Tag: lorenzo fioramonti

Categories
Wellbeing Economies: Concept

Online-Event: Maja Göpel and Lorenzo Fioramonti

On Monday, the 30th of November 2020 at 7 pm (CET), German Professor and ‘transformational thinker’ Maja Göpel will meet with Lorenzo Fioramonti (one of the two main protagonists of our film) in a live debate, streamed online. The title for the evening:

WELLBEING
How can we recreate our societies and
thereby ensure wellbeing and quality of life?

The event is organised by Arts & Nature Social Club, in collaboration with the German Chapter of the Club of Rome.

Even though we are already deep in the editing process, we will attend and film the event — to capture what will surely be an inspiring and inspired discussion about how to make our societies future-proof.

For those who want to join, here is the YouTube live link for the evening. Musical support will be provided by Frida Gold.

Categories
Behind the Scenes OECD South Korea On the Road

2019: A Breakthrough Year for Our Film Project.

The development of this film project in 2019 was rather remarkable.

Our stories and protagonists took to the global stage!

Originally, we thought the final chapter in our story about the Wellbeing Economy Governments was going to be the big OECD conference in South Korea where the initiative was officially launched and publicly announced for the first time. But that event felt somewhat anti-climactic: It was a so-called “breakfast session” — very early in the morning, in a small room, with hardly anyone attending. And at the time, we asked ourselves: This is supposed to be the big breakthrough?

It seemed a little like the project had failed as it was succeeding.

But it turns out: A small launch can still lead to a big change. In the following months, all kinds of little things were happening in the three WEGo countries, and also between them. And then, another few weeks later, the big news broke that Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, was announcing and explaining the WEGo initiative from the TED stage. To this day, her talk has been watched over 1.7 million times — and that does look a lot more like the big event that we would have hoped for. And then towards the end of the year, Icelandic prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir gave a speech about the initiative in London, which got the BBC interested, and which finally even led to a brief radio interview I gave to the BBC about the WEGo initiative.

Lorenzo’s story also took an unexpected turn around the middle of the year — he was promoted from Vice Minister to Minister of Education in the surprisingly formed new PD/5-Star government. In this role, he made waves in Italy, he got plenty of pressure from many sides, his policies made him unpopular with many people — as he is proposing uncomfortable solutions to really transform the Italian society for the future, while he also got international headlines for his push to have Italian schoolchildren taught about sustainable living and the climate in all classes starting with the coming academic year.

All this culminated in him being invited to the Climate Conference in Madrid and to an audience with the Pope. (We were there with the camera for the former, but not for the latter.) And now, just before the end of the year he resigned from his job as minister. Which came as no surprise to us — on the contrary. But the background to his resignation doesn’t belong here, it’ll be in our film.

The key thing for us is that we were very lucky — which is a requirement for any documentary film project: When we met Lorenzo, he was not yet a member of the Italian parliament, and then he transformed into an internationally respected politician in under two years. When he resigned, the news was reported around the world. How often does the world take an interest in an Italian Minister of Education who has been in office for only a few weeks?

We found powerful partners!

Around the middle of the year we met a director and producer who is very well established in the German film industry and who quickly warmed to our project. In November we signed an agreement according to which we will finish and market the film together with his company. For the development of our film, the second half of the year was characterized by getting to know and discussing the film project with our new partners. In our exchanges we thought and learned a lot about how our film can work, how we should structure it and what the focus should be. This was enormously helpful for our understanding of what kind of film we are making. But it also took time, of course.

So … we are looking very much forward to an eventful year 2020 in which we will launch into the next phase of the production. Carving out a compelling story from all the material that we have collected. Happy New Year everyone, and wish us luck!

Categories
Behind the Scenes climate change

Global Lorenzo.

When we first started thinking about this film in early 2018, Lorenzo Fioramonti was a professor for Political Economy in South Africa, who had given up his job, in order to get involved in Italian politics. He knew very little about the inside of politics, but the “5 Star Movement” had invited him to join their ranks — to become a member of parliament and, potentially, a Minister in the next Italian government. What happened next is hard to summarise. And our film will need to do that job.

What matters to us right now is that you can never know, in documentary film-making, what happens to your protagonists. Sometimes nothing happens at all, to the extent that you realise that you may not even have a film.

And sometimes you get lucky and your protagonist does things that make a difference, that effect change, that have an impact.

Last week, we witnessed Lorenzo making global impact. His plan to introduce climate change education in Italy as a mandatory subject for school children created ripples around the world – after he spoke to Reuters about this plan (who also called him the “Anti-Salvini” in their article), media outlets everywhere picked it up, from Australia to the Netherlands. The New York Times ran a longer article about him and his ideas. CNN reached out. He gave radio interviews to stations in various parts of the world. A German paper praised Lorenzo as a role model for German politicians.

Over the weekend, Lorenzo told us that he got invitations to speak at conferences, he spoke with other ministers in the EU who approached him and want to do something similar in their countries, he even got an invitation to meet the Pope.

When I first heard about Lorenzo and his plan to bring post-GDP thinking to a G7 country like Italy, I thought “this sounds like a very interesting project. And a very interesting guy.” Turns out that has been a major understatement – on both accounts.

And today, we sure are glad to be part of this ride.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Introduction

How an Advertising Man Became a Post-Growth Advocate.

I come from the dark side.

Between 1994 and 1999, I studied at two business schools. Then I worked in advertising and marketing from 1999 until 2016 — for 17 years. First I was an employee in a couple of advertising agencies. Then I got a doctorate in Marketing and helped build our own specialised agency, with a group of friends and colleagues. The one over-riding goal of everything was always:

Growth.

Advertisers may cite many reasons why they work with advertising and marketing agencies, but at the end of the day, they all want the same thing: to grow their market share, their profits, their sales.

And make no mistake: All advertising agencies ever want for themselves is growth, too. More clients. Bigger staff. More campaigns. More money.

Nobody who works in advertising ever questions any of this. There is no time. There is always the next deadline. The next flight to the meeting. The next crazy client request. The next ego emergency. Besides, why question the hand that feeds you? Growth pays for advertising. Then advertising begets more growth. Its a virtuously vicious circle.

I myself had no idea that something might be wrong. And when the news were reporting another year of GDP growth, it was the kind of good news I was happy to hear — I’d grown up in cold war “Economic Miracle” Germany, after all.

And yet, about a dozen years into my career it dawned on me that I could not, would not, should not spend the rest of my days trying to sell more of this shampoo or that floor cleaner. That that was simply not a worthwhile pursuit for a life well lived.

But I couldn’t leave right away, I had to stick it out for another four years, we had to keep growing our business so we could sell our company. I was fairly lucky with my contract and my role in the company — once the deal was done, I could quietly slip out the back door. The new owners hardly even realised that I was no longer there.

It was March 2016. I was in Munich.

I got an electric car — I thought that would be my contribution to protecting the climate. I went to Barcelona for a month, to spend time with friends. Then I moved back to Berlin. Brexit happened. It made me sad. I was living in a small apartment on Urbanstraße in Kreuzberg that I had rented from a friend. I was experimenting with a bit of freedom and with my underused creativity. In other news, the German right-wing party “AfD” was on the rise. I didn’t know what to do about it. Should I be more political? My father had been in politics.

I didn’t have a family of my own (I still don’t), I was alone. I made a hand-drawn animated short film. I reconnected with old friends. I thought about new professions I could take on. I felt a bit lonely. Autumn was coming. But overall, I was trusting that things would somehow be fine.

Then, Donald Trump got elected.

Many were shocked by the news, but ultimately this political earthquake did not leave much of an impact in the daily lives of many people in most European countries. Modern capitalism keeps us simply too busy to care: A presentation is due for the boss. There is the problems with the co-worker at the office. The neighbour just bought a new large SUV. Should we get one, too? One of the children is ill. Let’s just pray that the insurance will cover it. Also, the older one needs a new phone. The car has to go to the garage. A big SUV might feel safer, right? Oh my god, did we remember to book the flights for the holidays? Plus, can we even afford to put Ma in that retirement home? Oh man, health insurance rates went up again.

And so on. And then, at the dinner table, you might find a short moment, you’re looking at one another, saying: “Oh man, Trump is the American President now, that’s something else, isn’t it?” You shake your heads in disbelief, and then it’s back to the daily race.

Well, me … I had none of that.
I was by myself, no one needed me.
I was running nowhere.
No one waited for me.
I had no place to go, no job to do.
Instead, I was looking at the wall in that small apartment — and Trump was always there.

Soon I realised: This wasn’t about a complete catastrophe of a US President. It was about a very different question: What is going on in this world that the United States of America elect someone as horrific as him as “the leader of the free world”.

Where and when had things gone so badly wrong? What had I missed?

2017 became my fact-finding year. I read books and newspapers. I spoke with people. I launched a blog and wrote regularly about my experiences and questions. Soon, the climate crisis rose to the top of my agenda: jointly with my friend Kai Schächtele, I developed a show format called vollehalle — it talks about the climate emergency and the role of us all in it, in a constructive and inspiring manner. We also interviewed Tim Jackson for it. A giant among those who are imagining a better economy. Meeting Tim was my first brush with a new way of thinking about the system I had taken for granted.

And another thing happened to me in 2017: inspired by a small article in the German newspaper “taz”, I discovered the “Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik” — the German arm of the “Rethinking Economics” student movement. Thanks in part to our meeting with Tim Jackson, and also to David Graeber’s book “Debt” and Wolfgang Streeck’s “Gekaufte Zeit” (English title: “Buying Time“), it was dawning on me that the way we are running and thinking about our economies is probably a big part of the problem. But so far, I hadn’t met anybody who had useful answers. So, I applied to attend the Netzwerk’s first Summer Academy, which took place at the beginning of August 2017 in the small village Neudietendorf outside Erfurt. And I got accepted.

That week in August of 2017 changed my life.

Never before had I seen 90 people — most of them millennial students — so heavily engaged in deep, thoughtful, intellectually curious and generous debate about the major issues of our time. They weren’t shouting their written-in-stone political beliefs or adherence to some political party at one another. Instead, these (mostly) twenty-somethings were soft-spoken and genuinely curious about each other’s thoughts, about how to advance their own thinking, in order to get to new solutions. And they were going at it non-stop, from 8 am at the breakfast table until 2 am at night, as they were having their nightcap beers in the courtyard.

It dawned on me: If there is hope for our world, it’s with critical economics thinkers like these students — with their radically open eyes and their real questions and their genuine curiosity.

And there was something else that I realised: Nobody knows this. Nobody outside these circles knows that the ideas that will solve many of our most dire problems may already exist. And they lie in truly rethinking our economy. In other words, nobody outside these circles seemed to realise that economics was the most important and most exciting subject of our time, if tackled in the right way. I understood that we needed to vehemently start telling these stories and bring this thinking to a wider world. The stories that I was hearing here, the thinking that was going on here, it needed to be shouted off rooftops!

And that was just the informal part of the week.

The biggest part of the official agenda were the workshops. The one I had signed up for was called “Prosperity Economics”, led by Katherine Trebeck and Himanshu Shekhar. At the time, Katherine was a researcher at Oxfam in Scotland. She explained to us how GDP was at best an imperfect measure of progress and how an alternative take on “prosperity” would look at the real issues. She also talked about the challenges of measuring prosperity holistically, in a way that deals with how people’s lives — and the lives of all other living beings on this earth, too! — are really going.

19-11-03_katherine_costarica

And then she told us about a plan she had, jointly with an Italian professor named Lorenzo Fioramonti who was teaching Political Economics in South Africa. They wanted to build a “counter-G7”: A new summit that would bring countries together who tell the world: “Enough is enough, let’s show the world how to think differently about the economy — in a way that can actually save mankind and this planet.”

They wanted to call it the “WE7”: the Wellbeing Economies 7.

What a story!

Six months later, I got a call from Gustav Theile. He’d been one of the Summer Academy organisers, now he was Katherine’s intern in Glasgow. He told me two things: One, the summit was happening! With Scotland, Costa Rica and Slovenia as the first members, getting together in Slovenia — there, they would jointly sign the Ljubiljana Declaration. And two, Lorenzo had left the project: He was returning to his native Italy, in order to run for office in the Italian election — he wanted to bring his post-GDP thinking into a new Italian Government.

I could not contain my excitement. So I turned to my friend Nick Scholey — a media creation one-man powerhouse, musician, camera operator, editor, all around creative force — and said, “Man, we gotta start making a documentary about this. Let’s go to Scotland and to Rome, let’s start filming these people. What they are doing is too important for the world to miss.”

We were now on a mission. And we got support from Kim Münster, a film producer.

Today, one and a half years later, we have hours and hours of footage. Of Lorenzo’s political battles in that strange Five-Star-Lega government, which eventually fell apart — he’s now actually become the Minister for Education, in the brand new Italian Government. And of Katherine travelling around the world, helping save the Wellbeing Economies government project, after the summit in Ljubiljana got cancelled at the last minute. But Katherine and the amazing folks inside the Scottish Government kept at it. And so, a few weeks ago, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, gave a TED Talk about how Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand had joined forces as the Wellbeing Economy Governments!

I am a very different person from the one I was in early 2016. I really hope that I will look back one day and say:

I made my way from the dark side to the light. And it wasn’t too late.

=======

This text was originally published a few weeks ago as a guest-piece on the Degrowth.info blog. We are cross-posting it here because it tells the background story of this film project.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Gross Domestic Product OECD South Korea On the Road Wellbeing Economies: Concept

Film: Thoughts from the OECD Forum in South Korea.

In November our documentary film took us to Incheon in South Korea for the OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy. Here’s a little video from the trip!

Categories
Behind the Scenes Introduction On the Road

Reviewing 2018: An Incredible Ride.

The year is drawing to a close — here’s a look back on what has happened in our project so far. 2018 has been an incredible ride for us, in many respects.

It all started back in February, when we found out that two things were going to happen. One, a group of government representatives from Scotland, Costa Rica and Slovenia were going to gather in Ljubiljana in March, to say openly to the world that they want to pursue a different type of politics in economics, an approach that respects the needs of people and planet. At the same time, we heard that one of the people working on making this government summit happen, Lorenzo Fioramonti (a fierce critic of the GDP and of the way most economic policies are currently being designed), was going to leave academia and join the world of Italian politics, and run for office with the 5 Star Movement. Since the 5 Stars were the strongest contender in the Italian election, this was very interesting news — there was the potential that a man who had written books about how bad a measure the GDP is could become a minister in a new Italian Government!

So we decided that we had to start filming this story, no matter what — a story about people who want to move our world away from its endless “growth obsession”. So we went on our first trip: In the middle of February, we drove up to Scotland, to meet with Katherine Trebeck and other people at Oxfam, to find out what that government summit was going to be about. Katherine had worked on this thing from within the Scottish Oxfam offices, where she’d been a researcher.

On the way to Scotland, on the Le Shuttle train under the Channel.
Nick waiting at Oxfam Scotland’s offices.
Glasgow.
Nick getting a good shot of Adam Smith.
Back onto Le Shuttle.

A few days after returning from this one, we were already off on our second trip — down to Italy. And this time we went fully electric. We met with Lorenzo in Brescia where he had to give a campaign talk, and then we drove him down to Rome, to be able to follow him during this last week of campaigning before the election on March 4th. Lorenzo’s family and his home were still in South Africa where he had been living for many years. As he was launching his career in Italian politics, he turned his parents’ house — which has lots of space — into his new temp home as well.

The week we spent together in Rome was remarkable. We were traveling around the city non stop, went on lots of campaign appointments, saw plenty behind the scenes stuff in the “5 Star Campaign”, we went to their secret campaign headquarters in the center of Rome, and felt the vibe behind and on the stage at the big campaign rallies and events. It felt a little bit like being inside a real-world “House of Cards”.

Very unusual — lots of snow in Rome when we arrived. This is Lorenzo’s parents’ garden.
Nick filming Lorenzo and parents in their kitchen.
At campaign headquarters — Lorenzo in the center, in the foreground Davide Casaleggio, of the 5 Stars.
Luigi di Maio, prepping a campaign rally.
The economics team for the 5 Stars shadow cabinet.
Lorenzo giving an interview in the streets of Rome. On the left, Nick filming Lorenzo being flimed.
Lorenzo and 5 Stars founder Beppe Grillo.
The final 5 Star campaign rally.
Charging the car on the way back.

In early May, it had turned out that the summit in Slovenia was not going to take place — so we had to go back to Glasgow and speak with the team there again — about what was going to happen next. Timing was tight, and we had to somehow fit the trip in. We couldn’t drive — it takes four days driving time alone to go up there and back — so we flew this time around. But we compensated for our CO2 emissions with Atmosfair — like we do with every flight which we cannot avoid.

In theory, a documentary filmmaker only starts rolling his camera after s/he has thoroughly investigated and written down what the story is meant to be, exactly, that s/he wants to tell in the film. Based on this description, you go out into the world, and try to collect your story — or the version of it that reality will present you with. It’s obvious that life will never turn out the way you intend it in your head. But it’s still incredibly helpful to have that idea — otherwise you don’t know what you are shooting for.

It didn’t quite happen that way in our case. Instead, we had been obliged to start rolling the cameras, following these two people — Katherine and Lorenzo — to document what they were trying to do, to help us move to a post-GDP world. But what does that mean in terms of the story that we’re telling? How do we structure it, how do we intend to keep viewers engaged in a topic that may seem very technical to many? We had lots and lots of conversations with lots and lots of people, and particularly with Kim Münster, an experienced film director and producer, who agreed to produce our film and help us structure the whole thing.

In April, we returned to Rome for our second trip there. On the way down, we stopped over in Venice, to meet with and interview Petra Reski. She’s a German writer, but she has been living in Italy (closely following the “5 Star Movement”) for decades now, and she gave us a very helpful perspective on what this movement means for Italy. Then we journeyed on to Rome. Lorenzo had won his seat in the Italian election, and we spent another five days with him around town — while the party was trying to form the new Italian government. The negotiations with the “League” had failed, and now the 5 Stars were trying to figure out how they could potentially form a government with the “Partito Democratico”. And Lorenzo was trying to prepare for his new role, potentially as the Minister for Industrial Development in the new government.

Heading down south, towards the Alps.
On the road again.
Venice.
Charging the car in Arezzo at the Supercharger.
Lorenzo with Pasquale Tridico at a rally celebrating the end of World War 2.
We had the most expensive cappuccino ever at this place. I believe they charged me 7.50 EUR. I felt like an idiot.
Setting up for another long interview with Lorenzo in the garden.
Having a peek at the discussions between party leadership and the 5 Star parlamentarians, about negotiating with the PD.
Waiting for the bus after a long day.
Returning home.

On May 7th, we had the chance to meet up with Tim Jackson in Berlin. He’s a well-known professor, researcher, author and speaker, working on the post-growth agenda. I’d met him once before, in 2017, as we were preparing our climate change show “vollehalle”. It was fun to meet him again in Berlin. He gave a speech in the very impressive hall of the Evangelische Akademie Berlin — check out the floor lights in the pictures below — and we were allowed to film that speech.

Setting up to film.
Tim Jackson presenting.

And then at the end of May, we returned to Scotland. This time with the Tesla, again getting on the Le Shuttle train under the Channel. I really love that train! The trip first took us to Tim Jackson’s university in Surrey, where we had the chance to do a sit-down with him, and interview him for about an hour.

Then we journeyed on to Glasgow and then Edinburgh, for a very particular reason: on May 23rd, the Task Force meeting for the Wellbeing Economy Governments — the group that was originally supposed to meet officially in Slovenia in March — was happening at a hotel in Edinburgh. The idea was to plan the next potential official public meeting, which could now be in South Korea at an OECD conference, at the end of November. So there were representatives from the Scottish, Costa Rican and Slovenian governments, plus people from Oxfam and a couple of universities, getting together to hash out how they could develop their group until that conference. And we were in the room, with the cameras rolling! It was very exciting!

On Le Shuttle.
With Tim Jackson in Surrey.
The Task Force meeting in Edinburgh.
Returning home.

In Edinburgh, Katherine also told us that she was going to go to Costa Rica herself, to speak at a conference, and to (potentially) meet the Costa Rican president, and tell him about this project, and get him excited about it. It was clear — we had to go, too! So we booked two seats on the same flight that she was going to be on (again, we compensated for our CO2 emissions with Atmosfair), to travel with her to Costa Rica, only two weeks later!

But just before that, I had the hunch that I had to go back down to Italy. The forming of the government there had become this never-ending thriller — negotiations with the PD had been cancelled only days after our last trip there, because of a very controversial TV appearance of the former leader of the PD, and so the 5 Stars turned back around to negotiate once again with the right-wing “Lega”. When they finally tried to propose a government together, the Italian President Mattarella refused to sign them into office, for fear of a European backlash against the new minister of economics, a Euro critic. It was apparently all coming to a blow, with the 5 Stars organising a rally to demonstrate against the President, when at the last minute a compromise was found, and the goverment was sworn in. And so the demonstration against the President turned into one to celebrate the first time the 5 Stars were in an Italian Government. Since I only had two days, there was no way to drive down again, so I went on yet another flight, and spent two days in Rome, and got a few great shots and impressions of the vibe both within the 5 Stars, and also from Lorenzo’s point of view, who — at that stage — seemed nowhere near becoming part of the new government, despite the fact that he had been quite close to Luigi di Maio and the party leadership during the election campaign.

18-12-18_rome-5stars-governo

And then, only three days later, we went to Costa Rica. It was a great experience — we met incredibly interesting people, the conference called Omina (about sustainable fashion) was inspiring, and even though Katherine did not manage to meet the President (he had to cancel his appearance at the conference), she did meet the First Lady, and we were in the room with them. We returned to Berlin on June 11th, after being away only six days — it had felt much longer because it had been so intense.

Katherine visibly happy about “her own” banner.
Pablo, Alvaro, and Katherine — the Wellbeing Economy force.
Meeting the First Lady (on the right).
Omina vibe.
Alvaro giving his speech at Omina.
Seeing nature in Costa Rica.
On a hike with new friends.

The next trip took us back to Rome, we left Berlin on July 1st. This time, we wanted to be there when Lorenzo brought his whole family — his wife and the two kids — back from South Africa. We documented their arrival at Fiumicino Airport. But even more importantly, we had the chance to witness Lorenzo arriving at his new office — he eventually did end up in the government, he had been named Vice Minister in the Ministry of Education and Research (“MIUR”), and we were there to see his first days on the new job.

heading south, past the symbols of a new world of energy.
The MIUR — the Italian Ministry for Education and Research.
Nick getting shots from across the street from the MIUR.
Near Stazione Centrale in Rome.
The Colosseum.
Sunset over Rome.
Traveling back, charging stop in the Swiss Alps.

In mid August, we returned to Scotland once again — this time because Katherine was coming back from her summer holidays, and we wanted to be present (and film) as she was getting an update about the state of things with the Wellbeing Economy Governments from the Scottish government team.

View of Edinburgh.
Inviting.
Nick, cat photographer.

Which takes us straight to our last Italian journey so far for the film, in early September — and this one was by far the most tiring because we went to so many different places. Our first stop was Geneva where we interviewed Alvaro Cedeno (he’s in the pictures from the Costa Rica trip — but he lives and works in Geneva). From there, we traveled to Milan, where we met up briefly with Katherine (!) who happened to be there that night, and then we shot an interview and other material with a start-up company that we may include in our film.

From there, we traveled on to Genua where the motorway bridge had crumbled a few weeks earlier, and we needed to get shots of that. And from there, we traveled on to Rome, where we spent some more time with Lorenzo — we drove him to a couple of TV studios, for example, where he was giving interviews. And finally, we went with him back up north, to Tuscany, where he had meetings in Pisa and Lucca. It was a super intense trip, but again well worth it.

Preparing the interview with Alvaro.
Genua.
Sometimes hotels have chargers specifically for Teslas — very convenient.
Again the Ministry, but a different building this time.
Getting a nice shot for our film.
Nick filming Lorenzo at the TV station.
Rome skyline.
Lorenzo giving a speech in Lucca.

In late September and early October, we started a little sub-project within our film project — this blog right here, and the social media accounts that we’re using, to publish behind-the-scenes stuff around making this film.

18-12-19_01_welcome-video

Finally, in the middle of November, our most intense traveling and shooting period began. Within a very short time frame, we first went on our latest road trip back up to Scotland, met with Lorenzo in Berlin and then traveled to South Korea.

Katherine’s husband Mark agreed to be interviewed by us — which was really nice. And we joined one of his Dramble Tours: he himself does these guided tours of Glasgow that include stops in six carefully selected pubs where you get to sample six different carefully selected Scotch whiskys. We had fun. (I was just a bit cold, to tell the honest truth, my jacket wasn’t warm enough …)

On the road again.
Rowan Mataram, at Platform London.
The street outside Nick’s parents’ house.
Edinburgh.
Meeting Katherine and Una before the session with the Scottish government team.
St. Andrew’s, the government building.
Glasgow.
Aberlour, whisky #4 on the Dramble Tour.
On the way back, we actually got into a traffic jam in France that had been organised by the yellow jackets, at the very initial stage of that movement.
Symbol of hope, as we were returning home.

Only two days after our return, Lorenzo came to Berlin! Together with his assistant Nicoletta they came for a few meetings. That made life easy for us — no need to travel to Italy to film our Italian protagonist!

Nick filming Lorenzo inside the Bundestag (Reichstag building).
Coffee break.
Lorenzo meeting with Christoph Gran (left) and Jonathan Barth (right), of the ZOE Institute.

And finally, our last trip this year: to South Korea. The Wellbeing Economy Governments initiative (“WEGo”, here is the website) was going to be launched at a big OECD conference on measurement and statistics there, so the Scottish Government team, teams from other governments, and Katherine were going to be there. And Lorenzo was coming as well. So we had to go, too, and see what it was going to be like, to see that initiative see the light of day. Just like in South Korea, we spent a good deal of time with Katherine, and even managed to fit in a last day of “light tourism” in the old part of Incheon — the city where the whole thing was taking place.

(I already posted a fairly extensive blog post about what we learned at the conference.)

Our two main protagonists, together for the first time.
The big ballroom where all the main sessions took place.
Ready to doc!
The WEGo booth, manned by Michael Cairns (foreground).
Katherine moderating a panel on the big stage.
Dessert.
Nick has to do a nightly backup session. The computer was too slow to get it all done before we went to bed …
The WEGo have launched!
Our main rig for the conference.
Incheon skyline on our last day.

So … that was the summary of what we’ve been up to this year, making this film. (Not to mention other projects that we have worked on.) This does not include, of course, a whole bunch of little things that we were working on here at the office: editing work for funding applications, the countless revisions and reworkings of our various (German and English) treatments and other documents.

2019 will probably begin for the film in the second half of January, with yet another trip to Scotland. We hope to get done with the main bulk of shooting by March — in other words, more or less exactly a year after we started. And after that, we need to sit down and start to work out how to actually make this film — sift through all the material, edit it, and do all the prost production. There is a lot of work ahead of us, and it will be, without a doubt, another very interesting year.

We’ll hope to post another video, about the trip to South Korea, towards the end of this week — so stay tuned! And other than that, have a Merry Christmas Season, and all the best for 2019!

Categories
OECD South Korea

What We Learned In South Korea: the Wellbeing Agenda Is Making (Slow) Progress.

The last week was intense. We spent three days at the OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy in South Korea. The title of the conference: “The Future of Well-Being” — and that makes it quite topical for our film, of course. And even more specifically: The “WEGo” initiative — which stands for Wellbeing Economy Governments — was publically launched there, and it is one of the key projects that our film is about.

Here are a couple of tweets that document the launch — Gary Gillespie, Chief Economist for the Scottish Government, posted this after the announcement:

And we ourselves summarised the launch as follows:

As we have explained in our initial video on this blog, we are making a film about people who want to help move our world towards a new and different thinking about the economy. That sounds a bit technical, but it concerns every person on this planet — and the rest of the living world, too. If we cannot manage to find another way to run our economies, we will crash and burn our world. And the governments that got together here and launched the WEGo project — Scotland, New Zealand, Iceland — are among the leading governments worldwide in this area.

What makes them different from the rest?

One part of the OECD (an organisation founded to coordinate the economic collaboration among some of the richest countries in the world) is all about numbers. If you want to run an economy, you need numbers. The key number that almost all governments are most interested in is GDP growth. (We talked about what that means in our video about the GDP.) But there are more: the unemployment rate. The exchange rate. The stock market index.

These are the “traditional” measures that economists have been using for decades now, in order to figure out if a country is doing well or not. These numbers helped us a lot to rebuild our world after World War 2, and to build the Western societies of the sixties and seventies — which were incredibly prosperous, and where the idea was developed that every generation will have a better life than the one before. Many decisions that were made in the last fifteen to twenty years were all taken based on these indicators. The Maastricht treaty was designed around the idea that GDP Growth is the thing that every country needs.

Today we are seeing that these traditional indicators do not work anymore. They promote increasingly bad decisions for people and the world. They lead to favouring investors over normal people. They give more and more power to the rich, and tear at the social fabric of our societies. We are getting to a point where it is becoming clearer and clearer that we are no longer creating good and prosperous societies that way. Just the other day we had posted a text that shows how the UK is actually promoting poverty with the way politics are making decisions there — decisions that are taken primarily to promote economic growth.

In other words: the idea that every generation will have a better life than the one before it is being reversed — if we continue like this, the quality of life will drop significantly, for all of us. And we need to do something about this.

The realisation that this whole idea of GDP growth and our over-reliance on “old numbers” must end is not at all new to the statistics people at the OECD. Quite the contrary — they publish studies and talk about what we need to focus on: other numbers, those that promote real wellbeing.

One example: Is it enough to simply ask whether we have less unemployment? Or shouldn’t we start asking what kind of jobs we are creating? It’s not the number of jobs alone, it is the type of jobs and how well they are paid, and what they do to our societies. If you ask that type of question, you will act very differently when Amazon comes and wants to get subsidies for creating jobs in your town or region or country. If you look closely, you may realise that the jobs Amazon can offer may not be good at all for your communities. And so you may say “no, thank you”, to Amazon and try to find investors and companies that offer actually decent jobs.

What we learned at the OECD Forum, in a nutshell, is this: Statisticians and economists from governments all around the world and at the OECD as well have developed many new ways of measuring and assessing whether people and nature in a country, or in all countries around the world, are doing well or not. And they are sharing these ideas at these conferences, they are discussing them, and they have answers and ideas for a different way of organising our world.

But the politicians, the people who actually make these decisions, are not listening yet. Except for a few. The governments of New Zealand, of Iceland, of Scotland — they are. They have started to realise that the old numbers don’t work anymore. They have developed and implemented new numbers and new systems to look at how people are actually doing. And in the WEGo initiative, they are getting together and trying to learn from each other.

That is why the WEGo initiative is so important, and that is why we are following that project for our film.