Is GDP An Obsolete Measure of Progress?

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Is GDP An Obsolete Measure of Progress?

The GDP, generally expressed as a per-capita figure and often adjusted to reflect purchasing power, represents the market value of good and services produced within a nation's boundaries. Sounds reasonable. Until we consider what it doesn't measure: the general progress in health and education, the condition of public infrastructure, fuel efficiency, community and leisure.

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One new calculation that's been attracting attention is the Happy Planet Index (HPI), which combines economic metrics with indicators of well-being, including subjective measures of life satisfaction, which have become quite sophisticated (HPI uses data from Gallup, World Values Survey, and Ecological Footprint). The HPI assesses social and economic well-being in the context of resources used, looking at the degree of human happiness generated per quantity of environment consumed. The HPI metric was driven in part by the recognition that the environmental costs of economic growth must be figured into standard-of-living reports.
(See the worst business deals of 2009.)


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The matter of how a nation measures performance is far from trivial, says Gus Speth, particularly at a time when environment sustainability is on many people's minds. He observes: "You tend to get what you measure, so we'd better measure what we want." In other words, to a certain extent we are what we count.
(See pictures of the stock market crash of 1929.)
For Nic Marks, the key shift introduced by the HPI is its "move away from measuring production and toward measuring consumption. The HPI serves as a signpost pointing more toward a society we want to live in — the delivery of good lives rather than the delivery of more goods."
So how does the U.S. fare in HPI terms? Not so good. It sits pretty far down the list at 114. The U.K. is 74, behind Germany, Italy and France. Topping the chart is Costa Rica, which has long life expectancy, high life satisfaction, and a per capita ecological footprint one-fourth the size of the U.S.


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• Economists start to consider that money can't buy happiness (guardian.co.uk)

When Economics Meets Politics

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...without any major wars or world-shaking political or geopolitical disruptions.
...that three major struggles — the banks vs. President Obama, China vs. Google & friends, and the world vs. Iran — can be defused with win-win compromises rather than win-lose confrontations.
Moreover, our financial crisis was the result of a broad national breakdown in ethics
The economics of recovery were always hard, but in 2010 politics and geopolitics could make them even harder. Pray that cooler heads prevail.

 Two strategies:

• win -win strategy, means negotiations
• win - lose strategy means sanctions.

or means war.
Pay.

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A science book worth your time - USATODAY.com

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A science book worth your time - USATODAY.com

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In the book, Carroll recounts the history of scientists thinking about the "arrow of time," the clock's curiously one-dimensional march ever onward (we have up and down, right and left, backwards and forwards, but time just zips along ever forward). In particular, he revisits some of the 19th century thinkers, such as statistical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, overshadowed today by 20th century icons like Einstein.

Boltzmann and colleagues put entropy, energy's tendency toward disorder, on a statistical basis, offering a physics interpretation of time. Time results from entropy sending events, everything from the egg scrambled for your breakfast to stars running out of steam over billions of years, heading relentlessly one-way, never to unscramble themselves or restart their fires again.

One of the mysteries of the universe is its beginning in a highly-ordered low-entropy state, a hot, dense ball of energy some 13.7 billion years ago called the Big Bang. (Which was low-entropy in the sense that its energy was so useful for making stars, galaxies, planets, people and everything else, energy once spent that it couldn't be re-ordered like that breakfast egg that could be scrambled, poached or served sunny side up, but never put back together again.) "Why highly-ordered but not perfectly ordered,"

German opinion, Good is perfect, close to perfect order means close to God

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