Happy Museum focuses on the wellbeing of people, place and planet, exploring what constitutes societal progress.  Our work is held within the wider frame of our interlinked environmental and social crises. These, in turn, are symptoms of a global system in crisis driven by a focus on growth as its predominant economic and social goal.  Check out our founder Tony Butler questioning our preoccupation with economic growth at the launch of Happy Museum back in 2011.

 As Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics acknowledges: ‘We have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, and what we need, especially in the richest countries, are economies that make us thrive whether or not they grow’.

We live in a global system where the primary measurement of societal progress, our collective driver of value, is economic growth or GDP – however GDP as a measure and driver has crucial flaws 

• It is predicated on a need for continual growth in production – so requires ever increasing consumption, depletion of resources and huge amounts of waste at a global scale. 
• As a measure it doesn’t differentiate between spending on good things (like health and education) and terrible things (like resources needed to recover from natural disasters). 
• It fails to measure the economic services that nature provides, such as availability of clean water or fresh air or those that don’t come with a market price, such as raising children or caring for each other. 

As President Robert Kennedy said about GDP back in 1968 …it measures everything, …  except that which makes life worthwhile.’  

As the polycrisis intensifies it is increasingly clear that growth as a driver is a key factor in our inability to tackle the climate and ecological crisis, to address inequality or support our collective health. The material impacts of humanity’s destructive relationship with our environment are combined with huge societal impacts – inequality, deprivation, poverty, social and racial injustice, even impacting our bodies with microplastics. Growth led capitalism ‘externalises’ costs to the point where the costs are ‘externalised’ into our own bodies.

The material and societal impacts of our economic system share roots in our history of extractive capitalism, systemic domination and colonialism. Authors including Amitav Ghosh and Tao Leigh Goff argue that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. Ghassan Hage describes how this geopolitical order behaves as ‘an occupying force imposing its own interest, subordinating others for the extraction of value and eradicating or exterminating what gets in the way.’  Meanwhile Michael Parenti states that ‘poor countries are not “under-developed”, they are over-exploited’.

Many of our museums and their collections are embedded in, and have benefited from, this historic geopolitical order. We need to understand this heritage and its legacy in order to genuinely address these systemic crises.

A role for culture?

Meanwhile growth as a metric also presents significant challenges as a measure of flourishing cultural and creative sectors.  The prevailing ‘measures’ of success are growth in visitor numbers/audiences, a drive towards increased commercial income from shops, cafes and hires, blockbuster shows and exhibitions, international tourism and new capital build. 

Any measurement of cultural value sits within the economic system predicated on growth. We have a role as cultural communicators to explore and communicate the things that are genuinely important to us as individuals and societies – our health and wellbeing, our relationships and connections, our homes and environment, our sense of purpose and belonging.

Connecting with the growing range of alternative models such as Doughnut Economics, Thriving Places, the Happy Planet Index and the Wellbeing of Future of Generations Act in Wales, Happy Museum seeks to open up debate around fuller consideration, and measurement, of the contribution and impact that cultural institutions might make to their wider localities.

A systems approach

The author David Foster Wallace in a famous lecture said “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Economic growth is the water in which we swim as a society – the often unnoticed paradigm of our current system.  In her seminal work on systems theory Donella Meadows explores the most effective ways to effect change in a system that is out of whack.

The first is the goal of the system – in our current world – economic growth at all costs.

Even more important is the paradigm – the mindset out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.   

As the Wellbeing Economy Alliance observes – ‘A shift [from a growth focused economy] to a wellbeing economy is fundamentally a cultural shift .. It is a shift into different ways of being, thinking and doing. A shift in how we care for and relate to one another, humans and non-humans. A shift in how we understand our past, present and future. In revisiting stories about how we got here, why things are the way they are, and coming together to reimagine the future.’ 

How might museums (and other cultural institutions) help rethink our current paradigm? How might we explore and advocate for a paradigm shift towards what truly makes us thrive, where our collective focus is on the wellbeing of people, place and planet, both now and for the future.  

Later this year Happy Museum is planning to host a sector discussion around these themes.  If you would like to be part of that conversation contact us on happymuseumproject@gmail.com – or sign up to our newsletter for future information.

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Resources and further reading

From the Happy Museum…

Our founding Manifesto drew inspiration from Professor Tim Jackson and his book Prosperity without Growth and our Principles Measure what Matters and Create the Conditions for Wellbeing encouraged a focus on alternative drivers and measurements of progress.

Our 2016 session Happy and Green drew connections between Sustainability and Wellbeing in supporting individual, institutional and societal resilience – and considered the particular role that culture can play – with contributions from Lord Gus O’Donnell and Rob Hopkins.

In 2018 we worked with museums across Wales to explore how their work aligned with the groundbreaking Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (@futuregencymru) summarised in this report 

Our founder Tony Butler explored these ideas in this piece – Living with Limits and our Director, Hilary Jennings summarised our approach at the time in this blog – From Footfall to Footprint 

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…and beyond

Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity https://cusp.ac.uk/

Wellbeing Economy Alliance – global collaboration of changemakers https://weall.org/ 

Doughnut Economics Action Lab – https://doughnuteconomics.org/  The Doughnut offers a vision of what it means for humanity to thrive in the 21st century – and Doughnut Economics explores the mindset and ways of thinking needed to get us there.

PIRC https://publicinterest.org.uk/project/framing-the-economy/

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Cultural responses

The Art of the Wellbeing Economy – call to action – produced by WeALL Ireland and FEASTA https://weall.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Art-of-the-Wellbeing-Economy-Call-to-Action-2023.pdf 

 Investing in Arts and Culture to Reimagine Economic Growth in the 21st Century   https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/sites/bartlett/files/2025-09/Public_Value_of_Arts_and_Culture_0.pdf

Degrowth Journal – special issue on the arts https://www.degrowthjournal.org/volumes/2025-special-issue-arts/

It’s the Economy Stupid – theatre piece – https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/Its-the-Economy-Stupid?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAab6Dde7qzWoLTEhnmj1ooztVBVimE-8Lr9VnjniJ6JIPZhFiPBchqXacn4_aem_0M9DMjDOE2itUQjMCv3uXw

Radio 4 play – The Limits To Growth by Sarah Woods https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018109

Manchester Whitworth Art Gallery ran Economics the Blockbuster in 2023 https://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/pastexhibitions/economicstheblockbuster

Museum of the Economy – Mexico City https://mexicocity.cdmx.gob.mx/venues/interactive-museum-economy-mide/

Museum of Tomorrow Rio https://museudoamanha.org.br/en