On his book Measuring Tomorrow: Accounting for Well-Being, Resilience, and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century
Cover Interview of January 28, 2018
Lastly
I hope this book becomes an accelerator of the
well-being and sustainability transition already under way. This transition
received international recognition in September 2015, when the United Nations
embraced a “sustainable development goals” agenda in which GDP growth plays only a marginal role. In the U.S., scores of
scholars and (some) policy makers increasingly realize the importance of paying
attention to inequality rather than just growth. China’s leaders acknowledge
that sustainability is a much better policy target than explosive economic
expansion. Pope Francis is also a force of change when he writes in the
encyclical Laudato si,
published in June 2015, “[w]e are faced not with two separate crises, one
environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is
both social and environmental,” and urges us to abandon growth as a collective
horizon. Influential newspapers and magazines such as The Economist and The
New York Times recently ran articles arguing that GDP should be dropped or
at least complemented. Local transitions are happening all over the planet,
from Copenhagen to Baltimore, Chinese provinces to Indian states. But we need
to change our behaviors and attitudes faster, because the great race of the 21st
century between human intelligence and human greed is currently being lost. Measuring
well-being, resilience, and sustainability has the power to change the way we
see the world, what we do in it, and what we do to it.
[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
Lastly
I hope this book becomes an accelerator of the well-being and sustainability transition already under way. This transition received international recognition in September 2015, when the United Nations embraced a “sustainable development goals” agenda in which GDP growth plays only a marginal role. In the U.S., scores of scholars and (some) policy makers increasingly realize the importance of paying attention to inequality rather than just growth. China’s leaders acknowledge that sustainability is a much better policy target than explosive economic expansion. Pope Francis is also a force of change when he writes in the encyclical Laudato si, published in June 2015, “[w]e are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental,” and urges us to abandon growth as a collective horizon. Influential newspapers and magazines such as The Economist and The New York Times recently ran articles arguing that GDP should be dropped or at least complemented. Local transitions are happening all over the planet, from Copenhagen to Baltimore, Chinese provinces to Indian states. But we need to change our behaviors and attitudes faster, because the great race of the 21st century between human intelligence and human greed is currently being lost. Measuring well-being, resilience, and sustainability has the power to change the way we see the world, what we do in it, and what we do to it.