3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
Quality of Life Indicators
While economic stagnation may be occurring for many other reasons, a more crucial change is
just beginning to unfold which could account for part of the sluggishness: the slow demise of
the capitalist system and the rise of a Collaborative Commons in which economic welfare is
measured less by the accumulation of market capital and more by the aggregation of social
capital. The steady decline of GDP in the coming years and decades is going to be increasingly
attributable to the changeover to a vibrant new economic paradigm that measures economic
value in totally new ways.
Nowhere is the change more apparent than in the growing global debate about how best to
judge economic success. The conventional GDP metrics for measuring economic performance in
the capitalist marketplace focus exclusively on itemizing the sum total of goods and services
produced each year with no attempt to differentiate between negative and positive economic
growth. An increase in expenditures for cleaning up toxic waste dumps, police protection and
the expansion of prison facilities, military appropriations, and the like are all included in gross
domestic product.
Today, the transformation of economic life from finance capital and the exchange of goods and
services in markets to social capital and the sharing of goods and services in the Collaborative
Commons is reshaping society’s thinking about how to evaluate economic performance. The
European Union, the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), and a number of industrialized and developing countries have introduced
new metrics for determining economic progress, emphasizing “quality of life” indicators rather
than merely the quantity of economic output.
Social priorities, including educational attainment of the population, availability of health-care
services, infant mortality and life expectancy, the extent of environmental stewardship and
sustainable development, protection of human rights, the degree of democratic participation in
society, levels of volunteerism, the amount of leisure time available to the citizenry, the
percentage of the population below the poverty level, and the equitable distribution of wealth,
are among the many new categories used by governments to evaluate the general economic
welfare of society.
The GDP metric will likely decline in significance as an indicator of economic performance along
with the diminution of the market exchange economy in the coming decades. By midcentury,
quality of life indices on the Collaborative Commons are likely to be the litmus test for
measuring the economic wellbeing of every nation.
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