Over at the Motherblog, Kate Sheppard has a good report from Byron Dorgan's hearing on the inadequacy of GDP. As a pure economic measure, it speaks only of growth, not of distribution. In an age where the top one percent take 21 percent of the country's annual income, three percent in growth does not mean that the wages of most workers went up, or the economic security of most Americans increased. It may just mean that some very rich people got a whole lot richer. This, in general, has been the story of the Bush economy. But if GDP is an imperfect economic measure, it's a terrible measure of societal well-being. It has nothing to say about our health, our parks, our air, our families, our schools, our wars, our levels of civic trust, or just about anything else. As Karen Davis noted at the hearing, "a heart attack is accounted as a net gain for GDP, as all the health and service expenses related to it would put money into the system." That's pretty perverse. This would be less galling if GDP weren't damn near the only statistic used to explain how the country is doing, but it is. There's a tendency to pretend that we live in an economy, not a society, and the narrow focus on GDP as the only measurement that matters is a contributor to that myopia. But it's dumb. If your mother got a raise this year, your brother failed out of school, lead was discovered in your pipes, and your father suffered a heart attack, you wouldn't tell folks your family was doing great. But that's how GDP works. That's not to say there's a perfect alternative out there, but there's no reason the National Academy of Science couldn't be asked to come up with a credible well-being index, and we'd at least have that metric running concurrently so we could use it as a basis for comparison. And it's long overdue. Robert F. Kennedy was on this kick 40 years ago:
