Can Asia Let Go of American Consumerism?

Call it a Western poison pill.

In recent years, many Asian countries have bought into our culture of consumption. In fact these days, many of them — eager to break out of the pack and play on the same economic field as wealthier Western countries — have become what Asia Society in New York president Vishakha Desai calls “GDP junkies.”

There's no doubt that Asia's all-out obsession with economic growth has brought it American-style luxuries. Unfortunately, it has also brought American-style ecological disasters, like China's recent Dalian oil spill and the May collision of two oil tankers in the Singapore Strait.

While nowhere near as large as the BP spill (for now, at least), these accidents have caused some Asian soul-searching. At this point, these countries are at a crossroads. As Shanghai economist Andy Xie puts it, it isn't realistic for 1.3 billion Chinese people to hope to live like Americans.

Nobel laureates like Anil Markandya and Joseph E. Stiglitz have been telling the world for some time that it's foolish to try to tell how well a country is doing by relying solely on its GDP. Markandya, for example, has an amazing podcast in which he explains some of the other areas he measures, including a country's sustainability, Happy Life Years, Healthy Life Years, Intangible Capital (good governance, the rule of law, education), Social Capital (a nation's network of relations and institutions that allow it to function) and Genuine Savings (gross savings adjusted to reflect depletion of natural resources and pollution).

But for Asian economists like Bhanoji Rao, visiting professor at Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, even "going green" isn't enough to compensate for the continent's current pace of pell-mell development.

“There needs to be an internal debate within the developing countries," Rao says, "about what is the path of development we want to have.” According to the Times, some economists are even saying (economists!) that the answers may lie in Asia’s religious traditions, such as Shintoism, Taoism, Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Many of these emphasize harmony with nature and self-denial.

I, however, have my doubts. I once had the pleasure of living and working for a year in a fairly remote northern Japanese town. One night, I stayed at a Buddhist temple as the guest of a young monk named Keno. My friend Keno was the perfect illustration of the way many Japanese manage to identify with Shintoism and Buddhism, while still maintaining an extremely materialistic lifestyle: He was a monk, and the son of a monk and performed Buddhist rites for members of his community. But he wore expensive jeans and expensive leather jackets, and buzzed around town on an expensive, imported Harley Davidson motorcycle.

On the other hand, looking for new and different ways to measure our well-being — as absurd as some proposed measures may seem — can only give us a clearer picture of the areas in which we could improve. And if economists start looking for answers in religious texts that emphasize respect for creation and the dangers of materialism, is that really a bad thing?

(For more, check out Ben's coverage over on our Environmental blog.)

Photo Credit: Maven@China