Reactions of the SCORAI community to Project Syndicate: Is It Time to Abandon GDP?
Richard Rosen
Maurie, thanks for this article on GDP. Needless-to-say these problems with GDP as an index of anything useful also points out the problems with saying one is in favor of “no growth” or negative growth — in what? — Rich
Halina Brown
This article does not say anything that has not been said, many many time before. My Undergraduate students can recite the list of what is wrong with GDP. Like its predecessors, this article never really gets to answering the question of why GDP is used, despite its many well recognized shortcomings. The answer lies in its very flaw of not representing the well-being of the majority of the population: it is used because every time GDP increases the income and wealth of the rich and powerful increases with it while giving an illusion that the society at large benefits. Why would those who benefit from using GDP (and they have great power) want to abandon it?
To ask why we still use GDP is like asking why we still hold on to a tax code and many other institutions that perpetuate income inequality and other social injustices. The issue is not technocratic but political.
A much more interesting question would be not whether we should abandon GDP nor what indicators should replace GDP, but rather what would it take to expose to citizens what GDP represents. Maybe Bernie Sanders had once upon a time a chance to reveal the real meaning of the use of GDP. I do not count on Hillary.
Joachim Spangenberg
I can only support Halina – it is no technical but a political matter. There is no problem for degrowth as any environmentally motivated degrowth strategy measures its success in reducing physical throughput, not in monetary terms. Reduced gdp is a plausible but not necessarily inevitable side effect…
Regards, Joachim Spangenberg
Jean Boucher
Have we heard of the GDP paradox? We all agree on its shortcomings but keep using it.
fun fun,Jean
