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Opting out of China’s rat race
Chris Hogg, BBC News
… after three decades of extraordinary economic growth, there are growing numbers of middle class Chinese with good jobs who are well-off relative to the rest of the population.
Now some of those who moved to cities like Shanghai for good wages in white collar jobs are starting to tire of the rat race, and in a reversal of past patterns of movement are abandoning the urban sprawl for a quieter life in the country.
Gao Hong and Yang Xiaoling, two advertising executives in their mid-thirties, decided a year ago to give up their lucrative careers to move to a quiet house in the country, eight hours drive from Shanghai in Jiangsi province.
They took a 40-year lease on an old house which Yang Xiaoling came across during a business trip.
Gao Hong, at home
Gao Hong says country life offers a better sense of community
“She found it when she was looking for a handmade umbrella,” her husband Gao Hong explained, sitting in the sunshine in their garden on a bright but cold December morning.
Yang Xiaoling says there were several reasons why they decided to move.
She did not like their life in the city. “You work in a company like you are in a machine,” she said.
“Your working life runs in a groove, you do what you’re told.”
“People in the city are indifferent to each other,” her husband added. “Here our neighbours come and join us for meals often, they sit in the sun with us in the garden and chat all the time. We never lock our door.”
“We lived in Shanghai for years but we had no contact with 90% of our neighbours. If you have no contact with your neighbour, you have no idea what kind of person they are.”
(23 December 2008)
Sounds familiar. -BA
We don’t find happiness at the mall
Silver Donald Cameron, Chronicle Herald (Nova Scotia)
… Two-thirds of Americans apparently dread the holiday season, because it will simply add more stuff to their lives. Christmas gifts have become the social equivalent of anti-matter. Far from delighting the recipients, Christmas gifts depress them.
I stumbled across this information in Bill McKibben’s provocative book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. In it, McKibben asks a simple question: “Is more better?” Do objects and possessions really make us happy? If not, then why pursue “economic growth,” which really means the creation of still more objects and possessions?
These are heretical questions — particularly to economists, whose odd semi-science rests on the assumption that we can tell what makes you happy (or “maximizes utility,” in econo-speak) by looking at how you spend your money. Economics assumes that people are rational and make rational choices. If you’re buying a leaf blower, then, presumably you’ve judged that of all the things you could possibly be doing at this moment, buying a leaf blower is the most satisfying.
Buying stuff makes you happy. The more stuff you can buy, the happier you’ll be. That’s the fundamental assumption of economics.
But it’s not so in the real world.
(21 December 2008)
Your brain on shopping
Carey Goldberg, Boston Globe
The battle is not just among the jostling crowds at the sale bins and cash registers in these pre-Christmas days; it is also between warring factions of our own brains, some economists and neuroscientists say.
Recent studies suggest that each buying decision plays out in the brain as a fight between a pleasure center seeking the bliss of acquisition and an aversion center seeking to avoid the pain of paying.
In the hot field of neuroeconomics, MRI scans have turned up heightened activity in deep, primitive areas of the brain as subjects shop. The nucleus accumbens, a seat of pleasure, lights up when they are contemplating a purchase, and the insula, a seat of disgust and pain, lights upwhen they are thinking about how much that purchase is going to cost.
(22 December 2008)
