I wrote: > And then we can replace the GDP growth mania by the GPI growth mania?
That's a straw-man. I wasn't advocating that. > I'd argue that the way we measure progress itself needs to be > flexible. What was progressive 100 years back (increasing food > production for e.g.) is definitely not progressive today. Likewise > what we might consider progressive today (to put into a GPI index) may > not be so in the future. Following a long tradition started (at least in the US) by James Tobin and William Nordhaus, the GPI is simply an effort to correct GDP for what the benefits it leaves out (e.g., parents' labor taking care of kids) and for the costs it leaves out (e.g., pollution). It suffers from the same problem as GDP: it is added up using (inflation-adjusted) prices, so that in some cases prices are attached to items that really shouldn't be priced. But that does allow for changing priorities (definitions of progress) over time, since things likely have higher prices as they become more important. > Why should we expect to be able to measure something as complex as the > well-being of a society with a single number? You are right: the BIG problem with the GPI is that it presumes that all of these things can and should be added up to create a single number. I tell my students that the main benefit of the GPI is that it tells us the stuff that measures of activity in the goods & services markets leave out. It points us in the direction of understanding what's really happening in the economy without being a perfect number itself. Use-value cannot be measured quantitatively. (That's one reason why GDP gets such respect: what it measures is exchange-value, which can be measured quantitatively.) Anyway, no-one that I have heard of has ever advocating distilling all of society's goals into a single number. It's only the "real GDP is the best a measure of social welfare" crowd that does that. And I'd bet that they'd moderate their opinion under a little bit of questioning. If Sabri makes me president of the US, I'd insist on getting as much information as possible so that the Congress of of Councils of Workers' Delegates could be as informed as possible when making crucial decisions. No single number would be sufficient. -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
