Mismeasuring Our Lives

Mismeasuring Our Lives
Author: Jean-Paul Fitouss
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2011-04-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1459617797

In February of 2008, amid the looming global financial crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France asked Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with the distinguished French economist Jean Paul Fitoussi, to establish a commission of leading economists to study whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - the most widely used measure of economic activity - is a reliable indicator of economic and social progress. The Commission was given the further task of laying out an agenda for developing better measures. Mismeasuring Our Lives is the result of this major intellectual effort, one with pressing relevance for anyone engaged in assessing how and whether our economy is serving the needs of our society. The authors offer a sweeping assessment of the limits of GDP as a measurement of the well-being of societies - considering, for example, how GDP overlooks economic inequality (with the result that most people can be worse off even though average income is increasing); and does not factor environmental impacts into economic decisions.In place of GDP, Mismeasuring Our Lives introduces a bold new array of concepts, from sustainable measures of economic welfare, to measures of savings and wealth, to a ''green GDP.'' At a time when policymakers worldwide are grappling with unprecedented global financial and environmental issues, here is an essential guide to measuring the things that matter.

For Good Measure

For Good Measure
Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1620975726

Today's leading economists weigh in with a new "dashboard" of metrics for measuring our economic and social health "What we measure affects what we do. If we focus only on material well-being—on, say, the production of goods, rather than on health, education, and the environment—we become distorted in the same way that these measures are distorted." —Joseph E. Stiglitz A consensus has emerged among key experts that our conventional economic measures are out of sync with how most people live their lives. GDP, they argue, is a poor and outmoded measure of our well-being. The global movement to move beyond GDP has attracted some of the world's leading economists, statisticians, and social thinkers who have worked collectively to articulate new approaches to measuring economic well-being and social progress. In the decade since the 2008 economic crisis, these experts have come together to determine what indicators can actually tell us about people's lives. In the first book of its kind, leading economists from around the world, including Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Elizabeth Beasely, Jacob Hacker, François Bourguignon, Nora Lustig, Alan B. Krueger, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, describe a range of fascinating metrics—from economic insecurity and environmental sustainability to inequality of opportunity and levels of trust and resilience—that can be used to supplement the simplistic measure of gross domestic product, providing a far more nuanced and accurate account of societal health and well-being. This groundbreaking volume is sure to provide a major source of ideas and inspiration for one of the most important intellectual movements of our time.

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress
Author: Keith G. Banting
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2001
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Analyses the impact of economic performance on patterns of social well-being in Canada during the 1990s. It has thirteen articles which look at the policy shifts of the 1990s such as the Bank of Canada's inflation targeting strategy, the fight against government deficits, trade liberalisation and social policy reform and assesses their effects on Canadian society.

Democracy, Governance, and Economic Performance

Democracy, Governance, and Economic Performance
Author: Yi Feng
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262562119

A theoretical and empirical examination of why political institutions and organizations matter in economic growth.

The Pricing of Progress

The Pricing of Progress
Author: Eli Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2017-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674982541

How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the “health” of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals.

Measuring What Counts

Measuring What Counts
Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 162097570X

A bold agenda for a better way to assess societal well-being, by three of the world's leading economists and statisticians "If we want to put people first, we have to know what matters to them, what improves their well-being, and how we can supply more of whatever that is." —Joseph E. Stiglitz In 2009, a group of economists led by Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen issued a report challenging gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of progress and well-being. Published as Mismeasuring Our Lives by The New Press, the book sparked a global conversation about GDP and a major movement among scholars, policy makers, and activists to change the way we measure our economies. Now, in Measuring What Counts, Stiglitz, Fitoussi, and Martine Durand—summarizing the deliberations of a panel of experts on the measurement of economic performance and social progress hosted at the OECD, the international organization incorporating the most economically advanced countries—propose a new, "beyond GDP" agenda. This book provides an accessible overview of the last decade's global movement, sparked by the original critique of GDP, and proposes a new "dashboard" of metrics to assess a society's health, including measures of inequality and economic vulnerability, whether growth is environmentally sustainable, and how people feel about their lives. Essential reading for our time, it also serves as a guide for policy makers and others on how to use these new tools to fundamentally change the way we measure our lives—and to plot a radically new path forward.

Beyond GDP

Beyond GDP
Author: Marc Fleurbaey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199346917

In spite of recurrent criticism and an impressive production of alternative indicators by scholars and NGOs, GDP remains the central indicator of countries' success. This book revisits the foundations of indicators of social welfare, and critically examines the four main alternatives to GDP that have been proposed: composite indicators, subjective well-being indexes, capabilities (the underlying philosophy of the Human Development Index), and equivalent incomes. Its provocative thesis is that the problem with GDP is not that it uses a monetary metric but that it focuses on a narrow set of aspects of individual lives. It is actually possible to build an alternative, more comprehensive, monetary indicator that takes income as its first benchmark and adds or subtracts corrections that represent the benefit or cost of non-market aspects of individual lives. Such a measure can respect the values and preferences of the people and give as much weight as they do to the non-market dimensions. A further provocative idea is that, in contrast, most of the currently available alternative indicators, including subjective well-being indexes, are not as respectful of people's values because, like GDP, they are too narrow and give specific weights to the various dimensions of life in a more uniform way, without taking account of the diversity of views on life in the population. The popular attraction that such alternative indicators derive from being non-monetary is therefore based on equivocation. Moreover, it is argued in this book that "greening" GDP and relative indicators is not the proper way to incorporate sustainability concerns. Sustainability involves predicting possible future paths, therefore different indicators than those assessing the current situation. While various indicators have been popular (adjusted net savings, ecological footprint), none of them involves the necessary forecasting effort that a proper evaluation of possible futures requires.

The Stiglitz Report

The Stiglitz Report
Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1595585206

The fact that the global economy is broken may be widely accepted, but what precisely needs to be fixed has become the subject of enormous controversy. In 2008, the President of the United Nations General Assembly convened an international panel, chaired by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and including 20 leading experts on the international monetary system, to address this crucial issue. This report controversially establishes a bold agenda for policy change, both broad in scope and profound in its ambitions.

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2002

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2002
Author: Institute for Research on Public Policy
Publisher: IRPP
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780886451981

Topics covered include productivity concepts and trends, government fiscal balances and environmental sustainability, social determination of productivity, demographics, human capital and social diversity, social policy, inequality and productivity.

The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust

The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust
Author: Eric M. Uslaner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 753
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190274816

This volume explores the foundations of trust, and whether social and political trust have common roots. Contributions by noted scholars examine how we measure trust, the cultural and social psychological roots of trust, the foundations of political trust, and how trust concerns the law, the economy, elections, international relations, corruption, and cooperation, among myriad societal factors. The rich assortment of essays on these themes addresses questions such as: How does national identity shape trust, and how does trust form in developing countries and in new democracies? Are minority groups less trusting than the dominant group in a society? Do immigrants adapt to the trust levels of their host countries? Does group interaction build trust? Does the welfare state promote trust and, in turn, does trust lead to greater well-being and to better health outcomes? The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust considers these and other questions of critical importance for current scholarly investigations of trust.