This week I have been reading Walter Wriston's feisty little 1992 book
"The Twilight of Sovereignty, etc," an exuberant paean to a galactic
world of knowledge workers the "limits to growth" people never knew.
Wriston takes a whole chapter to trash the common instruments of
economic measurement, especially the GNP. Listen to a representative
riff from that chapter (Where We Stand):
The standard industrial codes that once told how industry
is organized are now out-of-date. Of the twelve major code
divisions, only two reflect the service industry, although
about 80 percent of Americans work in a service business.
Accurate numbers are available on the number of brakemen
on American railroads but not on the number of computer
programmers. This is but one example of why today's econ-
omy cannot be fitted into yesterday's standards. If basic
macroeconomic measurements, such as the GNP and productive
capacity, do not mean what they once did, the question then
becomes: Can we construct new, more reliable measures of the
kind of economy we now have?
Well, I always thought there was something hokey and astigmatic about
the GNP, but I wasn't ready to call it out on Main Street like Wriston,
and long before computers appeared in every office Betty Friedan and
Gloria Steinem were already around to tell us that every year billions
of woman-hours of housework and child-rearing were disappearing into
The Great Bit-Bucket In The Sky without so much as an audible whimper.
No doubt many books have appeared since Wriston's with the same thesis.
Just how are labor and its yields figured in present company, pray?
valis
Occupied America
-- By viewing economic issues as subordinate phenomena
and securing the freedom of all to sleep
beneath the bridges of Washington,
the GOP has convinced at least itself that
the very best of good societies will be conjured --
