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18 March

You might have noticed a spate of media stories yesterday about the year 1976, coupled with a question: was it a good year to be alive? Cue references to flares, hot summers, water shortages, inflation, the Brotherhood of Man, etc.

What sparked all this is a new report from the New Economics Foundation, Britain's most interesting think tank (I'm not trying to damn them with faint praise, honestly), showcasing a new measure of social progress they've cooked up, which they call MDP (Measure of Domestic Progress). NEF has a long history of trying to highlight the crucial fact that our current measure of 'progress' - Gross Domestic Product, or GDP - is woefully inadequate. GDP simply measures the amount of 'stuff' made, bought and sold in any given year - not whether any of that stuff is socially or environmentally useful or not. Chopping down a forest and turning it into toilet paper boosts GDP, as does an increase in the sale of rape alarms or spending millions cleaning up after an oil spill. If we don't measure progress, growth, development - whatever you want to call it - properly, then calling for more of it incessantly, as all politicians of all parties (bar the Greens) do, is simply mindless, indeed destructive, rhetoric.

The MDP is an attempt to rectify this by measuring not consumption but quality of life. It takes into account things like the value of unpaid work, crime levels, family breakdown and environmental pollution. When it's compared to GDP it shows that social progress peaked in 1976, then tailed off steeply - as GDP continued to rise.

This is important stuff. Our modern myth of constant progress - despite so much evidence to the contrary - is built on flawed measurements like GDP, which crudely assume that if we're buying more things we're better off. You can read the NEF's full report here

Posted by paul at March 18, 2004 12:16 PM

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