Nothing can be duller than listening to an economist or other policy expert pontificate endlessly on such metrics as gross domestic product, stock market prices, employment, and consumer confidence. Most of all they talk about GDP: Rising GDP is good; falling GDP is bad. But as a measure of economic activity, GDP is what it says it is: a gross number. It doesn’t measure how money and wealth circulates through a system, what use it is put to, how the rewards of its use are distributed. It just counts how much comes out of the spigot at the end of the pipe. This completely avoids taking into account what may be the most important indicator of economic health: equality.
Epidemiological studies demonstrate that equality is essential to a host of physical, mental, and social health outcomes. Societies that are more equal have lower rates of infant mortality, homicide, imprisonment, teenage motherhood, and other indicators of economic dysfunction. People in those countries also have higher life expectancies, levels of literacy, math proficiency, social trust, social mobility, and other positive signs of a healthy society.
This research suggests that for most countries economic performance on equality is far more important to the well-being of their citizens than GDP growth. Indeed, in our currently overstressed world, in which humans are consuming at a rate 1.7 times what Earth can sustain, our real need is for less consumption and more equity. For the well-being of most everyone—including the rich—equality is more important than growth.
[For more on this story by David Korten, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/new...tes-failure-20180119]
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