Looking Backward: Economics and the Cult of Yesterday

by Jonathan Rowe

GDP and productivity don't measure what's really going on in the economy—or in people's lives. Jonathan Rowe on measuring what matters.

One reason that the nation has not made more progress toward an economic “recovery” is that the people in charge really don’t know what one would look like. The top economists in Washington don’t appear to have asked the obvious question, “Recovery of what—and for what?” Instead they have followed the old drill, tried to rekindle the old flame, and remained wedded to the old guideposts that leave them looking at yesterday and trying to see tomorrow.

Just recently, the president of France realized the stupidity. He has decided that his nation’s measures of economic health need to change to account for today’s challenges instead of yesterday’s. As Washington gears up to spend billions in more “stimulus,” it would help to ask exactly what it is trying to stimulate—and most importantly, exactly what would constitute success.

Economic indicators are our national psyche's main gauges, the mirror into which we look to see how things are going. In a market culture—which is to say, a money culture—the prospects for money become the prospects for ourselves. Such metrics as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have an oracular status; reporters watch them obsessively, policy experts steer by them, and politicians march to their command.

Yet for the most part the indicators are a crock and testimony to the grip of yesterday upon the expert economic mind. The prime example is the GDP, the anachronism of which is a secret, it seems, only within the media and policy establishments that invoke it constantly. Any measure that portrays an increase in car crashes, cancer, marital breakdown, kinky mortgages, oil use, and gambling as evidence of advance—as the GDP does—simply because they occasion the expenditure of money has a tenuous claim to being reality-based discourse.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/looking-backward-economics-and-the-cult-of-yesterday/?b_start:int=0&-C=

On simpler terms, I asked my mom when she turned 60 didn't she wish she was turning 40 instead. She said no, that for all the good times she said that there were a equal amount ot bad times and she would not want to relive those. WOW