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

Economics as a life science: Review of You Can\u27t Eat GNP: Economics As If Ecology Mattered by Eric A. Davidson and The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs

Two Book Reviews: You Can?t Eat GNP: Economics As If Ecology Mattered by Eric A. Davidson and The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacob

Toward an ecological economy

This section comments on an article by Lester Brown published in the July 2006 issue of The Futurist describing what an ecological economy might look like, at least in its technical dimensions. Brown points out that if economic progress is to be sustained, the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy must be replaced with a new economic model. To do this, we need to create a new vision of what the economy is, what it is for and how to measure success. There is substantial new psychological research in the emerging science of happiness that shows the limits of conventional economic income and consumption in contributing to well-being. One convenient way to summarize these contributions is to group them into four basic types of capital that are necessary to support the real, human-welfare-producing economy, including built capital, human capital, social capital and natural capital

Toward a new sustainable economy

The current financial meltdown is the result of under-regulated markets built on an ideology of free market capitalism and unlimited economic growth. The fundamental problem is that the underlying assumptions of this ideology are not consistent with what we now know about the real state of the world. The financial world is, in essence, a set of markers for goods, services, and risks in the real world and when those markers are allowed to deviate too far from reality, ?adjustments? must ultimately follow and crisis and panic can ensue. To solve this and future financial crisis requires that we reconnect the markers with reality. What are our real assets and how valuable are they? To do this requires both a new vision of what the economy is and what it is for, proper and comprehensive accounting of real assets, and new institutions that use the market in its proper role of servant rather than master

Simulation modeling on the Macintosh using STELLA

STELLA (Structured Thinking Experimental Learning Laboratory with Animation) is a computer application for Macintosh that allows model building for the biologist

Science, Uncertainty, and Society: Getting Beyond the Argument Culture to Shared Visions

Practical problem-solving in complex societies requires the integration of three elements: (1) active and ongoing envisioning of both how the world works and how we would like the world to be, (2) systematic analysis appropriate to and consistent with the vision and (3) implementation appropriate to the vision. Scientists generally focus on the second step, but integrating all three is essential for both good science and effective, democratic decision-making. Subjective values enter the vision of broad social goals and the pre-analytic vision that necessarily precedes any form of scientific analysis. Because of this need for vision, completely objective scientific analysis is impossible. To better support democratic decisionmaking, scholars of all varieties need to acknowledge the need to engage more directly in all three elements of the process while sharing their knowledge of how the world works and bringing their understanding of uncertainty more effectively to the table. This more integrated role of the scholars can help overcome the currently widespread denial of critical knowledge about how the world works, especially about climate, wellbeing, and evolution, and support better, more democratic decision-making about how we would like the world to be and how to get there

Measuring Genuine Social Progress

Nations need indicators that mesaure progress towards achieving their goals - economic, social and environmental.People want to see true measures of success, not just economic measurements that track financial activity. So why are we still using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to gauge our successes? Standard economic indicators, like GDP, are useful for measuring just one limited aspect of the economy - marketed economic activity - but GDP has been mistakenly used as a broader measure of welfare

What should be done with the revenues from a carbon cap and auction system?

In this article the author discusses the use of the revenues which can be generated from a carbon cap and auction system in the U.S. They believe that auction system will be politically feasible if all individuals share generated revenues equally. A significant fraction from the revenue should pay for related projects like researching and developing renewable energy in developing countries. The shareholders in this atmospheric commons should be both the current and future generations

Influential Publications in Ecological Economics: A Citation Analysis

We assessed the degree of influence of selected papers and books in ecological economics using citation analysis. We looked at both the internal influence of publications on the field of ecological economics and the external influence of those same publications on the broader academic community. We used four lists of papers and books for the analysis: (1) 92 papers nominated by the Ecological Economics (EE) Editorial Board; (2) 71 papers that were published in EE and that received 15 or more citations in all journals included in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Citation Index; (3) 57 papers that had been cited in EE 15 or more times; and (4) 77 monographs and edited books that had been cited in EE 15 or more times. For each publication we counted the total number of ISI citations as well as the total number of citations in EE. We calculated the average number of citations/yr to each paper since its publication in both the ISI database and in EE, along with the percentage of the total ISI citations that were in EE. Ranking the degree of influence of the publications can be done in several ways, including using the number of ISI citations, the number of EE citations or both. We discuss both the internal and external influence of publications and show how these influences might be considered jointly. We display and analyze the results in several ways. By plotting the ISI citations against the EE citations we can identify those papers that are mainly influential in EE with some broader influence, those that are mainly influential in the broader literature but have also had influence on EE, and other patterns of influence. There are both overlaps and interesting lacunae among the four lists that give us a better picture of the real influence of publications in ecological economics versus perceptions of those publications' importance. By plotting the number of citations vs. date of publication, we can identify those publications that are projected to be most influential. Plots of the time series of citations over the 1990-2003 period show a generally increasing trend (contrary to what one would expect for an "average" paper) for the top papers. We suggest that this pattern of increasing citations (and thus influence) over time is one hallmark of a "foundational" paper.

Influential publications in ecological economics revisited

We revisit the analysis of Costanza et al. (2004, Ecological Economics) of influential publications in ecological economics to discover what has changed a decade on. We examine which sources have been influential on the field of ecological economics in the past decade, which articles in the journal Ecological Economics have had the most influence on the field and on the rest of science, and on which areas of science the journal is having the most in- fluence.We find that the field has matured over this period, with articles published in the journal having a greater influence than before, an increase in citation links to environmental studies journals, a reduction in citation links to mainstream economics journals, and possibly a shift in themes to a more applied and empirical direction.Copyright Information: © 2016 Elsevier B.V. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0921-8009/..."Authors pre-print on any website, including arXiv and RePEC" from SHERPA/RoMEO site (as at 3/02/16)