GPI Atlantic

The Genuine Progress Index is a search for better measures of our success by looking more thoughtfully at the world around us.

by Carsten Knox

It's called the Genuine Progress Index, offering a more accurate picture of our progress as a society than any Gross Domestic Product calculation could do. It takes into account things that we haven't considered in our measures of success, like volunteerism—how much does it add to our overall wealth? The GPI also measures how the depletion of the environment reduces our economic gain (our quality of life is diminished), how heath care expenses will go up because of a compromised ecology and industrialized food production. The GDP may record the economy's growth yet ignore that certain segments of the populace are faring more poorly. The GPI takes it into account.

GPI Atlantic is a non-profit that has been producing reports for over a decade to better measure Nova Scotians' actual success living on this land. Executive director Ron Colman got involved while teaching political science at Saint Mary's University. While looking for tools to explain an integrated sense of the relationship between politics, economics, society and the environment, Colman came across integrated measurements and indicator work. "These new measures, like the Genuine Progress Index, really do integrate social, political, economic and environmental realities," he says, "but it struck me that they're very important from a policy point of view."

Colman found through GPI studies that volunteer work had dropped 12 percent over a decade in Canada, between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. That's not a statistic widely known nor discussed in legislatures, even though the drop was dramatic. "If the automobile industry dropped off by 12 percent, there's a multi-billion dollar bailout," Colman says. "But voluntary work drops off and it's never seen as a problem. But what it really means is that seniors, people who are sick, youth in need are not getting the services they once did. Sports coaching after school, theatre culture, environmental work, all the work that depends on volunteers that contributes to quality of life is being short-changed. But it's a non-issue because the only thing that matters is the progress of the economic growth statistics and it only measures exchanges for money, paid work. Unpaid work counts for nothing."

GPI Atlantic also notes that with the environment, we'd rather spend millions of dollars talking about Kyoto than do anything about it. Traditional "measures of progress show that the more greenhouse gasses we emit the more the economy will grow," says Colman. "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions—there's no reward in our measures of progress."

Colman says the search for better measures has been going on since the 1960s, and has spread across the globe. Back in the day, "there weren't measures of fish stock, forest inventories, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions. There wasn't data on those things. People have understood the necessity of coming up with better measures, but the means to do it are available now. Therefore there's no excuse for not doing it now."

In some ways, the GPI Atlantic measures are a boost for Atlantic Canada—there are certain positive, strong dimensions to our quality of life. "Social support networks are very strong in Atlantic Canada. People here are more involved in their communities," says Colman. "In a way we know that from our actual experience, but now we have the numbers to back that up."

Colman has seen the recent economic downturn as a creator of a false paradigm, the idea that we can somehow return to the boom times of the past 15 years. "It ignores the fact that the origins of the bust were in that boom...and from an ecological side, that boom period was a disaster."

So, what's the alternative? "We welcome a slightly reduced economic size. We don't have to go back to an overblown economy. On the contrary—we improve it by adjusting to a smaller economy. What about taking the opportunity to reduce people's work hours? People may postpone putting that extra deck on the house. They may adjust to carpooling.

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