Richard Eckersley
National Centre for Epidemiology and population Health
The Australian National University , Canberra

Address to Institute of Public Administration Australia 's
National Conference 2000
Perth , 30 November 2000

Abstract:

Surveys of social attitudes are revealing a perhaps unprecedented paradox: a booming economy but persistent community disquiet. The puzzling coincidence is fuelling interest in what is perhaps the ultimate public policy question: is life getting better - or worse? The relationship between economic growth and human development is not as clear-cut as conventional wisdom and government policy assume. Public opinion surveys suggest that the driving dynamic in Australia and other Western societies in the early decades of the new century will be a growing tension between values and lifestyles. How this tension is resolved will fundamentally determine national and global futures.

Introduction

My current work addresses the question, ‘Is life getting better, or worse?' (And for whom, in what ways, and for what reasons?). For me, this is the most crucial question of our times. Sociologist John Carroll made a similar point in a recent article in The Australian Financial Review : ‘All opinion worth its salt is addressed to a question that goes something like this: “What's wrong with our times, or with this or that behaviour, and what can be done to improve, if not correct things?”'

These questions are also fundamental to public policy and administration. Let me address them by discussing: firstly, the future as reflected in two historical spikes and our possible responses to them; secondly, the way we currently define and measure progress and what's wrong with these definitions and measures; and finally what we can do about this situation and the role of education in what we do.

But before I do that, I want to make a few pre-emptive strikes. Some might feel that the core question – is life getting better? – is too blunt, too crude. This may be so, but it is intended to match the bluntness of the current dominant measure of progress, GDP or Gross Domestic Product. To put my message in the form of slogans, we need to shift our focus from ‘going for growth' to ‘going beyond growth', from ‘a wealth producing economy' to a ‘health producing society', where health is defined as total well-being – physical, mental, social and spiritual.

Secondly, what I have to say should not be seen as primarily ideological – especially in terms of the traditional left/liberal or right/conservative prescriptions – although it has a bearing on ideology. To give one, perhaps, counter-intuitive, example, recent research suggests that strong welfare states don't necessarily have the most equal health or the happiest people.

Rather, the thrust of my talk concerns our worldview, and the need to question the deeply internalised, largely unquestioned assumptions that underpin the modern Western worldview. It is concerned with just about every facet of our private and public lives: how and why citizens vote, consumers buy, governments govern, public servants serve, and business does business.

Two historic spikes

At a futures conference in Perth earlier this year, I heard Damien Broderick, the science fiction and science writer, talking about his book , The Spike, and discussed it with him. Broderick says developments in computer, gene and nano technologies will produce, some time over the next 10 to 30 years, or by 2050 at the latest, a 'spike' or technological singularity, a period of change of such speed and scale it will render the future opaque, unseeable, where things become unknowable.

It could end in human obsolescence or human transformation. It could mean, as computing power continues to obey Moore 's Law and double every year, the rapid emergence of not only intelligent machines but superintelligent, conscious, machines, which leave humanity in their evolutionary wake. Or it could result in bionically and genetically enhanced beings who are effectively immortal. (I'm quite attracted to this eventuality. The more I try, the more I realise that I am just not intelligent enough to understand what's going on and what we should do!)

Providing a counterpoint to Damien's spike is another ‘spike': this time the population spike of a plague species – us – as it grows exponentially then collapses as it overshoots the capacity of its habitat to support it. And this within about the same timeframe as the technological spike!

I recently met another Australian writer, Reg Morrison, who argues in a new book, The Spirit in the Gene , that this is the certain fate of humanity. Morrison says evolution ensures this outcome for any species that threatens to become too dominant and reduce the earth's biological diversity. His intriguing spin on us is that our genes have bequeathed us a self-destruct mechanism – or time bomb. This is a sense of spirituality - our tendency to spiritualise or mysticise our existence - with the result that we will never –cannot - behave rationally enough to achieve sustainable planetary dominance, and are predestined to suffer the fate of all plagues.

[Consumercide Comment: Disagreement to the prior ‘intriguing' statement might come from an alternative perspective, which sees it is a very naïve concept of spirituality which conveys it as absolving us of the need to be responsible with our planet (due to whatever facets of spirituality are being caricatured, such as “afterlife concerns” or “zen acceptance” for example). The opposing position might well argue that the drive to the destruction of this planet is often motivated from an agnostic human conception that there is no accountability for “evil” or “bad karma” actions that lack compassion and destroy sustainability. Altruism and compassion tends to be one of the offspring of level headed spiritualities; these should perhaps not be confused with fundamentalist dogmas that express a hatred of diversity, which should not be confused or conflated with spirituality.
Note II: there are also strongly oppositional perspectives to the Malthusian population arguments, some pertinent ones taking the form of (for e.g.) a critique of the waste society, corporate exploitation in concert with govt. corruption, and the vast inequalities of society as causative, e.g. see Susan George's work “How the Other Half dies”, or this essay or“overbobulation” on this site… ]

There is a fascinating symmetry to these ‘spikes', both the result of exponential growth – one in technological power, the other in human population – both occurring at about the same time in history. Maybe we'll see the evolution of a new level or form of intelligence and consciousness just as its progenitor – Homo sapiens – reaches its zenith, and burns out: a metaphorical spaceship jettisoning its booster rockets, which fall back towards earth and burn up, as it soars into the wide open horizons of outer space.

There are several scenarios in the human response to either or both of these imminent 'spikes', each of which has profound implications for public administration and, indeed, human civilisation:

a) surrender and abdication : the scale and speed of change is so big people will give up any hope of trying to manage or direct it. The sheer impotence of government or any other human institution in the face of such change will totally undermine our faith in already weakened institutions leading to further political disengagement and an even greater focus on individual goals, especially hedonistic ones - precipitating a period of chaotic change.

b) a fundamentalist backlash : the technological 'fundamentalism' that the spike represents will trigger a desperate response by religious or nationalist fundamentalists, to whom what the spike represents is deeply offensive, and who will use every means at hand to oppose it - including potent technologies such as biological or nuclear terrorism. A population spike could also see a fundamentalist revival, but for a different reason – this is the action of a vengeful God.

c) a new universalism : a more benign outcome is that the spikes – one or other or both, because of the global threat or challenge they pose - help to drive the emergence of a new universal culture, a sense of human solidarity and destiny, and a resurgent spirituality. Set against the momentousness of these events, all differences between us become petty, and our present priorities and pre-occupations trivial. Only the most fundamental elements of life and the human condition matter.

Linear optimists

Both spikes are highly deterministic – one technologically, the other biologically. There is a strong element of inevitability about them, which I'd challenge. I also feel, as implied in response ‘c', that spirituality – a deeply intuitive sense of relatedness or connectedness to the world and the universe in which we live – is crucial to meeting the challenge of the future, not the source of the problem, as Morrison asserts.

But the stories and our responses contain several important lessons for us: The ‘spikes' are very real possibilities; they are not events in the far distant future, but within our lifetime or that of our children; there is already evidence of all three responses in the way humanity is dealing with contemporary global social changes.

And yet – most importantly – there is no recognition of these issues and possibilities in current political debate. Government and business are dominated by linear optimists – those who believe that by continuing on our current path life will just keep getting better. Their opposite might be called linear pessimists - those who believe that life will inevitably get worse. What we need are systemic optimists - those who believe life can get better, but only if we change systemically the way we think and do things.

Is linear optimism a valid, tenable belief? This is a more manageable subject, so let's focus on that. Linear optimism is framed by the conviction that economic growth = progress, that more means better. So, John Howard, declared in a speech to a World Economic Forum Dinner in Melbourne in March 1998 that: ‘The overriding aim of our agenda is to deliver Australia an annual (economic) growth rate of over 4% on average during the decade to 2010'. The Government's strategic economic objectives were pursued not as ends in themselves, he said, but as the means for achieving more jobs, higher living standards and an effective social safety net. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister clearly set the rate of economic growth as the prime benchmark by which to judge his Government's performance.

At a Liberal Party conference in April this year, Howard said of the Government's ‘great record of (economic) reform': ‘That reform program has not been pursued because we want to get an A+ in the exam for economic rationalists. Economic reform is about satisfying human needs. Economic reform is about making people feel more secure, happier, more able to care for their families.'

This is progress as a pipeline: pump more wealth in one end and more welfare flows out the other. By this standard, Australia is doing very well. Australians are, on average and in real terms, about five times richer now than at the turn of the last century. If we maintain economic growth at over 4% a year, we will be twice as rich as we are now in about 20 years' time, and so ten times richer than we were 100 years ago - and about 40 times richer than 200 years ago.

The need to question the assumptions implicit in this model of progress is demonstrated by the trends in five indicators of Australia 's development over the past 100-150 years - per capita GDP, life expectancy, unemployment, per capita energy consumption and population. Per capita energy use, a broad measure of resource consumption and waste production, has increased about fivefold, mirroring the increase in per capita GDP. The population has also increased about fivefold, so that total economic activity and energy use are about 25 times greater now than 100 years ago.

While Australians are materially much better off than ever before, some of the improvements in well-being are less directly linked to economic growth than is widely believed. Growth was stagnant before the Second World War, but life got better for most people because public policy initiatives improved education, health, housing and working conditions and, for some of this time, wealth and income were becoming more evenly distributed. Reflecting these changes, life expectancy, which has increased by about 30 years or 60% since the 1880s, was rising steadily when per capita GDP was not. With employment, the nature of the relationship with economic growth appears to be shifting; despite relatively strong growth, unemployment in the 1990s has been at its highest level outside the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s.

The inadequacy of GDP as an index of national performance or progress, relative to the past or to other countries, has led to the development of other indicators that attempt to give a truer or more complete picture. For example, the Genuine Progress Indicator adjusts GDP for a wide range of social and environmental factors that GDP either ignores or treats inappropriately, including income distribution, unpaid housework and voluntary work, loss of natural resources, and the costs of unemployment, crime and pollution. Such ‘GDP analogues' show that trends in GDP and social well-being, once moving together, have diverged since about the mid-1970s in all Western countries for which they have been constructed, including the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.

The reasons for this divergence may vary between nations, but include: the growing costs of environmental damage and resource depletion, including greenhouse gas emissions; increasing income inequality; unsustainable foreign debt; the rising cost of unemployment and overwork; the failure to maintain capital investment; and the transfer of (unpaid) household production to the market.

Flaws in the model

Going beyond these indicator trends and relationships we can argue that the model of growth as progress is inequitable; unsustainable and is not meeting its core objective of making life better or people happier:

Equity : About 200 years ago, the average income in the richest country of the world was about three times that in the poorest; today it more than 70 times greater. There is currently, in the literature, a lot of debate about trends in global inequality. It depends, for example, on how national currencies are adjusted in making comparisons. Thus, the UN Statistical Commission has just released a paper which says that using purchasing power parity rather than exchange rates, ‘the fifth of the world's people living in the highest income countries have 60% to 65%, not 86%, of the world's income, and that the gap in per capita income between the countries with the richest fifth of the world's population and those with the poorest fifth is not 74 to 1, but 16 to 1, and that the gap is not unequivocally widening but moderately fluctuating'.

Sustainability : World Wide Fund for Nature recently released the second of its Living Planet Reports . It notes that its Living Planet Index, based on an assessment of the health of forest, freshwater, marine and coastal ecosystems, has declined by a third since 1970. Humanity's Ecological Footprint, a measure of the ecological pressure of people on the Earth, has increased by half over this period. Sometime in the 1970s, WWF says, we passed the point of living within the regenerative capacity of Earth.

Quality of life : International comparisons show a close correlation between per capita income and many indicators of quality of life, but the relationship is often non-linear: increasing income confers large benefits at low income levels, but little if any benefit at high income levels. Furthermore the causal relationship between wealth and quality of life is often surprisingly unclear.

Some of the strongest evidence for material progress is that the vast majority of people today say they are happy and satisfied with their lives, and people in rich countries tend to be happier than people in poor countries. However, one of the most surprising findings of research into what psychologists call subjective well-being (which includes life satisfaction and happiness) is the often small correlation with objective resources and conditions. One recent estimate is that external circumstances account for only about 15% of the differences in well-being between people.

Only in the poorest countries is income a good indicator of well-being. In most nations the correlation is small, with even the very rich being only slightly happier than the average person. That people in rich countries are happier than those in poor nations may be due, at least in part, to factors other than wealth, such as literacy, democracy and equality.

Another striking finding is that the proportion of people in developed nations, including Australia, who are happy or satisfied with their lives has remained stable over the past several decades that these things have been measured (about 50 years in the US), even though we have become, on average, much richer.

It appears that increased income matters to subjective well-being when it helps people meet basic needs, but beyond that the relationship becomes more complicated. There is no simple answer to what causes happiness. Instead, there is a complex interplay between genes and environment, between life events and circumstances, culture, personality, goals and various adaptation and coping strategies.

The evidence suggests that people adjust goals and expectations and use illusions and rationalisations to maintain over time a relatively stable, and positive, rating of life satisfaction. In other words, life satisfaction is held under homeostatic control, rather like blood pressure or body temperature. This does not mean that social, economic and political developments do not affect well-being, but that the relationship between the objective and subjective realms is not clear-cut and linear.

There is another way to measure people's perceptions of quality of life that maybe gets us around this homeostasis: ask them, not about their own lives, but about how they think people in general are faring. These questions yield much more negative findings. In a May 1999 poll I organised for the Australia Institute, despite the long economic boom, only 24% of Australians said ‘the overall quality of life of people in Australia, taking into account social, economic and environmental conditions and trends' was getting better; 36% said it was getting worse and 38% that it was staying about the same.

The same question was asked again in January 2000, this time by The Australian newspaper. The percentage saying life was getting better had risen, to 31%. The percentage choosing worse was almost unchanged at 34%, while that saying life was about the same fell to 34%; 1% were uncommitted. The same market research company, Newspoll, conducted both the quality of life polls, using a random telephone survey of 1200 Australians aged 18 and over in all Australian States and in both city and country areas. The results were weighted to reflect the population distribution.

In our 1999 poll, people were also asked ‘in about what decade do you think overall quality of life in Australia has been at its highest'. Only 24% said the 1990s; a similar proportion chose the 1980s and 1970s, with the ‘vote' then declining through the 1960s, 1950s, and before the 1950s. There was a good fit between how people answered the two questions: most of those who chose the 1990s as the best decade thought life was getting better; those who picked the 1980s were most likely to say it was staying the same; and most of those who chose the 1970s or earlier believed life was getting worse.

While personal quality of life measures are positively biased, those of social quality of life may be biased towards the negative - by, for example, the media's focus on bad news. Still, there is evidence the social perceptions are grounded in real changes in modern life. They appear to be fundamentally about values, priorities and goals – both personal and national – and the degree of congruence or conflict between them.

Surveys show many of us are concerned about the greed, excess and materialism that we believe drive society today, underlie many social ills, and threaten our children's future. We are yearning for a better balance in our lives, believing that when it comes to things like individual freedom and material abundance, we don't seem to ‘know where to stop' or now have ‘too much of a good thing'.

Beyond the abstract moral issues, surveys also reveal more tangible dimensions to our concerns about ‘progress' and its impact on quality of life. We feel that: we are under more stress, with less time for families and friends; families are more isolated and under more pressure; a sense of community is being lost; work has become more demanding and insecure; and the gap between rich and poor is growing. All these concerns are linked, directly or indirectly, to the ‘growth priority'.

The 1999 survey of quality of life in Australia asked people to rate the importance of several factors in improving their own personal quality of life. It found that 75% rated as very important ‘being able to spend more time with your family and friends' and 66% ‘having less stress and pressure in your life'. Only 38% rated as very important ‘having more money to buy things' and 36% feeling they were ‘doing more for the community'. The 2000 survey by The Australian newspaper framed this question in a different way, asking people if there was more or less of these factors in people's lives now compared to ten years ago. Despite the festive season, 91% said there was more stress and pressure; 68% said people had less time to spend with family and friends; 51% said there was less caring for the needs of the community; but 49% said people had more money to buy things.

In response to other questions in The Australian poll, 55% said the distribution of wealth in Australia was less fair now than 10 years ago; 83% agreed the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer; 57% said there was a greater proportion of rich people in Australia now compared to ten years ago and 70% a greater proportion of poor people; 70% said they would prefer ‘the gap between the rich and the poor to get smaller' over ‘the overall wealth of Australia to grow as fast as possible'; and 79% said Australians workers were less secure in keeping their jobs compared to ten years ago.

It seems, then, that measures of social quality of life reflect social conditions and trends that measures of personal well-being tend to mask. Our social perceptions may be distorted by media and other influences, and vary over the short term as personal circumstances change and the national mood shifts. Subjective measures are just that – subjective. However, the evidence suggests the perceptions are not distant and detached, but reflect deeply felt concerns about modern life.

Myths about growth as progress

Let me turn now to some myths or misperceptions about growth in the contemporary political and public debate about its relationship to well-being. I'll list these briefly, and focus on the third:

1) If you are against current patterns of growth, including economic globalisation, you are for failed socialist, centralised, command economies. This confuses means and ends, function and meaning, systems and worldviews - how we do something rather than why we do it. This confusion leads to the claim that whatever its faults, capitalism or neo-liberalism is the best system we have and we should stick to it until someone invents a better one.

2) Growth allows us to spend more on meeting social and environmental objectives. This is understandable: high growth, more revenue, bigger budget surpluses, more to spend on new or bigger programs. But this myth ignores the evidence that growth processes are not socially and environmentally neutral. It assumes that, at worst, we can always repair with more wealth the damage that wealth creation causes.

3) Increased income (eg as measured by increased output per hour of work) is better, ‘all other things being equal', because it increases our choices, our ‘command over goods and services'. Again, this view seems straightforward and compelling. But I don't believe all other things can ever be equal - that, to the contrary, the processes of growth inevitably and inherently tend to affect ‘all other things'.

Here are some examples. Growth, as we know it, is closely linked to cultural trends like increasing consumerism and individualism, which place the individual at the centre of a framework of values and encourage us to live for the gratification of material wants. Yet:

1) US researchers have shown that people for whom ‘extrinsic goals' such as fame, fortune and glamour are a priority in life tend to experience more anxiety and depression and lower overall well-being than people oriented towards ‘intrinsic goals' of close relationships, self-acceptance and contributing to the community. Referring to ‘a dark side of the American dream', the researchers say that the culture in some ways seems to be built on precisely what turns out to be detrimental to mental health. Similarly, Australian psychologists have found consumerist and materialist values are positively correlated with depression, anxiety and anger; materialism is also negatively correlated with life satisfaction.

2) A British researcher found in a recent cross-national study of values and crime that tolerance for a set of 'materially self-interested' attitudes – like keeping something you've found, or lying in your own interest - was higher in men, younger people, larger cities, and had increased over time. This mirrors patterns of criminal offending. These self-interested values were also found to be statistically associated with crime victimisation rates.

3) In my own research looking at the socio-economic and cultural correlates of youth suicide in OECD nations – male rates have tripled or more in several countries including Australia over the past 50 years - I found no significant correlation with a range of plausible socio-economic causes including youth unemployment, child poverty and divorce. But suicide rates were positively correlated with several measures of individualism, including personal freedom and control. Both youth suicide and individualism were also negatively correlated with older people's sense of parental duty. While the interpretation of these findings is by no means clear-cut, they may reflect a failure of Western societies – and some more than others - to provide appropriate sites or sources of social identity and attachment, and, conversely, a tendency to promote false expectations of individual freedom and autonomy.

Back in 1970, the Swedish economist Stephen Linder pointed out that as income and therefore the value of one's time increases, it becomes less and less ‘rational' to spend it on anything besides making money - or on spending it conspicuously. Citing Spender, the American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi states: ‘As is true of addiction in general, material rewards at first enrich the quality of life. Because of this we tend to conclude that more must be better. But life is rarely linear; in most cases, what is good in small quantities becomes commonplace and then harmful in larger doses.' The survey results I've discussed support this interpretation.

Beyond growth – an emerging consensus?

A new report by the World Bank, Quality of Growth , released just a month ago, stresses the importance of ‘the sources and patterns of growth to development outcomes'. The report questions why policy-makers continue ‘to rely so heavily, and often solely, on the pace of GDP growth as the measure of progress'. The report emphasises four crucial areas that complement and shape growth: improving access to education, protecting the environment, managing global risks and improving the quality of governance. The last includes making institutions less corrupt, more transparent, and accountable to ordinary people – all aspects of a civil society.

At the news conference to launch the report, a journalist from The Economist noted that if the report was saying that GDP did not cover all aspects of human welfare, this was obvious and nothing new; if was saying that there were circumstances where growth in GDP should be sacrificed for other things, then this was radical. Both the World Bank's chief economist, Nick Stern, and vice president and lead author of the report, Vinod Thomas, said that, in short, yes, this (the latter) was what the report was arguing. Thomas says that: ‘Just as the quality of people's diet, and not just the quantity of food they eat, influences their health and life expectancy, the way in which growth is generated and distributed has profound implications for people and their quality of life'.

In essence, then, a fundamental problem with growth, as it is currently measured and derived, is that it is failing in its core objective of making life better and people happier, at least in nations that are already wealthy. On the contrary, ‘good' economic numbers are being met with persistent public disquiet. This should not be interpreted as an attack on economic and technological development as such, but as a critique of the ends towards which it is being directed, and the manner in which it is being pursued.

A key issue here is the narrow focus on the rate of growth, rather than its content. At present, government policies give priority to the rate, but leave the content largely to the market and consumer choice. Most economic growth is derived from increased personal consumption, despite the evidence of its personal, social and environmental costs. We need, individually and collectively, to be more discerning about what economic activities we encourage and discourage. While such suggestions are often dismissed as ‘social engineering', this criticism ignores the extent to which our lifestyle is already being ‘engineered', through marketing, advertising and the mass media, to meet the requirements of the economy.

These issues need to be incorporated into a new weltanschauung, a new view of the world and our place in it, a new framework of ideas within which to make choices and decisions, personally and politically, as citizens and consumers, parents and professionals. My sense is that if we removed growth – becoming ever richer, regardless of where and how - as the centrepiece of our worldview, things would fall into place, the tensions would be resolved, a sense of coherence and balance would be restored.

This sounds much simpler than it is. There is a huge social inertia that resists this change. As I said, worldviews tend to be ‘transparent' or ‘invisible' to those who hold them because of the deeply internalised assumptions on which they are based. And if individuals find change difficult, institutions find it even harder, running along grooves cut deep by past ways of doing things.

Both the necessity and ability to change become clearer if we look at other times of social upheaval. The great social and political movements of the 19 th century shattered many assumptions of what was ‘normal' at that time: recurrent epidemics of typhus and cholera, child labour, the buying and selling of human life, the appalling working conditions in ‘dark, Satanic mills'. For much of the 20 th century some GDP growth was traded off for a shorter working week and a shorter working life; higher quality of life meant lower growth.

In creating scenarios of the future, we are taught to express key variables as dichotomies or polarities, and to construct scenarios around these. I'd like to mention two such contrasting scenarios based on inner- and outer-oriented values, meanings and satisfactions: ‘cheap thrills' and ‘inner harmony'. They occurred to me when, on a recent family holiday to Queensland, we spent a day at Dreamworld and, about a week later, walked along a bush road one day to visit Chenrezig, a Buddhist retreat in the hills inland from the Sunshine Coast. (They also reflect, incidentally, two of the three responses - ‘a' and ‘c' - to the historical spikes I described at the beginning of the paper.)

Bear in mind that scenarios are extremes, or ‘pure' expressions of plausible realities - I'm not suggesting we will all either live our lives in theme parks, or become Buddhist monks. Dreamworld – like all theme and amusement parks, casinos etc - is a good metaphor for the current pre-occupations of modern Western societies: the quest for more and new experiences that offer pleasure, fun, excitement. Chenrezig, with its signs requesting no drugs and sex, is about something entirely different: developing a whole new (from a modern Western perspective) awareness of ourselves and our relationship with nature.

‘Cheap thrills' and ‘inner harmony' reflect growing and conflicting trends, an increasing tension between our professed values – a desire for simpler, less materialistic, less fraught lives – and our lived lifestyle – one encouraged, even imposed, by our consumer economy and culture. ‘Cheap thrills' does nothing to address the issues I've discussed. In fact, its appeal lies in allowing us to turn away from these issues, in celebrating the power of technology to distract and amuse. As Woody Allen once said, ‘don't under-estimate the power of distraction to keep our minds off the truth of our situation'. ‘Inner harmony', on the other hand, reflects an emerging global consciousness, environmental sensitivity and spiritual awareness – a transformation of the dominant ethos of industrialised nations in recent centuries.

Conclusion

This might all seem a very long way from the issues most of you grapple with: politics, policies, programs, budgets, etc. But public administration should ultimately be about trying to make life better, in the broadest sense, taking account of both current realities and future probabilities. Ultimately, how we perceive our challenges, and how we respond to them, depends on our worldview: how we see the world and our place in it, and so how and for what we should live. The issues I have raised should inform the reasons behind what you do, subtly but deeply.

My paper has highlighted the role of indicators in this whole process. And here, there is a lot already happening, with growing interest and activity at all levels of government in developing a broader array of measures or indicators of quality of life that better reflect community perceptions, aspirations and priorities. These are clearly changing. The tracking of these changes needs to be made more formal or systematic. Measures are important to policy because policies are intended to influence the measures. Bad indicators result in bad policies.

Local governments are probably leading the push to establish sets of sustainability or quality of life indicators. Mike Salvaris, a leading researcher in this area, noted in a paper to a conference on social indicators for local communities in Sydney in May 2000 that the critical lesson from US projects was that ‘the process is the product'. Successful projects should aim to create lasting changes in values and capacities, in the community and in government agencies. States are also moving to report performance across a wider policy front. And at the national level, the Australian Bureau of Statistics is working on an experimental publication , Measuring Australia 's Progress , which will report on national performance according to about 15 headline indicators and a range of background indicators.

Indicators development is part of the task of opening up the debate and discussion about public administration to address questions about the implications of shifting our policy focus from ‘going for growth' to ‘going beyond growth'. Should it be done? Can it be done? How can it done? To what extent can public policy lead this process? What cultural, institutional or other changes would be involved?

These are crucial questions for the IPAA and its members.

Richard Eckersley is at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia . He can be contacted at NCEPH, ANU, ACT 0200; ph 02 6249 0681; fax 02 6249 0740; email richard.eckersley@anu.edu.au .

Further reading (which includes full references):

Eckersley, R. (in press). The mixed blessings of progress: Diminishing returns in the pursuit of happiness. Journal of Happiness Studies .

Eckersley, R. 2000. The state and fate of nations: Implications of subjective measures of personal and social quality of life. Social Indicators Research 52, pp. 3-27.

Eckersley, R. 1999. Quality of life in Australia : An analysis of public perceptions. The Australia Institute, discussion paper no. 23, September, Canberra .

Eckersley, R. 1998. Perspectives on progress: Economic growth, quality of life and ecological sustainability. In Eckersley, R. (Ed), Measuring Progress: Is life getting better? CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood , Victoria .