{"id":13949,"date":"2015-10-30T06:35:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-30T11:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13949"},"modified":"2015-10-30T06:35:41","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T11:35:41","slug":"is-gdp-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13949","title":{"rendered":"Is GDP Over?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title single-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fpif.org\/is-gdp-over\/\" target=\"_blank\">Is GDP Over?<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"lede print-yes\"><strong>Economists from rich countries increasingly agree: Sustainable development and reducing inequality matter more than economic growth.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"lede print-yes\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-30051\" src=\"http:\/\/fpif.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/8766425525_f46492fd0a_k-722x481.jpg\" alt=\"sustainable-development-OECD-GDP-alternatives-growth-inequality\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Photo: World Bank Photo Collection \/ Flickr)<\/p>\n<p>Organizers of October\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>Why all the good cheer? Officials at the OECD, the official economic research agency of the developed world, feel they haven\u2019t just been organizing gabfests since the first of these triennial forums in 2004. They believe they\u2019ve been helping change how the world \u2014 or at least the global public policy community \u2014 thinks about inequality.<\/p>\n<p>And that belief, prominent independent observers believe, reflects a healthy dose of reality.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe now have a broad consensus that more equal societies perform better,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>The OECD, Stiglitz observed, deserves much of the credit for this new consensus. The agency\u2019s efforts have helped shift the global analytical mainstream off a mindless fixation on GDP \u2014 an economy\u2019s total output of goods and services \u2014 and onto the importance of developing a sustainable \u201cprosperity for all.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cInequality is becoming unbearable,\u201d former Inter-American Development Bank president Enrique Yglesias pronounced. Our economic chasms have reached \u201cobscene proportions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Deeply unequal nations like Britain, lamented Catrina Williams of the UK Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, stand \u201con the brink of being permanently divided\u201d as the offspring of the most affluent increasingly occupy most of the key levers of power in everything from the judiciary to the media.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is GDP Over? Economists from rich countries increasingly agree: Sustainable development and reducing inequality matter more than economic growth. (Photo: World Bank Photo Collection \/ Flickr) Organizers of October\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[190,10347,242,10346,9456,2164,669,2372,2084],"class_list":["post-13949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-data","tag-economic-measure","tag-economic-policy","tag-foreign-policy-in-focus","tag-gap","tag-oecd","tag-reality","tag-research","tag-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13950,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13949\/revisions\/13950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}