{"id":65742,"date":"2015-11-02T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=65742"},"modified":"2015-10-30T14:02:26","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T14:02:26","slug":"is-gdp-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/is-gdp-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Is GDP Over?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have We Finally Moved Beyond GDP?<\/em> Economists from rich countries increasingly agree: Sustainable development and reducing inequality matter more than economic growth. To help overcome inequality we need to do much more than total up an economy\u2019s goods and services.<\/em><\/p>\n

20 Oct 2015 – <\/em>Organizers of October\u2019s fifth OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy could barely contain their sense of satisfaction when the three-day event opened in Guadalajara, Mexico.<\/p>\n

Why all the good cheer? Officials at the OECD, the official economic research agency of the developed world, feel they haven\u2019t just been organizing gabfests since the first of these triennial forums in 2004. They believe they\u2019ve been helping change how the world \u2014 or at least the global public policy community \u2014 thinks about inequality.<\/p>\n

And that belief, prominent independent observers believe, reflects a healthy dose of reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now have a broad consensus that more equal societies perform better,\u201d as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it in his World Forum keynote address to the over 1,000 government statisticians, academics, and civil society analysts on hand in Guadalajara.<\/p>\n

\"\u201cWhat<\/a>

\u201cWhat we measure affects what we do,\u201d Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz told the fifth OECD World Forum on stats and policy last week in Guadalajara. Photo: OECD.<\/p><\/div>\n

The OECD, Stiglitz observed, deserves much of the credit for this new consensus. The agency\u2019s efforts have helped shift the global analytical mainstream off a mindless fixation on GDP \u2014 an economy\u2019s total output of goods and services \u2014 and onto the importance of developing a sustainable \u201cprosperity for all.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the United States today, pundits and politicians still regularly dismiss worries about our contemporary global prosperity for just a few as little more than do-gooder posturing. But at the World Forum in Guadalajara, no one treated inequality as anything less than a dangerous social pathology.<\/p>\n

\u201cInequality is becoming unbearable,\u201d former Inter-American Development Bank president Enrique Yglesias pronounced. Our economic chasms have reached \u201cobscene proportions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deeply unequal nations like Britain, lamented Catrina Williams of the UK Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, stand \u201con the brink of being permanently divided\u201d as the offspring of the most affluent increasingly occupy most of the key levers of power in everything from the judiciary to the media.<\/p>\n

One rising Mexican political star at the World Forum, Guadalajara mayor Arist\u00f3teles Sandoval, obviously sees outrage over inequality as a winning political strategy. The young and charismatic Sandoval, a possible presidential candidate for Mexico\u2019s ruling PRI party in 2018, spent some of his forum face-time blasting the intense concentration of our global wealth.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s 80 richest individuals, Sandoval noted, have as much wealth as humanity\u2019s poorest half. We have problems \u201cwhen wealth concentrates in too few hands,\u201d he declared, and the state \u201cmust intervene.\u201d<\/p>\n

OECD officials took the opportunity of the World Forum, the first held in the Americas, to release the latest edition of the How\u2019s Life?<\/em> series, a four-year-old effort to get the world focusing, as OECD Secretary-General Jos\u00e9 Angel Gurr\u00eda puts it, \u201con people and the quality of their lives, not just whether GDP is going up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new How\u2019s Life?<\/em> rates the 34 OECD nations across 11 \u201cquality of life\u201d and \u201cmaterial conditions\u201d measures that range from environmental quality and work-life balance to housing and income and wealth. The data can make for jaw-dropping reading. One example: Full-time workers in France and Germany average an hour per day more leisure than workers in the United States and Australia.<\/p>\n

Another: The most affluent 10 percent of the population in Denmark and Finland are taking home about five times the income of poorest 10 percent. In the United States, it\u2019s close to 19 times. In Mexico, it\u2019s 25.<\/p>\n

Inequalities within nations, the 2015 How\u2019s Life?<\/em> emphasizes, can rival inequalities between nations. In the UK, for instance, incomes run 50 percent higher in the London area than in Wales.<\/p>\n

In Mexico, a separate new OECD study released at the Guadalajara World Forum details, the differences can be even starker. Household disposable income in Chiapas only averages one-third the disposable income in Mexico\u2019s capital city region.<\/p>\n

But powerful stats like these can only take us so far. Stats on their own don\u2019t move national governments. Indeed, stats on their own don\u2019t even automatically move the global organizations that create them, as former UK civil service chief Gus O\u2019Donnell made clear in one particularly dramatic World Forum moment.<\/p>\n

Researchers at top global economic institutions, O\u2019Donnell noted, have made a convincing case that modern societies need to become more equal, go beyond GDP, and begin paying prime attention to the actual economic, social, and environmental well-being of their people. Yet the global institutions where these researchers labor continue to single-mindedly lecture nations dependent on their support on the inadequacies of their GDPs. These agencies, O\u2019Donnell lashed out, need to focus instead on \u201cwhat\u2019s wrong with our well-being.\u201d<\/p>\n

On paper at least, the new \u201csustainable development goals\u201d<\/a> adopted at the United Nations earlier this fall should make the \u201cbeyond GDP\u201d wisdom of global economic agency researchers much more difficult to ignore. These new \u201cSDGs\u201d even include one goal that explicitly calls on nations to \u201creduce inequality within and among nations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvidence shows,\u201d this new sustainable development goal points out<\/a>, that \u201cbeyond a certain threshold, inequality harms growth and poverty reduction, the quality of relations in the public and political spheres, and individuals\u2019 sense of fulfillment and self-worth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The agenda adopted at the UN Sustainable Development summit gives nations 15 years to achieve the new goals and, in the process, \u201cend poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all.\u201d<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t, say critics, hold your breath. The new goals, they charge<\/a>, \u201cwill not deliver the new economy that the world so desperately needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the problem? The goals\u2019 creators, writes London School of Economics analyst Jason Hickel, are aiming \u201cto reduce poverty and inequality without touching the wealth and power of the global 1 percent.\u201d The new goals fail to understand that \u201cmass poverty\u201d reflects \u201cextreme wealth accumulation and overconsumption by a few.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Guadalajara, NGO leaders seemed to see the new UN goals in a more positive light. The goals have emerged from \u201can intergovernmental negotiation,\u201d as \u201cvery much a product of realpolitik,\u201d Claire Melamed of the London-based Overseas Development Institute told me in a World Forum interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty astonishing,\u201d Melamed added, \u201cthat that many governments managed to agree on a free-standing goal on inequality and goals on sustainable production and consumption.\u201d The new UN goals, she summed up, \u201cgive advocacy groups another tool in their toolbox.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this new sustainable development tool, Melamed readily acknowledges, will only make a difference if advocacy groups use it \u2014 \u201cin clever and politically smart ways\u201d \u2014 to hammer home pressure on their governments and the global agencies that hover over them.<\/p>\n

If that pressure doesn\u2019t build, then the gap between the egalitarian \u201cbeyond GDP\u201d insights of global agency policy analysts and the actual inequality-widening policy demands on governments from the movers and shakers of global economic institutions will only continue to widen.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Sam Pizzigati edits <\/em>Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies online monthly on excess and inequality. His latest book is\u00a0<\/em>The Rich Don\u2019t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (Seven Stories Press).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 inequality.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have We Finally Moved Beyond GDP? Economists from rich countries increasingly agree: Sustainable development and reducing inequality matter more than economic growth. To help overcome inequality we need to do much more than total up an economy\u2019s goods and services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}