On 5/8/05, tom walker wrote: >... What would productivity change > look like if we used a Genuine Progress Indicator > rather than the GDP as the surrogate?
I'm a fan of the GPI, but I don't see it as a substitute for the GDP. Whereas the GDP is a measure of exchange-value, the GPI is an effort to measure social use-value. These aren't commensurable, even though the folks at Redefining Progress add up the GPI using inflation-corrected dollars. This aggregation is a useful exercise, for fun and illustration, but strictly speaking you can't add use-values. There's clearly a contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, as some old hairy German was wont to note. If one takes the GPI quantification seriously, that contradiction is suggested by the fall of GPI relative to GDP since the 1970s. The US economy isn't doing a very good job at serving human needs (no surprise) even though it's pretty good at producing GDP. But capitalism runs on exchange-value, not use-value. What's important to the powers that be, in other words, is GDP. And if the economy were good at producing use-values, it would be a fall in exchange-value (and surplus-value) that would lead to a capital strike. JD
