Éloi Laurent is the author of Measuring Tomorrow Accounting for Well-Being, Resilience, and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century.From his Q&A at the Princeton University Press blog:
Why should we go “beyond growth” in the 21st century to pay attention, as you advocate, to well-being, resilience and sustainability?--Marshal Zeringue
Because “growth,” that is growth of Gross Domestic Product or GDP, captures only a tiny fraction of what goes on in complex human societies: it tracks some but not all of economic well-being (saying nothing about fundamental issues such as income inequality), it does not account for most dimensions of well-being (think about the importance of health, education, or happiness for your own quality of life), and does not account at all for sustainability, which basically means well-being not just today but also tomorrow (imagine your quality of life in a world where the temperature would be 6 degrees higher). My point is that because well-being (human flourishing), resilience (resisting to shocks) and sustainability (caring about the future) have been overlooked by mainstream economics in the last three decades, our economic world has been mismanaged and our prosperity is now threatened.
To put it differently, while policymakers govern with numbers and data, they are as well governed by them so they better be relevant and accurate. It turns out, and that’s a strong argument of the book, that GDP’s relevance is fast declining in the beginning of the twenty-first century for three major reasons. First, economic growth, so buoyant during the three decades following the Second World War, has gradually faded away in advanced and even developing economies and is therefore becoming an ever-more-elusive goal for policy. Second, both objective and subjective well-being—those things that make life worth living—are visibly more and more disconnected from economic growth. Finally, GDP and growth tell us nothing about...[read on]