Health and Wealth:
H&W is a paradoxical social currency which acts as a tool to re-think the relationship between happiness and economics.
A scientific approach to happiness began with the Utilitarian
Jeremy Bentham who said the objective of any society is to maximise the sum of happiness in society. Economics then evolved as the study of utility or happiness, which was assumed to be in principle measurable and comparable across people.
According to Richard Layard, founder-director of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, all the barometers for measuring happiness show that increased material wealth does not lead to greater happiness. For instance, for Japan, research figures on happiness have been available on a continuous basis since 1950. They show no change despite a 6-fold rise in income per head.
In Europe the research conducted by the think-tank Eurobarometer from early 1970s again show has no increases for the same period.
In day-to-day terms the contradiction that governs modern life is that personal security is realistically achievable only through individualism and material consumption. Personal happiness however can only be secured through social interaction and a sense of relatedness.
It is this inherent conflict of means embodied in modern culture that is played out by Health and Wealth.
H&W uses a scientific approach to simulate the logic of orthodox current thinking which conflates happiness and the pursuit of money in an endless process of economic growth by reproducing the same pyramidal distribution of Wealth that already structures society.
The best paradigm to illustrate this is the social institution of the National Lottery.
Health and Wealth uses the structure of the National Lottery based on permutations of 1 to 49 as on a lottery board to simulate the permutations of an artificial social system.