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| Mar 05, 2009 12:49 am |
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re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: US Economy and Stimulus - another model? |
| abbeboulah
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Mr. Holford,
If your comment
"If you're trying to argue that the health and prosperity of a national economy can be measured and managed by guaging the amount of "love" in the economy, I can only conclude that you're not a serious person."
is indended to be a comment ot James Booth's post, I can only conclude that you have not read that post and/or not understood it, or that there is something wrong with your concluding ability.
It further strongly suggests, together with previous evidence, that your contribution on this forum is less aimed at exchanging useful information and argument to the issues but predominantly towards insulting people. This might on occasion even be fun, even if it's not the purpose of the forum, but only if accompanied by some seasoning of humor and wit, both of which are sorely lacking from your posts.
If I may presume to speak for at least some others here, who are sincerely trying to find better ways of dealing with the crises that (blind, deaf, dumb, stupid...) obsession with GDP-guided policies have gotten us into: we would be indeed be interested in your promised treatise and would prefer to wait to hear from you until that is done.
===
Meanwhile:
The question of what is included in the GDP -- which, incidentally, once was also conceived by some (bureaucrat?) person behind a desk -- leads to a fruitless enumeration of everything that it tries to capture. It is more enlightening to ask what it does include, that demonstrably does not contribute much to human or societal well-being. One such example is everything that has to do with waste. Every increase in the output of garbage which then leads to more activity of the activities euphemistically entered into the GDP accounting as "waste management", paid for by taxes, is increasing GDP, while a reduction of waste would reduce GDP.
An interesting thought experiment: Imagine an economy consisting of homesteads where everything needed for the survival of its residents is produced by the community living there -- e.g. a family. This may sound "utopian" and therefore "not serious", but I have personally seen remnants of such economies; farmsteads in Austria or in Indonesia, waterfront communities ('stilt' houses in the water) in Malaysia. They were, for example in Singapore, relentlessly opposed by GDP-drunken governments, (Singapore had numerous "fires of convenience" to destroy these communities) because of course nothing produced there ever could be accounted for, -- and taxed -- in the respective country's GDP.
In such communities one could find, if one were so inclined, examples of fine craftsmanship, construction ingenuity, expert gardening and animal husbandry, art -- e.g. in form of the handmade gifts with which the members of the community expressed their love for one another, or in the little baskets of flowers offered every day by the Balinese, to their various gods high and low, or the songs with which such people entertained each other and nourished their spirits. Talking about spirits, this even included the expertise with which e.g Swiss and Austrian mountain folk converted their apples, pears, and various other fruits and herbs to potent and very much inspiring beverages. (They also produced very little if any garbage that couldn't be recycled into fertilizer etc.) Or the little precious monuments they built everywhere in the countryside to honor some deity or saint, atone for some unspecified sin, or to remember some revered member of the community. Just to name some examples, none of which -- NONE -- ever made it into the GDP, simply because they were not part of any market, free or otherwise, from which taxes could be extracted.
I am not saying that we should necessarily revert to such economies. Or that measures such as the GDP are entirely useless. But the argument that exclusive reliance on such measures by policy-making agencies has been responsible for the disappearance of many such elements that were not just life-enhancing and made life more worth living, is one that cannot be countered with condescending remarks such as that GDP 'measures reality'. (One almost feels sorry for people whose reality is measured by GDP.) And it more than justifies efforts to find better measures to guide economic policies. The fervor with which such efforts are opposed (and, in the case of Singapore, led to what by all criteria must be called criminal acts) makes one just a tad suspicious. Private Reply to abbeboulah (new win) |
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