HEALTHY AT 100 (38 page)

History shows that wherever inequality of wealth distribution becomes extreme, people tend to become divided against one another, and societies tend to spend less on public health, education, and social safety nets. Large numbers of people feel chronically left out, powerless, anxious, angry, and afraid. In such societies, everyone—whether they are “haves” or “have-nots”—tends to become less trusting of their neighbors and less inclined to help others. The result is higher crime rates, increased violence, and higher rates of heart disease, depression, and many other debilitating and deadly ailments
for both rich and poor.

Is it a coincidence that the countries ranked first and second in the world in terms of wealth equality (Japan and Sweden) are also ranked first and second in life expectancy? And is it a coincidence
that the United States, which ranks last among all industrialized countries in terms of wealth equality, now ranks nearly last in life expectancy?

In the 1990s, no state in the United States generated more wealth than California. Both Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the computer industry, and Hollywood, the center stage of the world’s entertainment industry, were generating new millionaires by the minute. But instead of circulating through the culture, this wealth was concentrating in the hands of an ever smaller portion of the population. The richest 1 percent of Californians now earn more per year than the bottom 60 percent combined.

Ruth Benedict found that, in cultures which value wealth accumulation more than they value wealth sharing, the wealthy tend to be less interested in the well-being of those who are less fortunate. True to her point, many of California’s wealthy have tended to wall themselves off behind gated communities and barred windows and have been more inclined to spend public funds to build prisons than to improve social conditions. In an eerie mirror image, the two hottest areas in California’s construction industry since 1990 have been the building of gated residential communities and the building of prisons.

Despite the valiant efforts of many concerned citizens and organizations, including the Oakland, California–based Ella Baker Center’s “Books Not Bars” campaign (which advocates spending more money on lifting kids up than on locking them up), the state now has the highest youth incarceration rate in the country. There are now five times as many African American men in California prisons as there are in California state universities.

The consequences to public health have also been tragic. California used to rank near the top of the nation in health statistics, but this is unfortunately no longer the case. The state now has one of the nation’s highest percentages of families without health insurance. Children living in poor neighborhoods often have no safe place to play. High rates of violent crime and infectious disease coexist with one of the nation’s lowest levels of spending on public health.

Half the adults in some California cities today suffer from hyper-tension.
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Three-quarters of California’s children do not meet the
state’s minimum standards for physical fitness.
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California has the world’s fifth largest economy, but its citizens are experiencing what can happen when accumulation for the few takes precedence over the well-being of the many.

When much of society’s wealth is in the hands of a small minority, the vast majority of people are left with little recourse but to spend their precious time and energy in the continuous pursuit of financial resources. This takes a toll on the health of communities, marriages, and families that is difficult to exaggerate. Many couples have little quality time with each other, and many parents have tragically little time with their children.

I have a friend, a psychotherapist, who is a single mother. Living in California where housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years, she has to work very long hours to make ends meet. One day her eight-year-old son became so frustrated with her unavailability that he said, “If I save my allowance and give it all to you, then will you have time to listen to me?”

Many of us in the hyper-competitive modern world have become so used to not having enough time for our relationships that it is hard for us to grasp what has been lost. In the world’s healthiest and longest-lived cultures, relationships are held to be of primary importance. When someone is in need, others provide whenever possible. People do not lock their doors when they leave their homes. It is expected that a visitor who finds the house empty will come in and help themselves to a meal while waiting for the family to return.

If a theft occurs, it is a rare and unusual event. In many modern cities, in contrast, if a day goes by without a murder it is a remarkable occurrence.

There are of course many wonderful and hopeful things about the modern world, and I am by no means suggesting that the way to solve our problems is to abandon the quest for material progress. But I believe J.R.R. Tolkien had a point when he said, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

The gross domestic product (GDP) is now routinely used throughout the industrialized world as a fundamental measure of a nation’s level of success. It is taken for granted that the higher the GDP, the better a country is doing. This use of the GDP has become so ubiquitous that people often don’t realize there are alternatives. Unbeknownst to many of us, the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been taking a very different path, with remarkable results.

Roughly the size of Switzerland, Bhutan is the only independent Buddhist monarchy in the world, and the only country in the world that practices the Tantric form of Mahayana Buddhism as its official religion. In April 1987, Bhutan’s young monarch, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, was interviewed by the
Financial Times.
Asked about his nation’s economic development, which was among the world’s lowest, he replied, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”
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Though Bhutan has its problems,
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King Wangchuck’s statement was not an idle remark. Under his leadership, Bhutan has made Gross National Happiness its official index for evaluating development. As a result, the guiding principles of all Bhutanese policies have been to ensure that prosperity is shared across society, that cultural traditions are honored, the environment is protected, and the government is kept responsive to the real needs of the people. While economists in the West have scoffed at the king’s ideas, calling them naïve idealism, the results speak for themselves.

Though household incomes remain among the world’s lowest, the people of Bhutan have created one of the world’s most intriguing societies. The nation has more monks than soldiers, not a single traffic light or mall, and a profound commitment to education. Forty years ago, Bhutan had no public education system, now there are schools at all levels throughout the country. The literacy rate, which was less than 10 percent as recently as the early nineties, now tops 50 percent and continues to increase rapidly.

When the current king took the throne in 1972, there was not a single sanitary hospital in the country. Now, all Bhutanese subjects have access to free healthcare. People entering hospitals with non-acute
problems can choose Western or traditional medicine. Government policies ensure that people have a great deal of free time with their families, including maternity leaves. The elderly are provided for both by their extended families and by pension programs provided by the government. In 2005, Bhutan became the first nation in the world to impose a national ban on the sale of tobacco and on smoking in public places.
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As Buddhists, the Bhutanese don’t kill animals for food. (If a cow dies naturally, though, they will eat it.) Most of their meals are centered on red rice, accompanied by chili peppers and other vegetables, all home-grown, with occasional cheese from local cows. There is not a single McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, or Pizza Hut in the entire country.
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Perhaps the most remarkable part of Bhutan’s commitment to Gross National Happiness is a stunning dedication to preserving the country’s natural resources. While the forests of all its neighboring countries have been decimated in recent years, Bhutan retains the highest original forest cover of any nation on earth.
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The hunting of animals is prohibited, as is fishing in the rivers. Livestock grazing, logging, and mining are strictly controlled and limited. Plastic bags are banned, as are two-stroke engines. There are stringent fuel-quality laws. The nation has an annual holiday to honor the king, but instead of pomp and parades, he has declared the holiday Social Forestry Day, and the people now spend the day planting trees. Consistent with the Buddhist doctrine of respect for all life, a constitution is currently being written which gives inalienable rights to wildlife and trees as well as to people.
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How has all this affected the health of the people? In a stunningly short time, the nation has experienced one of the most dramatic increases in life expectancy in world history. In 1984, life expectancy in Bhutan was 47 years. Only fourteen years later, in 1998, it had leaped to 66 years.
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The Bhutanese would understand the Abkhasian proverb “When money speaks, the truth is silent.” In the modern West, on the other
hand, we’ve had popular TV shows like
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
that glorify conspicuous consumption. I’ve known people who like to drive around town pointing out the most expensive homes and cars. And I’ve seen how this kind of preoccupation affects the way they treat people. When they meet someone for the first time, they seek to assess the person’s economic status, and their behavior toward that person changes according to their appraisal. Those judged to be upper class are treated with deference, while those viewed as lower class are regarded with indifference.

It is a poignant sign of our times that the largest-selling board game in the world today is Monopoly, in which the goal is to bankrupt your opponents and amass all wealth unto yourself. More than two hundred million Monopoly sets have been sold, and the game is currently produced in twenty-six languages.

We are complex people, we human beings. There is a little bit of Donald Trump in each of us, and that part of ourselves is often rewarded and reinforced in a society that measures success primarily in material terms. But there is also a little bit of Mother Teresa in us. Each of us—including, I’m sure, Donald Trump himself—has a place that understands the greater importance of our relationships with other people, with our own spirits, and with life itself.

I wonder what would happen if instead of glorifying those who excel at getting, we gave our applause and esteem to those who excel at giving? What if we recognized the many courageous people who work day in and day out not just to make the biggest buck, but to make the world a better place?

To my eyes, the people who are truly wealthy are not those whose bank accounts are the largest, but those who find something precious in every moment and rejoice in the opportunities they have to contribute to the lives of others.

Such people, whether they know it or not, are carrying on the traditions of the Abkhasians, the Vilcabambans, the Hunzans, the Okinawans, and many other peoples who have understood what extraordinary resources we can be for one another, and who use whatever financial wealth they have to make a difference in the lives of others. As one Okinawan woman told me, “Some people have more
money than others. If you have more, it’s so you can use it to help those who don’t. If we can’t help one another, then what’s the point?”

My father (Irv Robbins) and my uncle (Burt Baskin) founded and owned an ice cream company. Starting from nothing, they were extraordinarily successful. Baskin-Robbins (31 Flavors) became the world’s largest ice cream company, with many thousands of stores worldwide, and annual sales measured in the billions of dollars. We had an ice-cream-cone-shaped swimming pool in our backyard, my pets were named after ice cream flavors, and I ate countless gallons of ice cream. When people nowadays hear that I no longer eat ice cream, they sometimes feel sorry for me. “Please don’t,” I tell them. “I ate enough ice cream during my childhood for twenty lifetimes.” Sometimes I ate ice cream for breakfast.

It was my father’s dream that I would someday join him in running the business, and from my earliest childhood he set about grooming me to follow in his footsteps. Like almost every child, I loved ice cream. But when my uncle Burt Baskin was only fifty-one years old, he died of a heart attack. A large man, he had always enjoyed the family product. I asked my dad if he thought the amount of ice cream my uncle ate might have contributed to his fatal heart attack. “No,” my father said. “His ticker just got tired and stopped working.”

I understand why my father would not have wanted to consider the possibility that ice cream might have been involved. By this point he had manufactured and sold more ice cream than any human being who had ever lived on this planet. He didn’t want to think that ice cream was harming anyone, much less that it might have contributed to the death of his beloved brother-in-law and partner. Besides, not much was commonly known then, in the late 1960s, about the connection between ice cream and disease.

But I saw the connection, as I did when my dad developed diabetes and high blood pressure, and again years later when Ben
Cohen, co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s, needed a quintuple bypass procedure at the age of forty-nine.

A single ice cream cone, of course, isn’t going to harm anyone. But even though it tastes delicious, ice cream is very high in sugar and saturated fat. The medical data is overwhelmingly clear that the more sugar and saturated fat you eat, the more likely you are to experience heart disease and diabetes and to become obese.