There is broad agreement that global society should strive for a high quality of life that is equitably shared and sustainable. Several groups and reports have concluded that GDP is dangerously inadequate as a measure of quality of life — including those published by the French government's 2008 Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress10, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future11 and the European Commission's ongoing Beyond GDP initiative. That conclusion was also echoed in 'The Future We Want', the declaration of the 2012 Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development agreed to by all UN member states.
Nonetheless, GDP remains entrenched1. Vested interests are partly responsible. Former US President Bill Clinton's small move towards a 'green GDP', which factored in some of the environmental consequences of growth, was killed by the coal industry. However, much of the problem is that no alternative measure stands out as a clear successor.
Creating that successor will require a sustained, transdisciplinary effort to integrate metrics and build consensus. One potential vehicle for doing this is the setting up of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a process that is now under way to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Established in 2000, the MDGs comprise eight basic targets that include eradicating extreme poverty and establishing universal primary education, gender equality and environmental sustainability. Currently both the MDGs and the suggested SDGs are only lists of goals with isolated indicators. But the SDG process can and should be expanded to include comprehensive and integrated measures of sustainable well-being12.
Any 'top-down' process must be supplemented with a 'bottom-up' engagement of civil society that includes city and regional governments, non-governmental organizations, business and other parties. We recently formed the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity (www.asap4all.com) to do just that. This web-based 'network of networks' can communicate research about sustainable quality of life and the elements that contribute to it (see Supplementary Information), and so help to build consensus among the thousands of groups now concerned with these issues.
If undertaken with sufficiently broad participation, the hunt for the successor to GDP might be completed by 2015. There are significant barriers to doing this, including bureaucratic inertia and the tendency of governments, academia and other groups to work in isolation....
The successor to GDP should be a new set of metrics that integrates current knowledge of how ecology, economics, psychology and sociology collectively contribute to establishing and measuring sustainable well-being. The new metrics must garner broad support from stakeholders in the coming conclaves.
It is often said that what you measure is what you get. Building the future we desire requires that we measure what we want, remembering that it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.
Nature 505, 283–285 (16 January 2014)
Development: Time to leave GDP behind
Robert Costanza,
Ida Kubiszewski,
Enrico Giovannini,
Hunter Lovins,
Jacqueline McGlade,
Kate E. Pickett,
Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir,
Debra Roberts,
Roberto De Vogli
& Richard Wilkinson
1 comment:
This has got to be a joke, right?
Tellingly, one of the sponsors of this project is that bulwark of ethical behavior, the European Commission.
The objective, I guess, will be to permanently reduce the wages and purchasing power of the many, have mediocre employment opportunities forever, and then tell the great unwashed that this is a "development" and that it was all done for their own good, to promote more ecological and political correct living standards among the masses.
GDP measures production of final goods and services. It is a very useful statistic, in many ways one of the most important consequences of the Keynesian revolution of the 30s. These unaccountable institutions should simply keep their hands off it.
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