My dear friend Andreas Lundström who helped me make my new E-book God vs Inequality also made this video for me. It’s based on this blog post about how Costa Rica is a good example of a country that combines a long life expectancy with a small ecological foot print. Most people are quite happy to live there, and they are managing to do so wighou destroying the environment very much. Also, their GDP per capita is about the same as the gross world product per capita: 13,000 dollars a year. If everybody lived like the average Costa Rican, wealth would be evenly distributed, while if everybody lived like the average American, we would need five planets.

As I have shown people this clip, some have been skeptical. They dig up facts about inequality within Costa Rica, or its horrible sex tourism, or its crima rate, and argue “look Micael, Costa Rica isn’t much of a paradise, is it?” And of course I’m not arguing that it is a sinless state, because such do not exist – the only perfect country is the Kingdom of Heaven. But you can’t get away from the fact that Costa Rica disproves the idea that you need to be rich to have a long happy life, or that it’s impossible to enjoy life without trashing the planet. This is also the case with Kerala in India, a state that combines good health care and education with very low GDP per capita.

The point of the video is that rich countries must get poorer and give away much more of their money to create a fair and sustainable world. Many rich people don’t like this biblical idea because the love for money is a root to all evil (1 Tim 6:10), but Costa Rica show us that low GDP doesn’t mean that you’ll die when your 40 – Costa Rica has a longer life expectancy than the United States! So if you want a fair and sustainable world, live on less than 13 000 dollars a year and give the rest of your money to the poor. God bless you.