On the Components of Human Flourishing
I returned from Guatemala on this week, helping lead a group of 25 people on a visit to the village where our non-profit organization Mayan Partners works in the western Guatemala highlands. The trip made me reflect again about the meaning of human flourishing, including a conversation I had with another guest at the motel where we stayed.
Benoît Laplaize is one of the leaders of a charismatic Catholic community in northern France, and does frequent public talks on the different dimensions of capital in society and their relationship to human flourishing. He himself was in Guatemala to show the country to one of his five children, his adopted Guatemalan son, who was seeing it for the first time he could remember. His other adopted child is disabled, where many in their community have adopted the unwanted children of others.
He shared with me from a lecture that he gave in English in the United States that I found particularly insightful, and I thought a modified presentation of some of his ideas that are related to a conception of human flourishing I present in Shrewd Samaritan (available on Amazon July 9th!) would merit some blog space.
Consider the general set of “good things” that most of us value–across two dimensions: the nature of possession (whether it is individual or communal) and materiality (whether we are talking about a material good or asset, or one that is non-material or even abstract. Then let’s look at different combinations of these:
FIrst, consider things in Quadrant 1, those that are material and whose possession is generally individual, essentially private consumption goods. Here we’re talking about typical goods like food, clothing, cars, and houses. A central domain of traditional economics lies in understanding how private goods are allocated, and development economics in particular often becomes about people being able to obtain more of these things.
Below private goods in Quadrant 2 are other things economists have become pretty good at understanding: public goods and environmental resources. These differ in that the consumption of environmental goods is rival (the tree in the forest I cut down is one that you can’t) whereas the park I enjoy is probably one that you can too without rivalry. But they are similar in that their possession is communal rather than individual.
It is the right-hand column where things get more interesting. In Quadrant 3, we have assets that are personal, but non-material, such as a person’s education and intelligence, but also other things that we value in people as well, like good character, virtue, and a positive demeanor. (In fact in common parlance, we often talk about a person’s assets in this way.) While this area has been the domain of other academic disciples, economics is only beginning to make little forays into this area in understanding their importance to economic life.
Quadrant 4 categorizes assets that are communal, but non-material. These include social trust and its counterpart trustworthiness, goodwill, and general ethical standards to which most in the community abide and expect others to do the same. It includes a common understanding of things that are believed to be sacred and a set of common values and ethical norms. It also includes communal knowledge–what over time a group of people have come to believe to be true about the world.
The important point is that all of these are important to human flourishing, but many people involved in different aspects of development work focus on one or two of these while mostly ignoring the others, or viewing them only as a means to progress in their favorite quadrants.
I find that the approach of many evangelical development NGOs, for example, seem to focus on Quadrants 1 and 3, the individual assets, where personal virtue and character as well as individual material prosperity are paramount metrics. Catholics NGOs tend to lean more strongly toward Quadrant 4 relative to Quadrant 3, where there is a greater emphasis on communal well-being.
Secular development practitioners, as well as most economists, focus mainly on Quadrants 1 and 2. While there has been increasing work in the last twenty years in quadrant 4, it still appears to play second fiddle to strictly material considerations, and Quadrant 3 is largely ignored.
But all the quadrants are integral for human flourishing.
Benoît makes some interesting distinctions about the implication of sharing different types of goods and assets. Some of the accounting here does not jive with traditional economics. For example, if we share a bottle of wine with some friends, traditional economics counts this as a “loss” of a private good. However, this act of friendship may increase human flourishing in quadrant 4 at the cost of what is likely a much smaller loss in quadrant 1. And likewise, when we give away some of our money or some of our time to those in need, these acts increase quadrant 2. A person picking up pieces of litter during a quiet walk down the beach probably reflects or promotes human flourishing in quadrants 2, 3, and 4 at the same time.
What I noticed in Guatemala last week was that while the people in our village may be more deficient in quadrant 1 than most of us on the trip, they compare pretty well in most of the others. There is hope in Guatemala, even with all the recent attention paid to failed states and refugees. And as I consider our time with them, it made me think about Benoît and his reflections on human flourishing.
Follow AcrossTwoWorlds.net on Twitter @BruceWydick. Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor is published by HarperCollins/Thomas Nelson and available July 9th.
- Review of Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why
- Introduction to Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor