Frank just gave me Mis-measuring our lives, why GDP doesn’t add up, which is a report
by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social
progress, installed by former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. The
commission was headed by two Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya
Sen and by the French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi. The report dates from
September 2009.
‘Read the foreword by Nicolas Sarkozy,’
Frank urged me. ‘It is beautiful and inspiring, just like the constitution of
the EU. Why didn’t he live up to it?
I read the nine pages with increasing
astonishment. ‘I hold a firm belief’, the then president of France starts his
passionate plea, ‘We will not change our behavior unless we change the ways we
measure our economic performance.’ Mr Sarkozy arguments that the way we measure
economic growth no longer represents the reality of people’s lives. ‘If leisure
has no accounting value because it is essentially filled with nonmarket
activities such as sports and culture, this means that we are putting the
criterion of high productivity above that of the realization of human
potential, contrary to the humanist values that we proclaim. Who could imagine
that this won’t have consequences?
[…] ‘if we count activities that lengthen
the distance between home and work and increase insecurity and exclusion as
positive contributions to progress; if ever-growing nervous tension, stress,
and anxiety undermine society, and the ever-greater resources devoted to
fighting their effects are included in economic growth – if we do all this,
then what, concretely, is left of our notion of progress?’
The bell rings. A gypsy woman – she must be
over sixty years old - stands before my front door. She is at least two feet
smaller than I am. At her side is a children’s carrier, filled with plastic
gloves for cleaning, vegetables, perfumes and other this and thats. The woman
looks up to me with watery brown eyes that once must have shone. From where I
stand, I can see her hair needs dying. I tower above her wearing an expensive
dress given to me the day before by my mother in law. It is the kind of dress I would
have loved at first sight but never would imagine buying. But my mother in law
did. She bought it and today I am wearing it, while the poor woman at my
doorstep is telling me her story.
I do not listen to her words because I know
the words. These are the words of a beggar. She puts in a little lie to gain
empathy. She talks about children in distress whose school burned down. She
knows that kids soften people’s hearts. She needs money urgently. Even though
she doesn’t explain her real pain with words, she explains it by ringing my
bell and asking me to buy any of her goods, making up a story that will
transfer my money into her pocket.
I tell her I don’t have money either while
leaning against the doorpost in my too expensive dress. She smiles. Then she
looks up to the sky greying with rainclouds and the old woman blesses me – may
God give me Good Health and Happiness - and she moves on, to ring the next
bell. I feel some itching.
Mr Sarkozy calls the discrepancy between
what is in the statistics of economists and repeated over and over by country
leaders and politicians and what is the reality for many a civilian, one of the
reasons why people feel deceived by policymakers and politicians: ‘Who could
fail to understand why those who had lost their home, their job, their pension,
would feel deceived?’
He makes a strong plea for what is called
the capability approach that drastically changes the ways we think. The
capability approach views the success of society in terms of individual
wellbeing and freedom. It includes environmental issues that threaten health or
happiness.
The gypsy lady walks down the street. She
is getting tired. Rain pours down, wetting her goods, soaking her
clothes. She starts to cough. Maybe she’ll take the bus instead of walking
home, she ponders. But the bus costs €3 and that will set her back ten percent
of what she earned today, which was just enough to buy her grandson new
football shoes for his birthday. ‘Sports are important for a child,’ she thinks.
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