A Baseline for Wellbeing Accounting

In a scoop, Interest has been made privy to an important advancement in the Wellbeing Accounting space.

All wellbeing measures, to be credible, require a baseline from which to adjudge progress in the various indicators.  This is not easy to establish:  the requirements include solid records, a sufficient sample size, and a time lapse of well over a century to let the noise in the data settle down.  The Department of Statistics has established just such a baseline, and by a novel technique.

There is no immediately usable baseline within New Zealand itself.  It is a young country, records of sufficient size and credibility are sparse, and with rapid rises in population over the century-plus time lapse deemed necessary, data from the early years cannot be taken as being at all representative. Drawing on settled science techniques from other disciplines, infill data from a close and analogous neighbour has been used to establish this baseline.

The data comes from several large Tasmanian organisations.  These meet the stipulated requirements:  records, sample size, and age.  The work involved to shape this data into a form suitable for use in a 21st century public accounting context is substantial:  raw data, as for other disciplines, needs to be viewed with 21st century eyes, rather than be taken at face value or have 19th century concepts of 'wellbeing' simply echoed verbatim .  There have been several streams of work to refine the original records along the alignments mandated by the Wellbeing Budget now being finalised.   These have reached conclusions, and some observations are reported in precis form below.

The Tasmanian data reveals two main threads reported in the quite voluminous records kept at these institutions: falling under the following broad Wellbeing headings.

Social:  the general impression is that social interaction was muted to an extent rarely seen today.  And such interactions as did occur were formal, short, and evidenced high levels of power imbalance.  There is little to no evidence of much informal interaction, and similarly, diversity of gender, race, and religion is minimal.

Environmental:  the records reveal that there was strong self-sufficiency and little reliance on external inputs.  The populations gardened, built using local materials, extended existing, older buildings and generally 'did for themselves'.  Interestingly, and not unlike the present day, they seem to have been subject to tight supervision and control in these activities, albeit of perhaps different types.

The result of this baseline establishment is vital to the Wellbeing Budget which forms the cornerstone of  the forthcoming 2019 Budget.  Current-day soundings are compared to this baseline, and rates of progress can, with some caution, be assessed.  The infill technique, novel but certainly well-established in other settled science, has been a vital instrument for this purpose.  Once again, New Zealand leads the world in placing Wellbeing Growth at the heart of its Governmental activity.

Millenarial Movements

The Historian Norman Cohn, in his 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, found that Millenarian movements always picture salvation as:

• Collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity.
• Terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some other-worldly heaven.
• Imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly.
• Total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the present but perfection itself.
• Miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies.

It might have been expected that millenarian thinking would disappear with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. But Cohn found that these ideas and the manias they inspired reemerged in the twentieth century’s secular totalitarian and revolutionary movements.

In what could be a description of the Green New Deal (USA), Cohn argued that these movements felt themselves to be engaged in a struggle of unique importance, “different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed…this is the essence of the recurrent phenomenon of revolutionary millenarianism.”

Now tell me that this does not largely describe those young, easily-led, desperate-to-be-Liked Youf who recently lay about various places to draw attention to Weather in 2100.....