GDP: Taking Aim at the Stat that Bamboozles

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



GDP: Taking Aim
at the Stat that Bamboozles
A conservative world leader and two world-famous economists who challenge conservative world leaders have joined up to call for a totally new global economic yardstick. And they want that yardstick to measure inequality.

September 28, 2009

By Sam Pizzigati


Sometime early this fall, new statistics are almost certainly going to show “positive” growth in gross domestic product, or GDP, for 2009’s third quarter. Economists, in quick order, will solemnly pronounce that the Great Recession has finally ended. Average working people, just as quickly, will have one more reason to be deeply suspicious about officialdom.

“The world over, citizens think we are lying to them,” a prominent figure in that officialdom, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, noted earlier this month. “And they have reasons to think like that.”

Statistics can lie, and the world’s single most important economic statistic, Sarkozy believes, has become something of a truth-perverting whopper. This all-dominating stat, GDP, essentially measures only what people are making for the market — and ignores every economic reality that impacts how well or poorly real people, in their daily lives, are actually doing.

That’s why GDP can be rising at the same time jobs are disappearing, homes are foreclosing, and paychecks are shrinking.

Last year, in the early stages of the current recession, Sarkozy moved to begin a “statistical revolution” and end GDP's political dominance. The French president, a right-of-center politico, asked two left-of-center Nobel-laureate economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, to lead a commission on the “measurement of economic performance and social progress.”

Two weeks ago, just before the meeting of the world’s 20 biggest economies in Pittsburgh, Stiglitz and Sen delivered the product of their commission’s deliberations, a thick report with recommendations for crafting a new yardstick for the world’s economies. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/sept28a.html

[PDJane]

1. Thank you.

This coincides with a personal belief; that the more equality there is, the better off the world will be.

[BolivarianHero]

2. I agree...,

Who gives a fuck if Saudi Arabia is rich when 1/3 of the female population can't read and tons of them are little more than sex slaves for dirty little (and I mean little) oil barons?