🚀 go-pugleaf

Was from: cardin@slip.net (Richard Clark):

GPI stands for Genuine Progress Indicator.  It's the subject of the lead 
article in the October issue of _The Atlantic_, which contends that the 
age of GDP hegemony is over.  It's over because GDP is increasingly 
perceived, quite accurately, to be misleading and irrelevant.  GDP, 
Gross Domestic Product, has allowed us (as a society) to leave social 
and environmental costs out of our economic reckoning.  It has 
facilitated the illusion that such things as the following have no 
economic significance:  family breakdown and crime, the destruction of 
farmland and unprecedented numbers of entire species, 
underemployment and the loss of free time.  The costs of such 
ignorance are increasingly large, and ever more people are coming to 
understand this.

The GPI (Gross Progress Indicator) is a complex measurement which 
the federal government, with its enormous statistical resources, could 
easily make operational.  The GPI, as a measure of societal progress, 
would measure more than twenty aspects of our economic lives which 
the GDP ignores.  In addition to measuring the totality of how much we 
produce, the GPI also factors in any significant changes in income 
distribution, and accounts for the value of non-monetized (non-market) 
work contributed by community or household effort.  It also accounts 
for such "externalities" as the costs of pollution and the disappearance 
of natural resources.  In short, it distinguishes between the costs and 
benefits of "growth."

When such factors are taken into account, a much different picture of 
our economic progress over the last 50 years emerges.  Using the GPI 
we see an upward curve from the early 50s until about 1970, but then 
there is a gradual decline (in measured progress) of about 45%.  And so 
we see that the real costs of increased economic activity---at least the 
kind we are locked into now---have begun to outweigh the benefits!  In 
other words, the kind of economic growth we have now  has really 
become uneconomic.

Specifically, the GPI reveals that a growing amount of what we now 
call growth (or GDP) is really just one of three things in disguise: 
   
   fixing blunders and social decay from the past, 
   
   borrowing resources from the future, or 
   
   shifting functions from the traditional realm of household and 
   community to the realm of the monetized economy.

More than 400 economists and a growing number of opinion leaders, 
including Robert Eisner, the former president of the American 
Economic Association, and Alvin Toffler, Newt's favorite futurist, have 
endorsed the GPI as an important step forward.  Research Institutes in 
Germany and the UK. have replicated it for their countries.  

It seems that economic measurement is due for radical change.


   Richard Clark


Jay
-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
"The market economy is replacing a complex organic
 environment with a simplified inorganic one, literally
 dissembling a biosphere that has supported humanity for
 countless millennia.  In the course of replacing the complex
 ecological relationships, on which all living things depend,
 with more elementary ones, capitalism is restoring the
 biosphere to a stage where it will be able to support only
 simpler forms of life. ... The earth will become incapable of
 supporting humanity itself." [Bookchin 1980:230-1]