GDP Douchebaggery
Our favorite crypto-Hungarian (or not) Sárközy is making waves by capitulating to every anti-American/anti-globalizationist economist’s wet dream:
No one can accuse Nicolas Sarkozy of aiming low. The French president wants to make his country the “soul” of the new Renaissance this world so badly needs.
The goal of reconstructing rules and norms sounds distinctly old-fashioned, but Mr. Sarkozy’s approach is thoroughly modern. He wants to put a number on the progress of his nation’s soul.
Only the dullest materialist would consider per capita gross domestic product, a standard measure of national prosperity, up to the job. The metric includes only actual cash payments for goods and services, which are adjusted arbitrarily for changes in quality. Among other weaknesses, it ignores the depletion of resources, environmental damage, leisure time and unpaid labor.So Mr. Sarkozy has turned to two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, for help. Mr. Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor, gained fame for spurning conventional economic wisdom on development, and Mr. Sen, who teaches at Harvard University, helped create the leading alternative to GDP, the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI).
But the HDI won’t do the trick. The three-part measure — of education, life expectancy and economic output — provides a rough index of economic progress in poor countries. But France already has minimal rates of preventable diseases and a highly educated population. The HDI can’t determine whether the nation is becoming more civilized, Mr. Sarkozy’s stated objective.
Messrs. Stiglitz and Sen might try to create a sort of rich-country development index. This measure could include components for culture (say sales of opera tickets or Jerry Lewis DVDs), grand architectural projects (one of Mr. Sarkozy’s special interests) and holidays in beautiful locations (the president just went to Egypt with his new girlfriend, Carla Bruni). They also might try to measure destruction to the environment and leisure — though if they give too much value to the latter, they will undercut Mr. Sarkozy’s parallel initiative of snuffing out the Gallic 35-hour week.
…Chapeaus off to Messrs. Stiglitz and Sen if they can put a number on such spiritual matters — but don’t hold your breath.
Let me tell you what this is —- if this isn’t immediately obvious to you: A stupid fuckin’ idea meant to generate publicity and goodwill for Sarko.
Let us assume that GDP is rife with all the sort of problems mentioned above i.e. that it doesn’t capture the intangible value in, say, smoking Gauloises all day in a tragically hip Parisian cafe, eating some of the world’s best baguettes, snootily looking down at the non-Francophile world…after picking up your welfare check at the dole office or whathaveyou.
The problem is, once you start getting away from GDP, everything becomes untenably subjective. If we were to count and weight GDP with, perhaps, dobos torta consumption by capita, well, pretty clear that Hungary would rocket to the top. Or how about number of ex-pat douchebags per capita?
Hhhhhmmmmm.
That might be tough. The Czech Republic might win that one.
How about palm trees per capita? Cuba might do pretty well there, no? England, not so much. How about…how’s about not suggesting anything this fuckin’ stupid ever again.
BTW there is a red herring in the article above concerning environmental damage —- environmental damage is not linearly correlated with GDP. In fact, it looks sort of like a normal distribution ——- environmental damage rises in concert with GDP while a nation is poor, after sometime it actually drops off the richer the nation gets b/c a high quality environment becomes a public good that that richer countries want and, more importantly, can fuckin’ afford.
