Description
We can't - unless we know how to balance the real costs and benefits of economic activity, including the costs that aren't at all obvious. An ill-managed pulp mill may bring jobs and profits, for example, but it also depletes the forest and sullies the river. Overtime work boosts production and incomes, but constant overtime infringes on family time and community life. We rarely evaluate such costs at all, even though we see them every day in the form of vanished fisheries, broken families, gridlocked cities, smog-filled air, drug abuse, and other social and environmental woes. To build a sustainable economy, we need tools of analysis that properly value social, economic and environmental assets, tools that carefully appraise both costs and benefits, and balance them against one another. That's what's known as "full-cost accounting." And that's what the Genuine Progress Index is designed to provide. What's wrong with the tools we're using now? Today, the most commonly-used measure of economic progress is still the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is simply the total value of all the goods and services that are exchanged for money. The GDP literally does not count some of our greatest sources of wealth - unpaid household labour, volunteerism, and a clean environment, for example. Worse, the GDP doesn't distinguish between good things and bad ones - and it counts the depletion of our natural wealth as economic gain. ...