Well, he didn’t call it exactly that…but Sarko has joined former World Bank economist-turned-critic-of-globalization Joseph Stiglitz to co-author a report demanding that governments measure economic progress in broader terms than GDP, including such things as health care availability, leisure.
Developmental economist Amartya Sen has been at the forefront of that approach.
“French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked world leaders to join a “revolution” in the measurement of economic progress by dropping their obsession with gross domestic product to account for factors such as health-care availability and leisure time….”
My Comment:
While applauding the sentiment, this must win some kind of medal for fuzzy thinking. The point of a measure of economic productivity is that it measures, well, economic productivity.
Now, the productivity (or the production ) of morality, pleasure, good health or anything else, isn’t outside the realm of economic activity or of government statisticians, but if you think economic activity is hard to quantify, as we’re increasingly realizing, how much more difficult would it be to quantify such subjective factors?
The problem is only trained economists would ever have been silly enough to confuse the GDP of a country with its economic progress, or with its state of civilization, in the first place. No one else does. Then having made this elementary error, the experts now want to compound it by confusing production with consumption, economics with sociology and medicine, and work with leisure. It was the dismal science. Now it’s the dumbbell science. Or, as I suspect, this is the start of another propaganda effort of some kind..