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Is GDP Over?

October 30, 2015

Is GDP Over?

Economists from rich countries increasingly agree: Sustainable development and reducing inequality matter more than economic growth.

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(Photo: World Bank Photo Collection / Flickr)

Organizers of October’s fifth OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy could barely contain their sense of satisfaction when the three-day event opened in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Why all the good cheer? Officials at the OECD, the official economic research agency of the developed world, feel they haven’t just been organizing gabfests since the first of these triennial forums in 2004. They believe they’ve been helping change how the world — or at least the global public policy community — thinks about inequality.

And that belief, prominent independent observers believe, reflects a healthy dose of reality.

“We now have a broad consensus that more equal societies perform better,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it in his World Forum keynote address to the over 1,000 government statisticians, academics, and civil society analysts on hand in Guadalajara.

The OECD, Stiglitz observed, deserves much of the credit for this new consensus. The agency’s efforts have helped shift the global analytical mainstream off a mindless fixation on GDP — an economy’s total output of goods and services — and onto the importance of developing a sustainable “prosperity for all.”

In the United States today, pundits and politicians still regularly dismiss worries about our contemporary global prosperity for just a few as little more than do-gooder posturing. But at the World Forum in Guadalajara, no one treated inequality as anything less than a dangerous social pathology.

“Inequality is becoming unbearable,” former Inter-American Development Bank president Enrique Yglesias pronounced. Our economic chasms have reached “obscene proportions.”

Deeply unequal nations like Britain, lamented Catrina Williams of the UK Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, stand “on the brink of being permanently divided” as the offspring of the most affluent increasingly occupy most of the key levers of power in everything from the judiciary to the media.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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