The morning sun warmed Wingary's ebony back as she knelt on the chocolate shaving earth of her garden. With lightly callused hands she plucked the weeds from the soil around her nasturtium leaf green soybean seedlings. As she worked, Wingary sang a greeting to the sun. Her honey sweet voice was joined by a choir of other women, all working in their gardens. Also adding to the heavenly sound was Wingary's son. He was conveniently secured in a sling at her breast and cooed in contentment as he suckled. Wingary looked down at her chocolate pudding baby, and a smile danced across her face. Her smile still lingering, Wingary finished weeding and rose to fetch some water. Every day she diligently tended her garden, and in return it provided enough food to feed her family, plus a bit extra to trade.
Wingary strolled out of the garden and through the village towards the well. She walked by the packed mud walls of her house. In her mind she saw the cozy interior. She pictured the fire pit that kept the hut warm on cold nights; the highly prized wooden chest where the family kept their ceremonial clothes and the bed of furs that Wingary slept in with her husband, Matumbo, and the baby. Wingary had lived in the village her whole life, and there were few houses that she could not picture in vivid detail, both inside and out. She walked by one more house and came into sight of the well. There was a small gathering of villagers around it, and in the middle of them was a woman wearing strange clothes. Unlike the multicolored wrap worn by the village women, the stranger wore a blouse as white as bleached bones and dun pants. The woman was demonstrating how to make baby formula and extolling it's virtues as she did so. When the demonstration was done the woman gave out boxes of formula, and Wingary took one, convinced that it would make her baby grow up healthy and strong.
After a month the formula ran out, but so had Wingary's milk, and the family had no choice but to get more formula. This time they had to buy it and, having no money, Matumbo was forced to get work that paid wages. He found a job on a pineapple plantation 30 miles away. That was too far to commute on foot, so the family moved to the plantation. Wingary longed to go back to the village. They decided that as soon as the baby was weaned they would return to it. Things did not go as planned. Two months later the baby got sick and died, poisoned by pesticides in the water from the plantation. Matumbo was so devastated by the loss of his son that he took to drinking. One night in a drunken rage he beat Wingary. With shrieks of fury he blamed her for the death of their baby and struck her until crimson blood flowed through cuts in her midnight skin. And as Wingary slowly passed out from the pain, she could hear in the distance a blaring radio; "The Gross Domestic Product is on a steady rise. The number of people with jobs has doubled in the past couple years. Yes sir, things are looking up!"
The Gross Domestic Product, abbreviated GDP, is a statistic used by governments to measure progress. It "is the total value in money terms of all the production in a country in one year" (Anderson, 19). The Gross National Product, abbreviated GNP, is the same as the GDP plus unearned income flowing into the country, minus unearned income flowing out of the country. The value of the GDP is very close to that of the GNP for a country like the US, and in this paper I will treat them as the same thing.
I think that it is wrong to use the GDP as a yardstick for measuring societal progress. The misleading nature of the GDP has long been know, as is illustrated by this quote from Simon Kuznets, the original architect of the GNP. "The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined [by the GDP]" (Redefining Progress, 1). When politicians, corporate officials and others base their decisions on the state of the GDP the environment and children are short-changed, lowering our present and future quality of life.
The environment suffers when the GDP is used as a measurement of welfare. The GDP "treat[s] the depletion of natural capital as income rather than as the depreciation of an asset... violat[ing] basic accounting principles and common sense"(Cobb, Halstead and Rowe, 7). When a wetland is drained to make more farm land the GDP counts the increase in production from that farm and says that the economy is growing. What it does not take into account are the "long term economic, environmental and social costs involved in the loss of the [wetland]"(Cobb, Halstead and Rowe, 7). An acre of wetland produces an estimated $1,390 of services in a year. These are services such as purifying water; acting as a flood buffer and being a resting place for migratory birds, some of which help farmers with pest control and others that help with pollination. All of these services are necessary for a healthy economy and are very costly to replicate. Thus in reality the draining of the wetland did not help to boost the economy but to undermine it. Another of the many examples of harm to the environment that increases the GDP is pollution. "The GDP counts pollution as a double benefit to the economy: once when the factory creates it as a side effect of production, and then again when a multi-billion dollar... program is necessary to clean it up"(Cobb, Halstead and Rowe, 11). Surely there is no sense in using an economic decision making tool that, "for all practical purpose, treats the reckless destruction of the environment as a good thing" (Redefining Progress, 2)! A tool that considers irrepairable damage to the economic foundation (i.e. the environment) and pollution to be beneficial. The biggest reason that the misuse of the GDP continues is that most of its harmful effects are long term. It can take decades or more for damage to the environment to begin effecting peoples lives. Problems relating to children often take a long time to show up as well.
When the goal is increasing the GDP the result is that the next generation is neglected. The GDP increases as more adults move out of the household economy and into marketplace jobs. If these adults are also parents they are forced to leave their children with a childcare provider. "The quality with which [childcare] is done can have a major impact on the quality of life experienced by the next generation"(Gilman, 29). Unfortunately "commercial childcare is generally inferior to [the] more personal forms of care in families"(Cobb, Halstead and Rowe, 14). The result of this can be seen in the parallel trends of increasing time parents spend in the workplace and increasing incidence of youth crime. Another example of the lack of importance placed by economic decision makers on making sure that children are raised well is the recent proposed cut in federal funding for education. Politicians argue that federal spending does not do as much to boost the economy as business and household spending. In truth spending has the same effect on the GDP regardless of who spends it. The only significant difference between federal and household spending is what the money is spent on. If such cuts were passed, instead of paying for education that would allow children to get good jobs when they grew up, the money would very likely be spent on frivolities such as second televisions, overpriced clothing and gas guzzling cars. Concentrating on boosting the GDP destroys the future for the empty pleasures of the present.
Robert F. Kennedy once said "we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things... The GNP counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play"(Redefining Progress, 2). Children are growing up uneducated and most importantly unloved. The environment on which we depend for the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the very air we breath is being damaged, maybe permanently. And all the while the GDP steadily rises. When are we going to wake up? The misuse of the GDP is not as glamorous a problem as the logging of a stand of old growth forest, but if we change the way we use the GDP we may be able to save all the old growth forests, not just one stand. Too often we see a problem and try to fix it while ignoring the systemic flaw that caused the problem in the first place. This is a dilemma which is analogous to a test for insanity in which a person is put in a room with a wall full of running faucets and a large quantity of buckets and mops. Any sane person would simply go and turn off the tap, yet when the tap is the GDP and the water the destruction of our quality of life our approach seems to be to try to fix the problem with buckets and mops.
Anderson, Victor. Alternative Economic Indicators. London and
New York: Routledge, 1991
Cobb, Clifford, Ted Halstead and Jonathan Rowe. The Genuine Progress Indicator. San Francisco: Redefining Progress, 1995
Gilman, Robert. "From Dismal Science to Joyful Art." In Context 2 Spring 1983: 28-37
Redefining Progress. Critiques of the GDP. San Francisco: Redefining Progress, date unknown