Tagged: GPI Atlantic
Silver Donald Cameron hearts Bhutan
A great little TED talk by a Nova Scotia apostle of Gross National Happiness.
H/T:BT
Urinal cakes and the Genuine Progress Indicator
Ron Coleman, please note: Tim Hartford, the Underground Economist, weighs Genuine Progress as it plays out in the men’s room of your favorite neighborhood pub. The question:
Whenever I go to the gentlemen’s toilet in a pub, I’m unsure how to behave… Should I urinate on the urinal cakes or not? At first, I think that if I urinate on them I’ll help to finish them earlier, thus making the publican purchase more of them, and helping the economy. But then I think, while I’m urinating, that if the publican has to buy more tablets, eventually he will probably have to raise the price of the beer, to my huge disappointment. So the question is, where should I urinate in the gentlemen’s toilets in the pub?
The answer: here.
H/T Daily Dish
Prosper and live long
Advocates of the Genuine Progress Index argue that traditional measures of our economic health, mainly the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), mislead us by mixing up good spending (on the likes of lobster, turnips, and bicycles) with bad (on oil spills, crime, and car crashes), and because it fails to account for depletion of natural resources. Those critiques, while valid and important, don’t completely obviate the relevance of GDP. A new chart from Gapminder (previously mentioned in one of my all-time favorite Contrarian posts), shows that higher GDP per person equals longer life:
The trend is unmistakable, and at first glance, the few outliers (South Africa, Russia, to a lesser extent, the USA) are countries with wide income disparity. Download larger versions here [pdf or ppt].
Hat tip: Cliff Kuang at Fast Company.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic
Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept.
In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia’s Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic. [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]
