NGO "ANOTHER WAY" (STICHTING BAKENS VERZET), NETHERLANDS, SUSTAINABLE INTEGRATED SELF-FINANCING DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS AND ADVANCED DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGIES

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.” (Baldwin J., Stranger in the Village, Essay in Notes of a Native Son, Beacon Press, Boston 1955. Accessed at www.scribd.com, 08 October 2012.)

“Endless economic growth driven by unbridled consumption has been elevated to the status of a modern religion. ” Renner M., Moving Toward a Less Consumptive Society, Chapter 5, pp. 96- 119 of the State of the World Report, 2004, A World Watch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable, Society , Halweil B. and Mastny L. (Project Directors), W.W.Norton, New York and London, 2004, copyright World Watch Institute, Washington, 2004, ISBN 0-393-05860-3 and ISBN 0-303-32539-3 (pbk).

“If the desire of acquiring goods and services that at current practises generate waste and promote unsustainable use of the earth’s resources was not present in society, sustainability would not be an issue”. (Towards Sustainable Consumption : An Economic Conceptual Framework, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Working Party on National Environmental Policy, Paris, 2002.)

“Society is undermining the ecological foundation of its own food system.” (Alder, J. et al, Avoiding Future Famines : Strengthening the Ecological Foundation of Food Security through Sustainable Food Systems, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Nairobi, June, 2012, executive summary p. vii). ISBN 978-92-807-3261-0.) “As a rough estimate 100 calories of externally provided energy (mainly fossil fuels) are needed to produce 10 calories of food.” (idem, p. 8).

“We will not significantly change the potentially unsustainable aspects of human activity unless we can develop an economic environment within which they are no longer attractive.” (Towards Sustainable Consumption : An Economic Conceptual Framework (above p. 8), citing Heal, G. (1998), Valuing the Future: Economic Theory and Sustainability, Columbia University Press.

Look at the following slide:

1. Poverty.

References to poverty in the slide appear to be economic in nature.

1. Opinion.

How can money become a market limitation?

2. Opinion.

How is it possible to «create » scarcity? Who creates it?

The verb “perceive” is used in connection with poverty. Perception is subjective.

A wide literature is available on the definition of poverty.

“The Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development (United Nations, 2006, resolution 1, annex II) characterized poverty as follows:

Poverty has various manifestations, including lack of income and productive resources sufficient to ensure sustainable livelihoods; hunger and malnutrition;

ill health; limited or lack of access to education and other basic services; increased morbidity and mortality from illness; homelessness and inadequate housing; unsafe environments; and social discrimination and exclusion. It is also characterized by a lack of participation in decision-making and in civil, social and cultural life (par. 19). ” . Rethinking Poverty : Report on the World Social Situation 2010., United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York 2009 (ISBN 978-92-1-130278-3).

“Quality of life includes the full range of factors that make life worth living, including those that are not captured by monetary measures.” Stiglitz J., Sen A, Fitoussi J-P (coordinators), Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress., Report for the President of France, www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr, Paris, September 2009, p.216 . Chapter 2 of the summary and chapter 2 of the body of this report provide a detailed analysis of the term “quality of life” with particular reference to its subjective elements..

Agarwala, M. et al on p. xxvii of the executive summary of Inclusive Wealth Report 2012 : Measuring progress towards sustainability (United Nations University Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (UNU-IDHP) and United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, June 2012. ISBN 978-1-107-68339-6) define wealth as “ the social worth of an economy’s assets: reproducible capital; human capital; knowledge; natural capital; population; institutions; and time.”

The law of diminishing returns is discussed in connection with health and education in 07. Financial leakage : health and education. According to Encylodpædia Britannica, the law of diminishing returns is an “economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increases in output.” This law can also be applied to our perceived quality of life.

Luxury is not necessary for a good quality of life.

“The whole enormous amount of human labour expended in the search for and the production of gold; the ships which carry out the thousands of explorers, diggers and speculators; the tools, implements, and machinery they use; their houses, food, and clothing, as well as the countless gallons of liquor of various qualities they consume, are all, so far as the well-being of the community is concerned, absolutely wasted…… The larger the proportion of the population of a country that devotes itself to gold-production, the smaller the numbers left to produce real wealth - food, clothing, houses, fuel, roads, machinery and all the innumerable, conveniences, comforts, and wholesome luxuries of life. Hence, whatever appearances may indicate, gold-production makes a country poor, and by furnishing new means of investment and speculation helps to keep it poor.” ( A.F. Wallace, The Wonderful Century : Its Successes and Failures (1898), Digital version : Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 370. ISBN 878-1-108-03689-5.)

“……beyond a certain threshold, more material wealth is a poor substitute for community cohesion, healthy relationships, a sense of purpose, connection with nature, and other dimensions of human happiness.” (Talberth, J., A New Bottom Line for Progress., Chapter 2, 2008 State of the World : Innovations for a Sustainable Economy, The Worldwatch Institute, p. 21. Washington, 2008.)

It has been suggested that in western countries the correlation between happiness and income may disappear at income levels less than US$ 10,000 (2003). (Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest Vol. 5, no. 1, American Psychological Society, Washington, July 2004, graph Fig. 1 on p. 3.) On p. 2 they affirm :“The purpose of the production of goods and services and of policies in areas such as education, health, the environment, and welfare is to increase well-being.”

“…. people with the highest well-being ‘‘are not those who live in the richest countries, but those who live where social and political institutions are effective, where mutual trust is high, and corruption is low’’” (Diener and Seligman, above, p. 5 citing Helliwell J.F. “How’s life? Combining individual and national variables to explain subjective well-being”, Economic Modelling, 20, 355.) …. “This pattern [increases in income accompanied by smaller increase in well-being] is consistent with the decreasing marginal utility of money (i.e., the impact of an added dollar decreases as the total amount of money increases) (p. 6).

“…communities with high rates of volunteer activity, club membership, church membership, and social entertaining (all thought to be indirect manifestations of social capital) all had higher well-being than communities that were low in these characteristics.(Diener and Seligman, above, citing Putnam, Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community, Simon & Schuster. New York, 2001.)

“…meeting one’s physical needs and one’s desires might be the crucial moderator of the effects of income on well-being……economic growth seems to have topped out in its capacity to produce more well-being in developed nations.” (Diener and Seligman, above, p. 10).

D.Kahneman and A. Deaton conclude in High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being, (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), vo. 107, no.38, pp. 16489-16493, Washington, 2010) that in the context of the United States, applying the cultural values there, “there is no further progress [in emotional well-being ] beyond an annual income [ per family] of ~$75,000” and that “high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.”

For a detailed discussion of this subject, see Mont, O. and others, Improving Nordic policymaking by dispelling myths on sustainable consumption, Nordic Council of Ministers, Copenhagen, 2013. ISBN 978-92-893-2589-9, pp. 87-93.)

3. Research.

List the references you have consulted on the definition of poverty.

Read material in the Model for integrated development projects which refers to poverty :

Poverty and its causes.

◄ ►

◄ First block : Poverty and quality of life.

◄ Index : Diploma in Integrated Development (Dip.Int.Dev)

◄ List of key words.

◄ List of references.

◄ Course chart.

◄ Courses available.

◄ Homepage Bakens Verzet.