yoga retreats and other concepts that try to strengthen the individual in the struggle within the existing destructive version of capitalism can easily be misinterpreted as a wellbeing approach, while they are the exact opposite.