What would we say about a country that cheered disease in its children? Or that regarded family breakdown, traffic congestion and polluted skies as signs of economic advance?
We'd have to say that country is the United States of America. Virtually every day, in Washington and across the land, politicians, policy experts and the media advance just this view of the economy and of life. Technically, they call it the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. More commonly, they use such words as "expansion" or "growth".
But however they put it, it serves as the nation's main gauge of well-being, and some gauge it is. Name something that is wrong in America today, something that people regard as a problem or affliction, and chances are the experts count it as economic growth and gain. Children are overweight and have trouble paying attention in school? Great. That probably means they are eating lots of junk food and spending lots of time in front of hyper-stimulating video. They are spending money, and that makes the GDP go up. Then we can drug them with Ritalin or Prozac and the GDP will go up some more.
The roads are jammed and it takes forever to get to work and back? Great again. That means we spend more on gas and on baby-sitters for the kids. It means more car wrecks and repairs as well. Traffic has helped make wreck repair a $130 billion industry in the U.S., and that's more GDP.
The divorce rate continues at high levels? Wonderful news. That means lawyer bills and counseling for the kids. It means two separate households - with furniture, vacuum cleaner, linens, telephones - where only one existed before.
The air in inner cities has become a toxic sewer? Wonderful again. That means more kids with respiratory problems and all the medical expenses that entails. And speaking of medical expenses, those ridiculous prices for prescription drugs also get counted in the nation's "growth."
That's the GDP, the nation's main yardstick of economic advance. More spending equals more growth and therefore more good. It makes no difference where the money goes or why. The worse things get the better they get where the GDP is concerned. That is just fine in Washington because it provides statistical cover for the favors for polluters, drug companies, commercial exploiters of children and the rest.
Nothing so illustrates the identity of the two major parties - and the media that covers them - than their agreement that a rising GDP is the goal and measure of economic life. Republicans may dispute whether the Clinton administration was responsible for the great economic "expansion." But they don't stop to ask exactly what is expanding, nor do they question whether this expansion -- whatever it is -- is entirely a good thing. On the basic question of the purpose of the economy, and how to measure its advance, the two parties really are one. They also are both total hypocrites on this point. Republicans make loud noises about sex and violence in the media, for example. Then they include that same media in the growth tally they promote. They say they oppose gambling, yet they include gambling too. (They also include such industries in their tax cut plans.)
Democrats meanwhile say they are for the environment. Then they include the things that degrade the environment in the record "expansion" that they boast about. Those gas-guzzling SUVs that are a menace on the highways, degrade the air and make us dependent upon the oil producers in the Middle East? Al Gore includes them -- and the gas they burn -- in his count of the great prosperity that Republicans supposedly will jeopardize. Gore used to talk about the absurdities of the GDP, when he was not running for the White House. ( George W. Bush is not one to worry about such things in the first place.)
The media meanwhile shows no curiosity whatsoever. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the major television networks, NPR - all the big outlets recite the latest GDP figures from the Commerce Department with the solemnity of a Latin Mass. Their only gesture at insight is to seek comment from academic economists and Wall Street "analysts", whom they put forth as disinterested experts. The major media never venture outside the entrenched assumptions represented by these groups, and inquire into the reality that the GDP numbers mask.
If they did show some curiosity - that is, if they did what reporters are supposed to do - they would find out that the GDP is not what it seems. As they use it, it is an aggregation of fallacies and oversights that would be almost comic if the results were not so grim.
The GDP assumes, for example, that everything produced and sold is a "good" by definition. Car wrecks, divorces, disease, crime - social and environmental breakdown of all kinds - get tallied in Washington as expansion and growth, simply because money changes hands. ATM fee rip-offs and outrageous prices for prescription drugs go into the same statistical laundry, and come out looking like economic advance. The GDP counts environmental breakdown as a multiple gain. The factory pollutes the water and the GDP goes up. People buy bottled water to replace the questionable stuff at the tap and the GDP goes up again. People develop cancers from the toxics in the water and the medical treatment makes the GDP goes up yet again.
By this monetized standard, the nation's economic hero is the worker who contracts cancer from toxic chemicals on the job and who is going through a costly divorce. The GDP doesn't even get right a simple thing like the depletion of natural resources. When a resource gets used up it is a cost, whether to an individual business or to a nation at large. That is elementary accounting. Yet the GDP takes the opposite approach. It tallies the use of natural resources - whether oil, coal, or whatever - as economic gain. In this regard, the GDP is like a calculator that can only add, and cannot subtract.
In effect, the U.S. has a national gas gauge that goes up as we drain gas from the tank. That's one of the reasons that polluters can argue that if we clean up the environment and stop wasting energy it could hurt the econonmy. Of course. They've rigged the accounting to make it look that way. If this country had honest accounting we'd see that pollution and waste are bad economically - and in every other way.
The second fallacy is more subtle and insidious. The GDP includes only those parts of the economy that are transacted through money. It leaves out entirely the vital services of the social structure and of the natural environment. It counts the services of a day care provider but not of a parent, of an air conditioner but not of a tree. Thus the more we destroy these - the more we displace the role of parents and the more we cut down the trees - the more the economy appears to grow because commodities take their place.
Yet the real economy - the array of life processes that actually sustain us - does not grow at all. If anything it diminishes. The appearance of growth is just another accounting trick. The economy takes something we have for free and turns it into something we have to buy for money. Thus health clubs displace the natural exercise of walking, air conditioners and purifying devices displace the natural functions of trees, McDonalds displaces the kitchen table, and on and on and on.
Money is changing hands where no money passed before. More functions of the family are now commercialized, due to the way our economy is designed for working families. The gift relationships within the family are replaced by the commercial marketplace. The GDP rises and politicians and the media cheer. They don't seem to notice that the natural environment and the social structure are falling apart.
Then there's the question of distribution -- that is, who gets what. The GDP ignores this crucial question entirely. It assumes that the bounty of the economy - if bounty it is - gets spread equally among all concerned. If an investment banking couple on Park Avenue throw a $15,000 birthday party for their child, that counts exactly the same as if 1,500 homeless people get ten dollars for a decent meal. If the homeless people go hungry then it makes no difference for the GDP. The garish indulgences of those at the top provide statistical cover for the deprivation at the bottom.
This is why the major political parties and the media can continue their self-congratulatory patter about a boom economy, and then shed a ritual tear for those who aren't sharing. They regard equity as an afterthought - as something that might possibly flow from prosperity rather than as an essential part of it. Since the majority of Americans aren't sharing, it is not really prosperity, and we have got to discuss that elementary fact. A majority of workers, in the nineties, made less in inflation-adjusted dollars than was the case 20 years ago, and they worked an average of 163 hours per year more, according to the Department of Labor.
In short America's main indicator of progress is fundamentally out of synch with reality. It tells us we are doing better when in reality we are doing worse - when the natural environment is eroding and our families and communities are disintegrating. We are driving towards a cliff with a clear highway painted on the windshield; and neither the political nor media establishments show a glimmer of awareness.
It is no longer enough to count just the money people spend and the materials they consume.. There is an urgent need for new ways to ascertain our economic condition in America - ways that distinguish costs from benefits, and that value the contributions of our families, communities and the natural environment rather than valuing the their destruction under a wave of commercialistic bias. We have got to start to gauge the actual impact of the economy upon the people who comprise it and whom it is supposed to benefit
If we did this then the entire economic debate in this country would change. Politicians and reporters would have to come down from their gauzy clouds of abstraction and statistical obfuscation. They could no longer pontificate quantitatively about the nation's "growth." They would have to be specific, qualitative and distributionally alert. They would have to talk about what is growing and what is diminishing and the implications and effects. We can't know where we are going - and where we need to go - unless we can see clearly where we are; and this should be the first order of business for the next administration.
Source: Nader 2000 campaign.
