On his book Measuring Tomorrow: Accounting for Well-Being, Resilience, and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century
Cover Interview of January 28, 2018
In a nutshell
Measuring Tomorrow
is about ending our passion for growth and engaging in the well-being and
sustainability transition. Growth of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, captures
only a tiny fraction of what goes on in complex human societies: it tracks some
but not all of economic well-being (saying nothing about fundamental issues
such as income inequality); it does not account for most dimensions of
well-being (think about the importance of health, education or happiness for
your own quality of life); and it does not account at all for
sustainability, which basically means well-being not just today but also
tomorrow (imagine your quality of life on a planet where the temperature would
be four degrees higher or where there would be scant drinkable water or
breathable air). This book’s essential argument is that well-being (human
flourishing), resilience (resisting to shocks) and sustainability (caring about
the future) should become the collective horizons of social cooperation instead
of growth. And it offers powerful tools, dozens of examples from all corners of
our world, and practical ways to achieve this goal.
To put it differently, while policymakers
govern with numbers and data, they are as well governed by them, so they better
be relevant and accurate. It turns out, and I think that’s a strong argument of
the book, that GDP’s relevance is fast declining in the beginning of the
twenty-first century for three major reasons. First, economic growth, so
buoyant during the three decades following the Second World War, has gradually
faded away in advanced and even developing economies and is therefore becoming
an ever-more-elusive goal for policy. Second, both objective and subjective
well-being—those things that make life worth living—are visibly more and more
disconnected from economic growth. Finally, GDP and growth tell us nothing
about the compatibility of our current well-being with the long-term viability
of ecosystems, even though it is clearly the major challenge we and our children
must face.
Since “growth” cannot help us understand, let
alone solve, the two major crises of our time, the inequality crisis and
ecological crises, we must rely on other compasses to find our way in this new
century. In my view, the whole of economic activity, which is a subset of
social cooperation, should be reoriented toward the well- being of citizens and
the resilience and sustainability of societies. For that to happen, we need to
put these three collective horizons at the center of our empirical world.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Measuring Tomorrow is about ending our passion for growth and engaging in the well-being and sustainability transition. Growth of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, captures only a tiny fraction of what goes on in complex human societies: it tracks some but not all of economic well-being (saying nothing about fundamental issues such as income inequality); it does not account for most dimensions of well-being (think about the importance of health, education or happiness for your own quality of life); and it does not account at all for sustainability, which basically means well-being not just today but also tomorrow (imagine your quality of life on a planet where the temperature would be four degrees higher or where there would be scant drinkable water or breathable air). This book’s essential argument is that well-being (human flourishing), resilience (resisting to shocks) and sustainability (caring about the future) should become the collective horizons of social cooperation instead of growth. And it offers powerful tools, dozens of examples from all corners of our world, and practical ways to achieve this goal.
To put it differently, while policymakers govern with numbers and data, they are as well governed by them, so they better be relevant and accurate. It turns out, and I think that’s a strong argument of the book, that GDP’s relevance is fast declining in the beginning of the twenty-first century for three major reasons. First, economic growth, so buoyant during the three decades following the Second World War, has gradually faded away in advanced and even developing economies and is therefore becoming an ever-more-elusive goal for policy. Second, both objective and subjective well-being—those things that make life worth living—are visibly more and more disconnected from economic growth. Finally, GDP and growth tell us nothing about the compatibility of our current well-being with the long-term viability of ecosystems, even though it is clearly the major challenge we and our children must face.
Since “growth” cannot help us understand, let alone solve, the two major crises of our time, the inequality crisis and ecological crises, we must rely on other compasses to find our way in this new century. In my view, the whole of economic activity, which is a subset of social cooperation, should be reoriented toward the well- being of citizens and the resilience and sustainability of societies. For that to happen, we need to put these three collective horizons at the center of our empirical world.