Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being

Stiglitz and others talk about the difficulties of our societies to have a sure approach to the several situations. It looks like that a certain solution doesn't exist. So we must use the possibility to know certain trends , how we can read better the reality. The stathistics could become more useful by theoretical aspects.

It was a nice book to understand the GDP as an economic indicator and its flaws and disadvantages. I understood that GDP is not a good indicator to measure the health of economics of a single household.

To help me write my book

The 1 star is not for the content, I haven't fully read it. The 1 star is because this is just a verbatim copy of a freely available report that Stiglitz authored with others called Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts for Economic and Social Performance. Save your money, search the report and read the PDF

Stiglitz’s opening sentence “The world is facing three existential crises: a climate crisis, an inequality crisis, and a crisis in democracy” sets the tone for this piece. What is interesting is the slow realization of this genius, and a few other like minded individuals, that it is time to rethink just what society’s goals might be beyond Growth of GDP."If we want to put people first, we have to know what matters to them, what improves their well-being, and how we can supply more of whatever that is."—Joseph E. StiglitzHis list of what drove those concerns forward is not very complex; it was the collapse of the capitalist market economies in the Great Recession of 2007-8 and the elections of 2016; but credit is given to President Sarkozy of France who in January 2008, before the global financial crisis, established a Commission to examine the adequacy of our metrics for assessing economic performance and social progress led by Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen that issued a report challenging gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of progress and well-being. The International Financial Crisis opened the door to broader concerns.A short-hand for those concerns could be captured in President Obama’s congratulatory statement of recovery and its later assessment that in the United States, 91% of all the gains in income in the first three years of recovery (2009–12) is estimated to have gone to the top 1% (p. 7).*The fact that many households lost their home and jobs, and often their hope in the future, in addition to their income, and those who didn’t were fearful of doing so led to findings that ‘trust in government’ had sank in western democracies to less than 30%;** giving us the rise of Populism and new social orderings.*** This work is a somewhat self-congratulatory description of what has happened since. Asking concerned minds across the globe to guide the reformation of public policy has had the formative assistance of the OECD using:Theme I—Income and Wealth Inequality; Theme II—Multidimensional and Global Inequalities; Theme III—Multidimensional Subjective Well-Being; and Theme IV—Sustainability. (p. xix)Several OECD countries have developed formal and structured mechanisms to ensure that well-being or “Beyond GDP” indicators are integrated into their policy processes. (p. 139)Table 4.1 provides an overview of such experiences in 10 countries that have adopted well-being policy frameworks but a difficult read on a Kindle or PC screen – hardcover recommended.Interesting questions such as how to format a taxing structure to reduce an ‘inequality crisis’ or ‘curtail global warming’ you will not find here. But Stiglitz’s thesis that “[W]hat you measure affects what you do” has pushed the world in a corrective direction and that does matter.“GDP growth cannot continue as it is within our planetary boundaries.” (p. 20)5 Stars*One could add that it took eight slow years to recover the unemployment levels of 2008 in the U.S.** In the United States, the median net worth of members of Congress was above $1 million in 2013, while the median net worth of American households was around $60,000 (Sitaraman, 2017). One implication is that less than 30% of all people in OECD countries feel that they have a say in what the government does. (p. 128)***Stiglitz raises many of the issues of populist’s discontent found in works like National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy by Roger Eatwell & Matthew Goodwin.

I hoped for insights, but there is such a lot text describing the process that I got bored.