raghu wrote: > Like it or not, GDP consistently and effectively measures capitalist > accumulation and has done so since the Industrial Revolution ... GDP, for all > its flaws, measures objectively what it is supposed to measure. <
This is exactly my point. GDP measures exchange value, not use-value. > The real question is why do even progressives attach a disproportionate > amount of importance to this number and why are we always obsessing about how > to increase it?< This critique doesn't apply to me; I do not "attach a disproportionate amount of importance to" real GDP. (What would be the "proportionate" amount of importance, by the way?) The _only_ reason to increase real GDP is that we live in a capitalist economy in which the availability of jobs is hooked to the real GDP. In case you haven't noticed, most people's livelihoods are mostly dependent on the health of the capitalist economy. We have no choice but to live within the belly of the beast. To ignore the currently negative growth of US economy or to see GDP's fall as irrelevant is saying that issues of high unemployment are unimportant. It's like those people who celebrate the recession because it's restoring financial sanity (encouraging thrift, etc.) and will likely imply lower pollution. > The various Gross National Happiness metrics are not satisfactory because > they always have a degree of arbitrariness.< Yes, they are arbitrary. As Doug pointed out, there can be a real downside to their use, as in Bhutan. >Also these attempts give the misleading idea that the GDP growth idea is not >fundamentally wrong, but merely needs a little fine-tuning.< That's not true. If you measure growth by looking at the changes in opinion poll answers to the question "Taken all together, are you very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" (as Richard Layard might advocate in a fit of giddiness), that is shoving GDP aside. That's not "fine tuning" GDP at all. from the start of raghu's letter: >You cannot win this argument until you produce an alternative variable to GDP >growth.< It's not my job to actually produce such an alternative. Since GDP is such a good measure of the capitalist pulse, this job will likely be left to a socialist society to do. Then, it will be democratic decisions that will be behind its construction (as I sketched before). I can suggest some ideas (as I did) but I can't produce such an alternative. The role of alternatives such as the "Genuine Progress Indicator" is to (1) say that we could do better than GDP in serving popularly agreed-upon goals; and (2) the US economy has not done very well in recent decades if you agree with the goals implied by the GPI. -- 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
