Planetary Choices

The Ecology of Happiness —A Conversation with Stefano Bartolini

• Center for New Critical Politics and Governance • Season 1 • Episode 9

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In episode 9 of Mapping the Planetary, hosts Hagen Schulz-Forberg and James Quilligan welcome Stefano Bartolini, Associate Professor at the University of Siena, whose research explores Political Economy, Social Economy, and the Economics of Happiness. Together, they ask a fundamental question: Can economic prosperity coexist with genuine human well-being and planetary sustainability? The conversation examines how modern economies might evolve beyond growth-centered models to embrace a more holistic understanding of prosperity, one that values social connection, leisure, environmental balance, and happiness as much as material wealth.

Academic Reference:

Stefano Bartolini, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, James Quilligan; The Ecology of Happiness—A Conversation with Stefano Bartolini. Global Perspectives 10 March 2025; 6 (1): 150338. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2025.150338

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This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).

To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary

The Ecology of Happiness – A Conversation with Stefano Bartolini

Hagen:

Welcome to Planetary Choices, a podcast by the Center for New Critical Politics and Governance. Today with us is Stefano Bartolini. Stefano is a professor of economics at the University of Siena where he teaches courses on political economy, social economy and most importantly for us, the economics of happiness. Stefano has been thinking about this for many decades, I believe.

Stefano:

Yeah.

Hagen:

And now he is with us to enlighten us a little bit about his work, which he breaks down in this podcast for us. As always, I have my co-host James Quilligan with me. James, hello.

James:

Hello.

Hagen:

Why is Stefano's work so important for Planetary Choices? Well, he tries to find out about the intercurrent relationship between economic prosperity, sustainability of the environment, human interrelation, leisure and happiness. And we want to know all about that. But maybe before we get going, Stefano, tell us a little bit about your background, about, you know, academic, educational, what inspired you to dive into the problem of happiness.

Stefano:

Well, my background is a typical background of economists, a master in economics, a PhD in economics. And the issue, you're mentioning the question, how to integrate economic prosperity with good relationships, sustainable environment, leisure time. All those questions arose from trips in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa. Those trips I did when I was very young. I was a master's student and I found people there, surprisingly open, sociable and happy. So, I began to ask myself, why do people in industrial countries, are so fearful, mistrusting, somehow depressed, aggressive, conflictual? Which was something I did not find there. However, I found there are other enormous problems, economic problems. People were very poor, which of course, was a problem from the point of view of happiness. It created them, enormous problems. There were people which had curable diseases and could not buy medicines, drugs and it also weighs on happiness. So, my basic question became, do we have to be like this, like we are, in order to be economically prosperous? And that was the initial question and I've been studying the case for 45 years.

James:

Stefano, you've said that most people are either rich materially, but poor in relationships. Would you explain the differences between individual capital and social capital and also between well-having, as you've put it, well-having and well-being? I think that's a very interesting comparison.

Stefano:

Yeah, uhm. What I found in those trips in Africa, was a society which was economically underdeveloped and relationally, much more developed than us. Individual wealth is what we have, but what we lack is relationships. I mean, loneliness has become a mass problem in industrial countries and all studies on happiness show that the unhappiest people are the lonely ones. Although poor in relationships, not poor in money, relational poverty weighs more than money poverty on happiness. So, that became the critical issue of my reflection, how to reconstruct relationships in a lonely world. Lonely, but economically rich.

Hagen:

I mean, this personal anecdote, or this personal motivation to your work, of course, has been still ongoing, because we haven't really found a path to more happiness in the industrialized societies, if I read your work well. But maybe, I'd like to dig into more of an academic side of things here as well. So, is your work that looks at GDP growth, or GDP rise, maybe not like, it went crazy in the fifties, but there's a steady GDP rise of one, two percent and at the same time, we can have planetary health and well-being. To have that balance, that seems to be hard to believe, or at least, there's a lot of pessimism out there, telling us that it's not possible. But where do you place your work? Do you somehow talk to post-growth or degrowth, literature? Or what is inspiring you, or how would you define that? Or how is your relationship to these terms?

Stefano:

Mhm. I have a problem with the term "degrowth."

Hagen:

Okay.

Stefano:

I find it a wrong term. It shouldn't be used, especially in political debates, because it draws attention on what we have to lose, not on what we have to gain. So, my-, the conclusion of my studies after decades has been that we, I mean, when I say "we", I mean people in industrial countries, are so focused on money, because private wealth is a compensation to collective poverty. Our collective quality of life has been decreasing across decades. We've been more lonely, our communities have been eroded, the quality of our environment, which is something else that we share, it's part of our collective quality of life, has been destroyed. Uhm, and what else can we do, other than to protect our quality of life with private wealth, when our collective quality of life is collapsing? That's the reason why money is so important for us, why we focus so much on money. It's also the reason why we have so much money. But not all of us, first of all and secondly, it is even too much because it is damaging the planet. I mean, what is putting ecosystems on their knees, is enormous mass of goods that we produce and we consume, but I'm convinced that a big part of this production and consumption is addressing emotional compensation for the middle class. It's an emotional compensation, which is needed, because what we share is in a very bad condition.

James:

And uh, how would reducing material wealth exactly make our social lives more meaningful, by rebuilding social capital, or as you have also called it, relational goods? How can society make these positive changes? What needs to take place?

Stefano:

We need to start by rebuilding our collective quality of life. So, protecting the environment and rebuilding relationships and communities. And we can do this in many, many ways. Think, for instance, to the way we organize cities. Cities are places to aggregate people, only for production and consumption. Work and shopping is the only form of aggregation that we have. For the rest of our cities, which are invaded by cars, are facing a distraction of the social fabric. The social fabric-, cities were invented five thousand years ago and their goal was to aggregate people. And the social fabric was built in the common spaces, streets, squares and this lasted until the common space was invaded by cars. Then it stopped having the function to build social fabric and became a space where people pass and to go somewhere else, because they have become polluted, bad smells, they are dangerous, because cars are dangerous for pedestrians. So, let's begin by reorganizing our cities, by changing the transportation, focusing on public transportation, on bikes. Here in Northern Europe, they have very good examples of these ways, this way to organize cities and green spaces, sports centers, pedestrian areas. That is what is needed to rebuild relationships in cities. We need a city reform. This is just an example, there are other spheres of social lives that could be reformed in order to rebuild relationships. Basically, relationships need physical space and also mental space, and mental space depends a lot on the way people-, on schooling systems. The schooling system that we have in so many countries, that is vertical, is based on students' passivity. Teachers teach and students have to take notes and study and read their texts. It's a very passive way of learning and we have alternatives to that. The most important alternative was invented one century ago by Maria Montessori, which was Italian, which invented the alternative schooling and which was based on participation of students, on involvement, on active involvement, on group work. Everything was discussed and agreed among students and teachers and this is another model of schooling that works very well and studies on this shows, that this type of participatory schooling, produces students which are happier, are more sociable and they even have better academic achievements.

Hagen:

Yeah. I would like to zoom in a little bit on the relationship between well-being and the ecological limits within which we need to organize this well-being. Arguably, some of the problems, or some of the pessimisms that are in the ecological discussions, suggests that, yes, we would need to live within planetary boundaries, but it's really difficult and we haven't really found a way to do that, other than believing that we need to cut back, we need to limit ourselves we need to somehow do some unhappy things, sacrifices, in order to live within these planetary boundaries. You somehow suggest something else, but one of your main points is solitude, or loneliness. Could you elaborate a little bit on loneliness in relation to the environment, or ecology? How are those two connected?

Stefano:

Yeah, loneliness requires emotional compensation, because it's a very heavy, emotional burden for people and what better compensation than having a nice car, or a beautiful house, which tells you every morning that your fears of being excluded, or of not being a member of this society, are wrong. If you have a good car, that's the evidence that you are a good member of this society, because shopping makes you a member of this society. It's an antidote to exclusion, to emotional distress. So, in this way, a lot of consumption, especially by the middle class in industrial countries, is made for compensating their people's emotional vulnerabilities. And in this way, we end up producing so much stuff that is damaging, deeply damaging ecosystems. So, my idea is that an enormous problem of the ecological movement is this idea that we have to live worse, in order to be sustainable. We have to make sacrifices, but if we improve our collective quality of life, which is critical to happiness, all studies on happiness show that sharing is the key to well-being, it's not possessing. Money has a very weak impact on people's happiness. What really makes people happy is sharing things. Collective quality of life. So, if we do this, we will need less consumption, less production, we will be happier and we will be more sustainable. So, this narrative of sacrifices, which is so common among ecologists, it uhm, somehow, shares the fetish of GDP with my, uhm, with my colleagues, economists. And it is based on the idea that reducing GDP, would imply living worse, but if the reduction of GDP is the consequence of an improvement in what we share, then we would live better, not worse. So, we have to shift to a narrative, which emphasizes that we have to gain a lot from this kind of ecological and social transition. We would live better, not worse.

James:

So, you're saying, basically, that the cultural roots of ecological overshoot are really embedded in consumerism. Now, how would you measure the changes that are needed to create a bridge between economics and social psychology and sustainability? How can that come together? Because we certainly are not anywhere on the track of that today, in an organized way. It is not a part of our real politics.

Stefano:

We need a cultural change, but I see signs that this cultural change has begun. I see many ecologists that began to, uhm, that are changing their narrative, showing that there are things that can make us live better, from living in a more sustainable system. I insist on this. The key to environmental sustainability is social sustainability, sustainability of relationships. If we live in a world in which people feel lonely, feel aggressed, feel fearful, money will become too important in people's lives to reduce their consumption and reach a sustainable and environmental sustainable system. I see many signs of this transition, of this cultural transition. In economics, in environmental studies, there begin to be many ecologists that are moving towards happiness studies. Basically, what we have to do is to contaminate happiness studies, with environmental studies. From this contamination, something new can come out, a new narrative which can be more politically attractive.

Hagen:

Yeah, okay. So, you need to walk me through something else here, which is when, okay, so we need to change the culture, we need to change our relationships, or we need to change our understanding of how we want to interact and what well-being actually means and how we get it. So, our public institutions, our schools, should maybe change, you're implying that and general cultural change. But is that enough? How does that end up in a lower budget? How does that end up in actual savings? So, how does this change in culture, come put at the tail end, as a better way of life, also shown in the budget? What I mean by that is, reducing costs of public health, would that be a consequence of that? Reducing, you know, right now, I think society spends a lot of money on pensioners homes, on public health in general and with the effect of what you're describing, are you assuming that this will decrease?

Stefano:

Okay, well, the uhm, spending in healthcare is one of the most prominent examples of what is called defensive spending. Spending that is made to defend people from the consequences of social problems. Because it's plenty of epidemiological studies, showing that the most important risk factors for health is loneliness and unhappiness also, which are, of course, deeply related. And so, if we do those kind of changes I was mentioning before, different cities, different types of schooling, which allow people to have more physical and mental space for building good relationships, people's health would improve. I mean, we have massive evidence of this, of the impact of unhappiness and loneliness on health from the United States. The United States is the only country, in peace, in the world, where longevity is shortening for very large population groups, especially those population groups, which are hit by more social desegregation and more unhappiness. And so, the consequence is very clear. Healthcare spending is the most important sector of activity, in the industrial countries. I mean, the biggest share of GDP is spent on healthcare. So, there's a lot of money at stake. From improving relationships, improving happiness, healthcare spending would dramatically decrease. So, what I'm-, the kind of policies I'm proposing are good for public budgets, not bad.

Hagen:

Would they also be enough, or how do they relate to problems of global heating, of biodiversity loss and all the broader ecological problems that we're having on the planet?

Stefano:

Yeah, the problem. Well, there are many things that we have to do in all cases, for instance, switching to renewables is key. But another thing that we have to do, is to reduce energy consumption. We’re-, energy consumption is under threat, because now we are seeing an enormous increase of energy consumption by the data centers for artificial intelligence. An enormous increase. Europe is talking about rearm. Armies are the most energy intensive activity ever invented, even in peace. They are extremely energy intensive. So, energy consumption is going to increase sharply over the next decades. Very bad idea. What we should do is, first, try to find a way not to rearm and uhm, and the other thing is, what I mentioned before, reducing defensive consumption, which according to our estimates, can reach fifty percent of GDP in industrial countries. So, there's a lot of things to do to reduce energy demand. We have an enormous scale problem with energy. The scale of the economic system is too big, is too energy intensive. There's no alternative form, other than reducing, somehow, the scale and we can do it, improving happiness. Because, if we reduce defensive consumption as a consequence of an improvement of our collective conditions of life, then happiness will improve and also climate change, we can get some results.

James:

It's deeply ironic that modern energy consumption and economic growth arise, to a large extent, by compensating for the problems that they create on their own, like pollution, and pollution cleanup, and health costs, and time scarcity. How can we create political systems, based on real democracy, where people can directly participate, in how their decisions are distributed and used?

Stefano:

Well, that's a great question. The state of our democracy is one of the main issues and one of the main obstacles to the kind of ecological transition I'm proposing. According to very influential political scientists, our democracies are not working anymore. They are not even democracies anymore. They are called post-democracies, or oligarchies-, oligarchy. And what do all this proliferation of level have in common, is that political decisions are deeply affected by big business, by corporations and do not really respond anymore to the interests of the vast majority of individuals. Uhm. The kind of things I was mentioning hit very important economic interests. Think, for instance, getting the cities free from cars. That means a big problem for the automotive industry, which is a big interest. Think, for instance, of what I've been saying of healthcare spending. If we improve happiness, if we reduce loneliness, we would need much less healthcare spending, which means much less profits for big pharma. So, all this, hits very important interests by big corporations, but those are who has the real political power. So, you were mentioning a democracy which is working. A democracy, a real democracy, in which people are involved, have a voice in political decisions. We have to understand, why democracies evolved into post-democracies and the most important reason is money. Politics needs money for electoral campaigns, for political activity is simply costly. And who has money? Not ordinary people, of course. Big corporations have money and their influence on the political system, passes largely through financing of political parties and candidates. We have to reform this and there are many proposals of reform, or the funding of the political activities, which can work. We have simply to understand that the current form of democracy is a heritage of the twentieth century. It was conceived in a very different situation, in very different conditions. It must be adapted, in order to make it respond to the interests of vast majority of citizens and not to the interest of the one percent.

Hagen:

In your vision, human and planetary well-being, happiness, flourishing, are interrelated. Right? They're almost dependent on each other? Because, if we're socially degrading, then we're ecologically degrading and vice-versa. And yet, so if we're understanding this correctly and if we live according to that, do changes according to an embedded understanding, or a dual understanding of this relation between human and planetary flourishing, there's a double dividend, you're saying, that we will increase our well-being and that we will reduce the ecological impact.

Stefano:

Yeah.

Hagen:

And how do we do that?

Stefano:

A good start could be changing our democracies, because this is a good start to change our decision. Uhm. Other good starting points are, changing the infancy is key. If you look at the data on mental disorders of the Z-generations, it's so disturbing. It's a disaster.

Hagen:

What do you mean?

Stefano:

I mean that we hear that, that generation is having-, is experiencing an epidemic of anxiety, of depression, of self-harm. Those data are really disquieting, really disturbing. We have a big problem with young generations and that's basically due to the mix that they are experiencing between loneliness and competitive pressure, which is a terrible mix. And both things increased dramatically over the recent decades. My generation grew up in the streets. I mean, when we were kids, I spent all the afternoons of my life playing soccer in the streets, with my gang of friends and no kid does it anymore. Now, they grow up in their homes, in front of screens, most of the time is spent lonely and this is basically due to the invasion of cars in the cities. There are, for instance, cities on an enormous scale like Tokyo, in which, streets are plenty of kids. Four-, five-, six-year-old kids, they go to school alone, because Tokyo is a car-free city. Simply, people move there with bikes or public transportation and you see directly the effect of freeing cities from cars on the quality of life of kids. So, uhm, more loneliness and more competitive pressure because data show that competitive pressure, especially from schooling, has grown a lot in all industrial countries over recent decades and the mix between loneliness and competitive pressure is producing a generation, which is plenty of mental disorders, but all this, is a consequence of political choices. We can change it. Competitive pressure is a matter of political choices on, how schooling should be done. And uhm, filling up the cities with cars is another political choice that can be changed. So, the whole issue of sustainability and ill-being are a matter of politics and that's the starting point to be changed.

James:

Yeah, last question. So, what you're saying is that improving human well-being, while reducing the ecological footprint, is really about aligning human prosperity with the planetary limits. Could you define that in more detail?

Stefano:

Hm. We have been cultivating the illusion to be healthy, in a planet which is sick. That's an illusion, that in order to live well, happily and in a healthy way, the planet has to be healthy. That's an illusion that should be abandoned. This is also called One Health. It's the concept of One Health. Human and planetary health are so deeply entrenched and they cannot be separated.

Hagen:

Stefano, thank you very much.

Stefano:

Thank you to you.

Hagen:

This was wonderful. Thank you for talking, thank you for enlightening us. Everybody, please listen to this. Visit our website. Thank you, James.

Stefano:

Thank you, James.

Hagen:

Grazie!

Stefano:

Grazie!

Further Readings:

Bartolini, Stefano. 2013. Manifesto per la Felicitá. Come passare dalla societá del ben-avere aquella del ben-essere.[Manifesto for Happiness. Shifting Society from Money to Well-Being.] Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Crouch, Colin. 2014. Post-Democracy. Polity. Montessori, Maria. 1949. The Absorbent Mind. The Theosophical Publishing House.

World Health Organisation (WHO). 30 June 2025. From loneliness to social connection:

charting a path to healthier societies. Report of the WHO Commission on Social Connection. World Health Organisation (WHO). n.d. One Health Overview.

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Hagen Schulz-Forberg

Host
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James Quilligan

Co-host
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Stefano Bartolini

Guest