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18 May 2010An important article in the New York Times magazine on the debate about GDP as a measure of progress and well-being.
The rise and fall of GDP by Jon Gertner is based on interviews with many of the key players in the debate including several members of the recent Sarkozy commission on the issue: Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel laureate in economics), Amartya Sen (another Nobel laureate in economics and one of the creators of the United Nations’ Human Development Index), Daniel Kahneman (Nobel laureate and key figure in behavioural economics), Robert Putnam (Harvard author of the influential Bowling Alone study) and Enrico Giovannini (the head of the Italian national statistics agency and a key figure in the international movement to introduce new well-being indicators). The sole critical voice he quotes is William Nordhaus of Yale.
The article gives a useful overview about how several key countries are moving away from GDP as the main measure of progress:
I have previously argued that the discussion of the deficiencies is essentially a sneaky attack on prosperity. There is nothing wrong with finding different measures of social progress – I often do it myself – but this is an attack on economic growth masquerading as a debate about measurement.
I intend to revisit this subject in more detail in the near future.
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