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Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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87<br />

In order to come up with a workable alternative to GDP as a measure of<br />

progress, we need to ask the right questions. In June 1996, I attended a New<br />

York conference on sustainable economics and listened to a speech from Mollie<br />

Olsen, a member of President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development.<br />

The president had appointed an unlikely combination of people to this task<br />

force – the CEOs of Dow Chemical, Ciba Geigy and Chevron were to work with<br />

top bureaucrats, environmentalists and indigenous people. There were 400<br />

people and eight task forces. Olsen told us:<br />

For a while we could see no common ground. The growth conversation was<br />

problematical and caused a great deal of tension. Then someone asked the right<br />

question. ‘What precisely is it that we want to grow?’ And everyone had to change the<br />

lens through which they looked at the world. They didn’t want growth of poisonous or<br />

polluting chemicals, agreed. The CEOs said I’d get fired, and asked for a level of trust.<br />

People then stated their assumptions and values. 15<br />

Over the years there have been several attempts to adjust the GDP to produce a<br />

more meaningful single indicator. This work is often called natural resource<br />

accounting. One such indicator is the United Nations Human Development<br />

Index (HDI), which ranks countries according to a mix of various measures,<br />

including GDP per capita, life expectancy, adult literacy rate and percentage<br />

share of household incomes accruing to the lower four deciles of households. 16<br />

Another single indicator is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which<br />

was developed in the US and in the UK, where it is known as the Index of<br />

Sustainable Economic Welfare. The GPI includes an estimate of the non­market<br />

economy, adjusts for income inequality, and subtracts social and economic costs

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