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By Root 475 0

should start with each of us making the effort to regain control of our personal judgments as individuals who must balance consumption and saving, work and leisure, individualism and membership in society. Our mindfulness should then extend to a more considered understanding of our social relationships and responsibilities: as workers, citizens, and members of the community. Mindfulness, I would suggest, is crucial in eight dimensions of our lives:

Mindfulness of self: personal moderation to escape mass consumerism

Mindfulness of work: the balancing of work and leisure

Mindfulness of knowledge: the cultivation of education

Mindfulness of others: the exercise of compassion and cooperation

Mindfulness of nature: the conservation of the world’s ecosystems

Mindfulness of the future: the responsibility to save for the future

Mindfulness of politics: the cultivation of public deliberation and shared values for collective action through political institutions

Mindfulness of the world: the acceptance of diversity as a path to peace

Beyond the Craving for Wealth

Mindfulness of self means that we once again take time to understand the sources of our own happiness. Americans today routinely assume that higher take-home pay and consumption of goods are the keys to happiness and therefore that tax cuts are the quintessence of well-being. Yet experience and reflection tell us something very different. The greatest benefits of higher income accrue to the poorest households, to enable them to meet their unmet basic needs. For the middle class and especially for the rich, many factors other than income are far more important for personal happiness. Good governance, more trust in the community, a happier married life, more time for friends and colleagues, and meaningful and secure work all rank as far more important than another few percent of personal income. Yet many of these sources of long-term happiness can be achieved only through collective action, including politics, not through individual decision making in the marketplace. Even more telling, many of the uses of personal income today—for television viewing, fast foods, cigarettes, gambling, long commutes, and the like—are behaviors that often bring “buyer’s remorse” (a regret about the level of consumption and a desire to cut back) rather than true satisfaction.

There is also a huge difference between having more income (or wealth) and relentlessly craving more income. More income—if properly deployed—can be a source of personal happiness and security, but devoting one’s energies in a narrow-minded way to gaining it can be a source of endless frustration and unhappiness. The difference could not be more important. Having more income gives a mild, and mostly temporary, boost to satisfaction, holding other things constant. Aggressively orienting one’s life toward becoming rich, however, leads to prolonged and measurable unhappiness. Individuals with a high “materialist” orientation, for whom earning and spending money are a central aim of life, are systematically far less happy and secure than nonmaterialists.

The good news is that only a modest level of income is needed to meet basic needs. Once a society achieves that level of income across the society, there is the opportunity to refocus many of the society’s energies toward sources of well-being that can’t be reached by the market alone. Consider life expectancy, a key measure of well-being. By the time a society reaches a per capita income of around $3,000, life expectancy is generally 70 years or higher (compared with 78.3 years in the United States in 2009). Many countries much poorer than the United States either exceed or are very close to the U.S. life expectancy. Chile, for example, with a GDP per capita of $9,400 in 2009, roughly one-fifth of America’s at $46,400, has a life expectancy of 78.7 years, slightly higher than in the United States. Costa Rica, Greece, South Korea, and Portugal are considerably poorer than the United States in per capita GDP, but have life expectancies that are higher.2

Similarly,