By Mike Zeidler

‘World Leaders’ are just like us. They’re ordinary people who happen to have a bit more ambition than most and a really strong desire to lead.  They also like to be successful.  Really successful.  Right now, if you’re a ‘World Leader’, you’ve got a major problem on your hands because you’re in a job where the chief measures of success are so unrealistic that you’re pretty much certain to fail.

What’s odd about the situation is that the employers (that’s us really, democracy or not) are all kicking up a hell of a fuss about the need for a little bit more fairness, preferably without trashing the planet, but the leaders are listening to the weasel words of some other dark power which is setting them up to fail.  Not for nothing has this power been called ‘the invisible hand’...

The chants on the streets aren’t based around the popular phrase ‘More GDP Growth’, but this is the mantra of ‘the markets’ – not the straightforward kind of market where you can get to feel the vegetables – these are the markets of financial instruments and terribly complicated algorithms which add up to nothing you can ever quite put your finger on.

However, the invisibility cloak has slipped a bit, and there are now more and more people pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. The main problem with GDP Growth as a goal is that (like the financial markets), it doesn’t follow the rules of real life.  If resources are limited, debt becomes unpayable and the population has gone off your products because they’re rubbish, there’s no alternative but to shut down, have a re-think and come up with a new way of doing things that suits the times.

Slightly bizarrely, the canary in the coalmine is football.  The gradual shift from a game of the people to a diamond encrusted plaything of the mega-rich, tells the whole story of economics today – and the warning for ‘World Leaders’ is clear.  Mega rich paymasters will kick you out before you know it if things don’t go their way – but their way is the one which excludes the population with high ticket prices, expensive kit, exclusive TV rights and no real interest in the leagues below.  Ultimately, the privileged few are strangling the life out of the poor majority, and that’s just not fair....

Which is why there are so many people involved in the Occupy thing.  The money men continue to urge world leaders naked onto the stage to convince the masses that we need to knuckle down and get on with growth, but the crowd out there is getting restless, finally beginning to notice the unpleasant contradictions in the GDP Growth story which has held them rapt for so long.  This is where our World Leaders begin to feel uncomfortably trapped between a Rock and a Hard Place.

Fortunately, there’s another story that’s infinitely more attractive and real if our leaders can overcome the outdated assumptions of the last 65 years of economic thinking.   In 2007 an Artificial Life researcher called Steve Grand responded to the Edge Question ‘What are you optimistic about?’ by saying he was very hopeful that our scientific understanding was ‘all wrong’.  His point was that we often discard or ignore contradictory information when we don’t understand it, and can go a long way in the wrong direction until we realise the problem doesn’t lie with the facts, but with our assumptions. 

The recent announcement from San Grasso was a perfect illustration of Steve’s hopes, because if matter can travel faster than light, there’s now a completely new world of possibility and we’ll need to re-build the foundations of our science.  We think it’s fascinating that these scientists studied something so incredibly small in order to answer questions that seem so incredibly big.

And so it is with economics.  We can share Steve Grand’s optimism because we’re convinced the problems of the financial crisis are to do with the assumptions rather than the facts.  Our convention-busting theory is built on the shoulders of an army of giant thinkers, and like the scientists above, we think the tiniest details (of the way people work in communities) hold the answers to the big questions (of the international economic crisis).

Pat Kane mused in last weekend’s Observer, wellbeing is an opportunity for social excitement and behavioural novelty as we seek to ‘build the mindsets and communally forge the habits that prepare us to cope with radical change’.  Today’s work on wellbeing is no recent fad or flash in the pan – it draws on the debate about happiness  which began when humans could talk and has continued without interruption to the present day.  

Some leaders are trying on new outfits behind the curtain as they realise they need a new look in order to succeed. Sarkozy had his ‘Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’ and Cameron’s interest in GWB (General Wellbeing) is a step closer now the Office of National Statistics has announced its 10 indicators of wellbeing’.   These ideas are a step in the right direction, but not yet the coherent story which the crowd is looking for.

If any World Leaders are reading this, we strongly recommend you watch out for The Happy City Initiative and its Happiness Bank.  This is where theory and practice come together in ways that feed realistic and achievable measures of success.  Happiness is not just a crowd-pleaser, it’s a way out of the GDP Growth failure trap.