Beyond wealth and wellbeing: how nations flourish

As GDP data is increasingly scrutinised, Ryan Gilfeather asks how to measure the true health and wealth of a nation.

Ryan Gilfeather

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

Two women sit behind a press conference desk against a backdrop, one listens as the other speaks and gestures.

A recent International Monetary Fund press conference on the world economic outlook.

IMF.

Discussions of GDP loom large in our current age. As we live under the shadow of the threat of a recession in the UK, ministers and commentators anxiously follow our country’s Gross Domestic Product, to see whether we are on the right track. Measuring the total value of goods and services produced in a country, this figure is a litmus test for the health of an economy. Crucially, many policymakers and leaders in government believe this figure reveals the health of a nation.

As we will see, not all agree. Opponents rightly highlight that an increase in GDP does not necessarily mean that ordinary citizens live better lives. There are good reasons to share this opposition from a Christian perspective. However, ultimately, the Christian tradition highlights a very different way to measure the health of a society.

In 2020 The Carnegie UK Trust, a think tank campaigning for greater welfare for all, published a new measure for social progress: GDWe (Gross Domestic Wellbeing). In brief, they gathered and processed ONS (Office for National Statistics) data on a variety of domains in life, giving them a single figure on a 10-point scale to rate well-being. These domains included personal well-being, relationships, health, vocational activities, living environments, personal finances, the economy, education and skills, governance, and the environment. When they plotted GDP against GDWe from 2013-9, they revealed that the two do not always line up. As GDP steadily increased from 2016, overall welfare in society dipped. From 2013-9 GDP increased by 10.34 per cent and GDWe only 5.19 per cent. Hence, measuring GDP does not necessarily reveal whether life is getting better for ordinary.

Economic resources are not useless... However, they are not sufficient unto themselves for us to live full and good lives.

This attempt to shift the conversation about social progress from predominantly centring GDP is commendable. The Bible does not legislate on whether to use GDP or GDWe. However, scriptures within it repeatedly decouple economic wealth from flourishing. For example, in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus says the following:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

In life, we can either focus our efforts on attaining wealth or fostering our relationship with God. Only the latter will lead us to flourish. Economic resources are not useless; they are necessary for us to thrive in certain conditions. However, they are not sufficient unto themselves for us to live full and good lives. Furthermore, when wealth becomes the focus of our hearts and minds, our lives will be hollow and fractured. GDWe is a good measure, insofar as it acknowledges that economic flourishing is not the same as a good quality of life, and it attempts to shed light on the latter. However, the Christian tradition highlights a different framework altogether to grasp the health of a society.

Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century theologian and bishop, frames wellbeing as a human being reflecting the image of God to the greatest of their ability. The book of Genesis says that God made us all in His image. Gregory argues that this means that we can become like God in certain ways. God is the fullness of all good things, such as love, justice, peace, joy, and courage. Consequently, Gregory argues that when we act in good ways, we begin to share those characteristics, which in turn leads us to act well in the future. For example, if I defend someone who is under attack, I will become more courageous, and more likely to repeat the same action in the future. The more we reflect the image of God, by acting well and taking on His characteristics, the more we will flourish as individuals. In this vision of human flourishing, Gregory brings together an Aristotelian account of virtue, with a Christian understanding of people as the image of God.

This framework for the well-being of an individual also provides a good barometer for the health of a society. All of these actions and characteristics are building blocks for a healthy society. So long as we have a good sense of how to act appropriately with love, justice, peace, joy and courage, then our actions will build up our common life together. They benefit all, rather than one. They are not zero-sum actions. Accordingly, a society made up of individuals who are acting well and reflecting the image of God would be very healthy indeed.

As a measure of a society, we should ask whether it leads citizens away from virtuous actions and characteristics. For example, between 2019 and 2021, gun murders in the USA rose by 45%. Earlier this year, journalist John Burn-Murdoch argued this rise is partly due to decaying public trust in that country. This tells us that a culture marked by fear of others can lead some of its citizens to commit terrible actions and live lives full of violence. GDP may rise during this time, as may other markers of welfare. However, to see the whole picture we need also consider how societal forces are leading citizens away from flourishing in their reflection of the image of God. Then, we should go about addressing these malignant forces.

In times of adversity... individuals in societies marked by high levels of trust are more satisfied with their lives and act more benevolently.

At the same time, we should also consider how a society enables its citizens to reflect the image of God. Societies with high levels of social trust create space for a variety of positive actions and characteristics. The World Happiness Report studies people’s sense of life satisfaction worldwide. It routinely finds that in times of adversity, like the Great Recession in 2008 or the COVID pandemic, individuals in societies marked by high levels of trust are more satisfied with their lives and act more benevolently than others. Again, these social forces are not the same as GDP, yet they have a significant ability to shape the extent to which citizens can reflect the image of God, and thereby flourish.

In my work for the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work, I am particularly concerned with low-wage workers’ pay and conditions. As I have argued elsewhere, low pay leads to some workers needing to take on two or more jobs. They, consequently, have no time to see their children, nourish their faith, or participate in community institutions. It is clear, therefore, that the widespread pattern of paying below the Real Living Wage (£11.94 p/h in London, £10.90 elsewhere), hinders people in their expression of love for God, family and neighbour. Pay and conditions are but one further example, amongst many, of how societal forces can hinder or help our flourishing in the reflection of the image of God.

Needless to say, GDP and GDWe are still useful and necessary tools. However, they do not tell the full story. GDP only describes the progress of the economy as a whole, and GDWe can only describe the quality of an average person’s life. In contrast, when we set a goal that each citizen should reflect the image of God, we can begin to explore how societal forces enable or squeeze out this aim. With this greater knowledge in mind, we can strive for progress in our nation by fostering good structures and stamping out bad ones, so that all may reflect the image of God to the greatest of their ability.

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Wildness

7 November 2024

7 min read

It’s getting harder to be wild in this world

We’ve trapped and tamed wilderness into a commodity.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Against a night sky a lit up face is blurred by the camera movement.

Under a Dartmoor night sky.

Yousef Salhamoud on Unsplash.

Some while back, my husband rearranged the books in our house, making sure that they were grouped together by theme. We have a lot of books, and there are now themes and sub-themes. It was quite an operation. Within the nature-related books, he created a separate shelf for books that have ‘wild’ in the title. We joked about it, but it made me think about how I’d noticed ideas of ‘wild’ pop up in lots of places in recent years: on clothing and stationery (with leaves or words like ‘keep growing’ printed), in shop windows (furniture displays draped in plastic greenery and fake animal skins), on social media (there are accounts that have ‘wild’ in the title connected to farming, conservation, publishing, personal development, coaching, poetry, business, and more), and in book shops (of which we apparently have only half the stock).

A quick online search on the topic of wilderness quickly leads me to conservation initiatives and statistics on the state of nature, but it also leads me to nature connection experiences, wild swimming, wild camping, soul work, and more. Wilderness becomes a pliable and hard-to-define term. It can relate to the natural world, to wildlife and natural spaces that have avoided human domination. It can also relate to the inner world, to spiritual experiences or to isolating and challenging times. But however you approach it, wilderness – inner, outer – seems to be having a hard time.

In recent months, wild camping has come under the spotlight. Dartmoor is the only place in England where wild camping is legal, and this this access helped to form me: as a teenager I hiked and camped with friends, encountered Dartmoor ponies trying to steal our food in the night, stomped through bogs and wolfed down boil-in-the-bag meals as the sun set. As an adult I’ve camped alone in a bivvy bag, my soul singing back to the Milky Way shining above me. Now, these experiences feel as much in need of protection as the nature they depend on, since a wealthy landowner decided to try and prevent people from undertaking this ancient practice of sleeping under the stars. The court case is ongoing, but it has highlighted the fragility of our access to nature here in England. Just 8 per cent of English countryside is accessible, and 3 per cent of rivers have an uncontested right to swim. Now, the last remaining right to sleep under the stars is under threat.

It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

We live in a time of crisis not just of the state of nature, but also of how we experience the natural world. In a recent study of nature connectedness, Britain was ranked lowest of all the countries surveyed. Our biodiversity is in crisis and so is our ability to encounter the natural world. This feels heightened by a way of being in the western world that sees us all living in our individual houses, working hard to pay for them, shuttling children and selves through schedules, spending fewer and fewer hours outside and with each other.

And this is not just a problem ‘out there’, because inner and outer landscapes are linked. It is unsurprising to me that in the UK at least, levels of good mental health, biodiversity, and access to nature have all been in decline. Disintegration of one is, I think, deeply connected to disintegration of the other.

These linked crises feel further threatened by the trapping and taming of ideas of wilderness, wrapping it into trends and materialism, commodifying it. There are some brilliant and essential initiatives helping to re-wild our inner and outer worlds. But there are also offerings that use wilderness imagery and the freedom and adventure associated with it to sell products and services, or as backdrop to human endeavour, or as a destination or resource for our consumption. I think a commodified wild can get in the way of the actual wilderness we need both externally and internally. This commodification is, I think, affecting our understanding of what the wild is and why it matters. It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

If real wilderness is everywhere but where we need it right now, how might we re-find it – in the natural world, but also within ourselves and our communities? Answering that question is work that many people are focused on now in all kinds of ways, and a short essay cannot begin to offer a full response. I will write more on this topic. But the question I have in mind at the moment is, how do we invoke wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world? – a physical landscape that is being stripped of nature, but also a social landscape that can often diminish our humanity. Perhaps a simpler way to ask the same question is, how do we not just survive life but get excited about it? – How do we love ourselves, our neighbours, and creation enough to deeply and truly care for these things?

Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything.

There are of course structures, systems, and powers that need to change so that people can move out of mere survival, and so that the wild world is restored. I am not exploring those things here. Here, I want to simply share three things that lately, have energised my ability to feel the love, the excitement, and the desire to cherish and protect our hearts, our relationships, and the generous world that hosts us all. Perhaps by reawakening these things, we might find motivation and sustenance for tackling structures and systems.

First, I have been noticing what my young daughter notices. The light shining off a puddle; the way an ant crawls on her hand; the bright silver moon in the sky. I have never struggled to access the exhilaration of the natural world, but seeing through her eyes, I am doing so again. Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything. The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich saw the wonder of the world, and God’s love for it, in a single hazelnut. She recounts her visions in her book Revelations of Divine Love. Sometimes connecting with the specific can help us see and face the global.

Second, there are authors who help me summon wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world, and in a future Seen & Unseen piece I’ll take us on a tour of some of those I love the most. Some of the authors are ancient. In Psalm 78, I read “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them”, and “…they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.” If sin is a kind of disconnection, perhaps our disconnection from creation might lead our gaze to turn inward, and to land on things that do not call forth the best of humanity, rather than the wonder of each other and the world around us. That we are able to forget wonder is something we must remember and work to counter.

Third, I have been thinking through the encounters that have most exposed me to wilderness of the world and of my soul and of relationship – both the uplifting and the challenging. Encountering the vastness of that shining and vertigo-inducing Dartmoor night sky; encountering others in relationships that have helped me slip my skin and enter their unknowability and fragility and beauty; encountering contexts that seem too broken for repair and yet still light enters in. It is in these encounters that I first found God dwelling, and when I followed his trail, I noticed that throughout the Bible there are many people who experience the challenges, joy, and lessons of the wilderness. Wilderness is not just beauty – it can also be unknowable, disorienting, scary. For 40 days in the wilderness, but also in the beauty of the lily of the field and birds of the air, Jesus is right there with us, showing that God can meet us in beauty and barrenness, in wonder and in despair. Again and again in the Bible I see how God loves the world, how he calls it constantly to life through resurrection, through re-creation, through that three-in-oneness of father/son/holy spirit, of self/other/world, of body/encounter/mystery.

Now, I think our souls and societies might benefit from investing in relationships first conjured in Eden: with a garden, with a human, with God and the mystery he points us to. These things feed each other; when one suffers so do the others. As we face a disintegrating and increasingly commodified natural world, a mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness, I think we are being called back to that garden, and to the kinds of wildness it made possible. I’ll look forward to exploring these themes more.