Beyond GDP: the need for new measures of progress

This repository item contains a single issue of The Pardee Papers, a series papers that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The Pardee Papers series features working papers by Pardee Center Fellows and other invited authors. Papers in this series explore current and future challenges by anticipating the pathways to human progress, human development, and human well-being. This series includes papers on a wide range of topics, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary perspectives and a development orientation.This paper is a call for better indicators of human well-being in nations around the world. We critique the inappropriate use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of national well-being, something for which it was never designed. We also question the idea that economic growth is always synonymous with improved well-being. Useful measures of progress and well-being must be measures of the degree to which society’s goals (i.e., to sustainably provide basic human needs for food, shelter, freedom, participation, etc.) are met, rather than measures of the mere volume of marketed economic activity, which is only one means to that end. Various alternatives and complements to GDP are discussed in terms of their motives, objectives, and limitations. Some of these are revised measures of economic activity while others measure changes in community capital—natural, social, human, and built—in an attempt to measure the extent to which development is using up the principle of community capital rather than living off its interest. We conclude that much useful work has been done; many of the alternative indicators have been used successfully in various levels of community planning. But the continued misuse of GDP as a measure of well-being necessitates an immediate, aggressive, and ongoing campaign to change the indicators that decision makers are using to guide policies and evaluate progress. We need indicators that promote truly sustainable development—development that improves the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of the supporting ecosystems. We end with a call for consensus on appropriate new measures of progress toward this new social goal

Neighbouring residue effects on the ^(15)N chemical shifts of some aliphatic dipeptides

The ^(15)N chemical shifts of a number of simple aliphatic dipeptides have been determined in a aqueous solution and while the amine nitrogen shift is independent of the nature of the neighbouring residue, the peptide nitrogen shift shows a marked dependence upon the nature of the adjacent amino-acid

International Law and the Rise of China

The geopolitics of the future US-China relationship has received a great deal of attention. Less attention has been directed to another topic-the role of international law in any future US-China confrontation. One might worry that America\u27s often dismissive attitude toward international law today will come back to haunt it when, in the future, American power is no longer unchallengeable. On this view, America should bind itself and the world to strict adherence to international law and international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Court. When America is no longer so mighty, it will be grateful for the protection that these institutions offer to the weak against the strong. One useful way of evaluating this argument is to imagine how existing international laws and institutions might be applied to conflicts between the US and China in the foreseeable future. [CONT

The Lightwave Programme and Roadshow: An Overview and Update

While optics and photonics are exciting disciplines with much research, industrial, and economic potential in the 21st century, this appreciation is only shared by a limited number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) experts, and there is a recognized STEM skills shortage. To widen the pool of talent, it is essential to expose students to optics and photonics throughout their education and particularly starting at a young age. The Lightwave programme, consisting of an interactive collection of photonics demonstrations and experiments targeted for primary school students, was thus created to facilitate this endeavor. The programme is run by doctoral students forming a team of “Lightwave ambassadors”. All the demonstrations that comprise Lightwave can be easily integrated into a physics curriculum, enabling educators to generate more student interest and enhance the image of science through an interactive pedagogy. We provide a description of the programme at its initial inception, and report on the recent additions and updates that have brought about its success, moving from a purely outreach driven focus to engaging pupils with our own research. We also discuss our approach to ensuring that our team of ambassadors are from diverse backgrounds and use both male and female students as role models. Finally, we reflect on how evaluation methods to obtain feedback from our activities are key to Lightwave's sustainability and in improving the perception of optics and photonics

Social Investing and the Law of Trusts

In Part I, after presenting a brief primer on the economics of securities markets, we analyze the economic and policy issues presented by social investing. We conclude that the usual forms of social investing involve a combination of reduced diversification and higher administrative costs not offset by net consumption gains to the investment beneficiaries. Social investing may therefore be economically unsound even though there is no reason to expect a portfolio constructed in accordance with the usual principles of social investment to yield a below-average rate of return - provided that administrative costs are ignored. Part II relates our policy analysis to the law of trust investing. We conclude that the duty of loyalty, the prudent-man rule, and cognate doctrines, which govern both pension funds and trust investment generally, forbid social investing in its current form. But if the pension-fund beneficiary is allowed to opt out of any fund that practices social investment and into one that pursues investor financial welfare single-mindedly, social investing may be a reasonable and, under the ratification doctrine, legally permissible investment strategy for pension funds and related types of trusts. Part III extends our analysis to the university endowment fund, where the rights of individual beneficiaries do not hamper fiduciary investment decisions, but where a variety of other legal and practical hazards confront trustees who permit non-economic considerations to affect portfolio construction

Social Investing and the Law of Trusts

In Part I, after presenting a brief primer on the economics of securities markets, we analyze the economic and policy issues presented by social investing. We conclude that the usual forms of social investing involve a combination of reduced diversification and higher administrative costs not offset by net consumption gains to the investment beneficiaries. Social investing may therefore be economically unsound even though there is no reason to expect a portfolio constructed in accordance with the usual principles of social investment to yield a below-average rate of return - provided that administrative costs are ignored. Part II relates our policy analysis to the law of trust investing. We conclude that the duty of loyalty, the prudent-man rule, and cognate doctrines, which govern both pension funds and trust investment generally, forbid social investing in its current form. But if the pension-fund beneficiary is allowed to opt out of any fund that practices social investment and into one that pursues investor financial welfare single-mindedly, social investing may be a reasonable and, under the ratification doctrine, legally permissible investment strategy for pension funds and related types of trusts. Part III extends our analysis to the university endowment fund, where the rights of individual beneficiaries do not hamper fiduciary investment decisions, but where a variety of other legal and practical hazards confront trustees who permit non-economic considerations to affect portfolio construction

Spatial consequences of bridging the saccadic gap

We report six experiments suggesting that conscious perception is actively redrafted to take account of events both before and after the event that is reported. When observers saccade to a stationary object they overestimate its duration, as if the brain were filling in the saccadic gap with the post-saccadic image. We first demonstrate that this illusion holds for moving objects, implying that the perception of time, velocity, and distance traveled become discrepant. We then show that this discrepancy is partially resolved up to 500 ms after a saccade: the perceived offset position of a post-saccadic moving stimulus shows a greater forward mislocalization when pursued after a saccade than during pursuit alone. These data are consistent with the idea that the temporal bias is resolved by the subsequent spatial adjustment to provide a percept that is coherent in its gist but inconsistent in its detail