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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This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2009.