cyu
13th January 2010, 22:28
Excerpts from http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/10/economic-growth-feel-good-factor
should we welcome the return of the spendthrift habits that plunged us into crisis in the first place, or is it time to ask if traditional metrics of economic success – retail sales, house prices, even GDP growth – really point us in the right direction?
As far as the politicians are concerned, the obsession with economic growth continues unabated.
Britain is far from the only country to have discovered in the past two years that a record of rapid GDP growth does not guarantee long-term prosperity, let alone fairness or environmental sustainability.
with the issue of climate change becoming ever more urgent and a growing recognition that economic growth does not make people any happier, there are growing calls for growth and the endless consumption of ever more material goods to be downgraded as political goals.
Financial Services Authority chief Adair Turner last week questioned whether economic growth was a "false god". He said that not only did growth harm the climate by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, but "all the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness".
This is an area some economists have tried to deal with for several decades, by attempting to subtract from GDP figures the social or environmental consequences of growth. Cleaning up an oil spill counts towards GDP, but the environmental damage it causes does not; pumping the oil out of the ground counts as economic activity, but the resource depletion it implies is not accounted for.
For years, the economists trying to come up with alternative measures of welfare or sustainability were treated by the mainstream of the dismal science as tree-huggers who were trying to value things that were impossible to count, and therefore best ignored.
Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, who works on development and poverty issues, and argues that conventional models of development increase poverty and ecological disaster.
Professor David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire... has spent decades working on measures of happiness and wellbeing which, he says, offer politicians much more useful ways to think about what policy they should aim for, rather than merely expanding GDP.
Blanchflower rejects the idea that happiness is difficult to measure. Not only are there huge amounts of survey data over decades asking people about how they feel, he says, but cross-checks with other disciplines such as psychology or medicine and their data on metrics such as blood pressure work very well. And the fundamental truth the data reveal is that, despite decades of economic growth in the western world, people have not got happier.
should we welcome the return of the spendthrift habits that plunged us into crisis in the first place, or is it time to ask if traditional metrics of economic success – retail sales, house prices, even GDP growth – really point us in the right direction?
As far as the politicians are concerned, the obsession with economic growth continues unabated.
Britain is far from the only country to have discovered in the past two years that a record of rapid GDP growth does not guarantee long-term prosperity, let alone fairness or environmental sustainability.
with the issue of climate change becoming ever more urgent and a growing recognition that economic growth does not make people any happier, there are growing calls for growth and the endless consumption of ever more material goods to be downgraded as political goals.
Financial Services Authority chief Adair Turner last week questioned whether economic growth was a "false god". He said that not only did growth harm the climate by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, but "all the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness".
This is an area some economists have tried to deal with for several decades, by attempting to subtract from GDP figures the social or environmental consequences of growth. Cleaning up an oil spill counts towards GDP, but the environmental damage it causes does not; pumping the oil out of the ground counts as economic activity, but the resource depletion it implies is not accounted for.
For years, the economists trying to come up with alternative measures of welfare or sustainability were treated by the mainstream of the dismal science as tree-huggers who were trying to value things that were impossible to count, and therefore best ignored.
Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, who works on development and poverty issues, and argues that conventional models of development increase poverty and ecological disaster.
Professor David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire... has spent decades working on measures of happiness and wellbeing which, he says, offer politicians much more useful ways to think about what policy they should aim for, rather than merely expanding GDP.
Blanchflower rejects the idea that happiness is difficult to measure. Not only are there huge amounts of survey data over decades asking people about how they feel, he says, but cross-checks with other disciplines such as psychology or medicine and their data on metrics such as blood pressure work very well. And the fundamental truth the data reveal is that, despite decades of economic growth in the western world, people have not got happier.