What Really Counts: The Case for a Sustainable and Equitable Economy 9780231549189

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W H A T R E A L LY C O U N T S

W H AT R E A L LY COUNTS

T H E C A S E F O R A S U S TA I NA B L E A N D E Q U I TA B L E E C O N O M Y

RONALD COLMAN

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Ronald Colman All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Colman, Ronald, author. Title: What really counts : the case for a sustainable and equitable economy / Ronald Colman. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020028956 (print) | LCCN 2020028957 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231190985 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231549189 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable development—Government policy. | Economic development—Environmental aspects. | Economic policy. | Equality. Classification: LCC HC79.E5 C5993 2021 (print) | LCC HC79.E5 (ebook) | DDC 338.9/27—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028956 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028957

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover photo: mohamedimages © Shutterstock

CONTENTS

A Note to Readers: Coronavirus—A Turning Point for Humanity? vii Prologue 1

1 THE MAGIC NUMBER 9 2 COUNTING WHAT MATTERS 21 3 A NOVA SCOTIA START 39 4 THE NEW MEASURES IN ACTION 55 5 SCALING UP 71 6 CHALLENGES BEHIND THE SCENES 94

VICO NTENTS

7 GENUINE PROGRESS MEETS POLITICS 113 8 A NEW ZEALAND INTERLUDE 138 9 INVITATION TO BHUTAN 157 10 (MIS)MEASURING GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS 172 11 EDUCATION—THE GOLDEN KEY 186 12 THE GAP BETWEEN WORDS AND ACTION 211 13 A “NEW ECONOMIC PARADIGM” FOR THE WORLD 236 14 CAN GENUINE PROGRESS REALLY HAPPEN? 257 15 FORGING A NEW ECONOMY 276

Acknowledgments 287 Notes

291

Index 347

A NOTE TO READERS Coronavirus—A Turning Point for Humanity?

A

s this book goes to press, the coronavirus pandemic dominates people’s minds and lives. In the midst of widespread death, suffering, and lockdowns, there is pervasive fear, anxiety, and blame. From Washington to Beijing and London to Delhi, policy circles and the media focus on reopening economies that have ground to a halt. And notable experts including Henry Kissinger, Yuval Noah Harari, and Kishore Mahbubani speculate on global economics, geopolitics, the future of liberal democracy, and more in the “world after coronavirus.”1 Sadly, human economics and politics remain the center of the universe in these conventional policy, media, and expert analyses. It’s as if nature did not exist and as if the health of the human economy were independent of planetary health. If we could broaden our horizons just a bit, might we transform present anguish into tremendous opportunity that can avert far greater suffering in the future? Might this present crisis forced on us be seen as a turning point in human history and the state of the world? Might we even be brave enough to think beyond returning to business as usual and find a new way forward to greater planetary and human health, harmony, sanity, and prosperity? We never would have voluntarily chosen such shock treatment to effect needed change. But we can still be honest enough to acknowledge that stopping our runaway fossil fuel–based growth economy in its

VIIIA NOTE TO REA DER S

tracks cut greenhouse gas emissions faster and more deeply than all the years of climate negotiations put together. It brought clean air and blue skies to the world’s most polluted cities. It stopped the flow of toxic effluents and industrial pollution into the world’s waterways, which at least briefly sparkled with clear water like never before. And it brought animals and aquatic life back to previously uninhabitable habitats—saving many species, at least temporarily, from the brink of extinction. Sadly, those gains may be short-lived. But will we now turn our backs on these realities that can save lives and economic costs far exceeding the coronavirus toll? In recent years air pollution from fossil fuels has killed 4.5 million people a year, costing the global economy an estimated $2.9 trillion (3.3 percent of global GDP) in health care costs and lost economic productivity annually.2 And Lord Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist, has estimated that continuing to emit greenhouse gases at pre-pandemic rates will cost the global economy between 5 percent and 20 percent of world GDP annually in economic damages due to increased droughts, floods, fires, sea level rise, and other climate change impacts on food production, water resources, health, and more. Stern calls climate change the “greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”3 Will we look back on the 2020 coronavirus woes as child’s play next to the suffering that awaits us, or as the moment humanity seized a golden opportunity to leave destructive habits behind, to avoid catastrophe, and to create a better future? Forcibly shutting down power plants, industry, and transportation and thereby drastically cutting coal and oil consumption, as COVID-19 has done, has already produced demonstrable savings in pollution costs. As of April 2020, preliminary estimates showed 11,000 avoided air-pollution-related deaths in Europe, and two months of pollution reduction in China likely saved the lives of 4,000 children under age 5 and 73,000 adults over 70.4 Later in this book we’ll look at how levels of pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and other social and environmental realities are translated into lives lost or saved, and increases or decreases in illness incidence, health care costs, productivity, agricultural production, and other economic costs and benefits. For now it’s enough to note

A NOTE TO READ ER SI X

that these avoided pollution-related deaths and costs are the direct result of the pandemic that the world experienced in 2020. Thus Harvard University researchers also have found that cleaner air would have sharply reduced the coronavirus death toll and costs. They found that areas with higher pollution in the United States had significantly higher COVID-19 death rates, because PM2.5 particles increase breathing troubles, hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes; weaken the immune system; and fuel inflammation in the lungs and respiratory tract. That in turn increases risks of getting COVID-19 and of severe symptoms and complications. According to Francesca Dominici, Harvard biostatistics professor, “If you’re getting COVID, and you have been breathing polluted air, it’s really putting gasoline on a fire.”5 On April 30, 2020, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that the decline in oil and coal use due to coronavirus lockdowns would cut CO2 emissions by nearly 8 percent in 2020—the largest annual decrease ever recorded, nearly six times the 2009 record drop due to the global financial crisis, and twice as steep as all emissions declines since World War II combined. IEA Executive Director Dr. Fatih Birol noted that a rebound in emissions is not inevitable if there is investment in renewables and other green recovery measures that “can create jobs, make economies more competitive and steer the world towards a more resilient and cleaner energy future.”6 We all want a quick end to this horrid coronavirus and the torment, grief, and insecurity it has brought. At the same time, we know we’ve given nature a break. We’ve suddenly been forced to shop, drive, travel, produce and consume a lot less. So we’ve depleted fewer resources, cleaned the air and water, and staved off climate change damages at least a bit longer. Our usually frenetic lifestyles have slowed, and we’ve tempered our usually insatiable appetites. We’ve also seen the perils of structural inequities that have rendered the poor, racial minorities, and others so much more vulnerable to this pandemic and deprived too many of life-saving interventions. And we’ve learned the hard way the necessity for global cooperation against a common threat. Perhaps most important and positively, we’ve proven we’re capable of major forthright

X A NOTE TO READER S

action in the face of crisis—from national lockdowns to putting off the Olympics to sharply reducing our air travel. When this virus goes, as it most certainly will, do we need to crank up business as usual and to go back into economic overdrive with potentially catastrophic future results? Or can we take this moment to forge a new path toward a more sustainable and equitable future, in which we live in greater harmony with nature and share its abundant resources equitably and efficiently? If we do not do so, then this present COVID-19 crisis will pale by comparison with the suffering caused by future climate change calamities to which the horrendous Australian fires of 2019–20 and the U.S. west coast fires of August–September 2020 are just a small precursor of what will come. At the time of writing, the greatest promise seems to come not from national leaders but from city mayors—from Paris to Bogota to Milan—who are promising a low-carbon, sustainable recovery from the pandemic with new networks of bicycle lanes and pedestrian walkways, commitments to renewable energy, and more.7 On 28 September 2020, 64 countries launched a Leaders’ Pledge to put the climate and nature at the heart of post-pandemic recovery plans. But without the support of the USA, China, Brazil, Russia, India, Australia and others who refused to sign, it is unclear whether and how the pledge will translate into effective action. To date, we’ve not been wise or courageous enough to change direction willingly. Now, through no choice of our own, we’ve been delivered a remarkable—perhaps once-in-a-lifetime—opportunity in the midst of immense distress. The entire purpose of this book is to help chart a new, different, and practical way forward to a much brighter future. The moment could not be more timely. The practical means and tools are in our hands, starting with an honest accounting of the true benefits and costs of economic activity. We know what to do and how to do it. With just a little will, bravery, and wisdom, we can do it! May this book make a small contribution to the well-being of this planet and all its inhabitants. And may our present woes quickly transform into security and happiness for our children and their children.

W H A T R E A L LY C O U N T S

PROLOGUE

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n 1965, I dropped out of Economics 101 at the Australian National University. I’d faithfully gone to classes and studied the assigned textbook readings but found them dry, distant, conceptually claustrophobic, and, as far as I could tell, with little apparent relation to the conditions of life I saw around me. I knew something was wrong, but I thought that “something” was me. As a young political science major who needed at least a basic knowledge of economics, it never occurred to me to question authoritative professors and texts, let alone the reigning economic paradigm they presented or the way economics was taught. That I literally couldn’t stomach economics had to be my problem. For years that “problem” would subtly haunt me. In the meantime, I was taken up by my other studies (especially in Chinese and Oriental Studies); by the heady atmosphere of radical politics in the 1960s, with its teach-ins, anti–Vietnam War rallies and other crusades; and then by work and travels. And yet in the midst of all these endeavors, economic issues kept cropping up, though in ways those introductory textbooks never mentioned. In 1969, for example, six months into my first full-time job as a reporter for the Canberra Times, I was fired for printing and distributing a leaflet detailing the newspaper’s censorship and advocating that editorial policy be made by journalists rather than owners. Why, I asked,

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did three families—Fairfax (which owned the Canberra Times), Packer, and Murdoch—control nearly all Australia’s media, and what gave them the right to decide what Australians should know or not know just because they were rich? Soon thereafter, on July 20, 1969, aboard a boat bound for Hong Kong with my girlfriend, we got news that a man was at that moment, for the first time ever, walking on the Moon. It was incredibly impressive: human beings could come up with the technology to do the seemingly impossible and overcome just about any natural force. Then, five days later, we ran into a major typhoon that knocked the ship around like a matchstick on massive waves, a reminder that whatever we human beings did, including in our technological advances and economic activity, always took place in the larger context of nature in its awesome power and complexity—a perspective that seemed entirely absent from those introductory texts. In colonial Hong Kong, where I taught English for six months, the police were so corrupt that they’d come by every Tuesday to collect their cut from the gambling den on the floor below our school. How, I  wondered, did the city’s massive illegal economy, palpable at every turn, fit into those elegant economics textbook models? After six months I shipped out on a freighter sailing for Calcutta (now Kolkata), where I was instantly overwhelmed by the poverty, leprosy, and homelessness I saw. Everything I’d ever considered a problem in life vanished into insignificance next to the human suffering I witnessed on the streets. Did this have anything to do with Economics 101, and if so, why did my professors keep talking about averages and national income and never about the gap between rich and poor? Later, while teaching English to Bedouin children for nearly two years in the desert hamlet of Kseifeh in Israel’s Negev desert, I applied for and won a Fulbright scholarship that took me to Columbia University in New York, where I subsequently got my PhD in political science and Middle East Studies. At Columbia in the early 1970s, the one truly standout course I took wasn’t in my field at all; it was a brilliant course taught by the great anthropologist Margaret Mead. She taught me that a scholar could communicate the most subtle, complex truths in plain language

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without any of the academic jargon that seemed to infest much of the social sciences. Throughout my time at Columbia and for years thereafter while teaching political science at the State University of New York, the problem that had haunted me since 1965 would not go away. Beneath the whole edifice of political systems and area studies that were my focus, it was clear that powerful economic forces were at work. And yet whatever conventional economics text or study I approached produced exactly the same aversion to and dismay with the discipline that I’d experienced years earlier when I quit Economics 101. Still, through all these studies, a light started to flicker in the darkness. Gradually I discovered incisive and convincing critiques of our present economic system and its root assumptions that exposed deep flaws and at least showed that it wasn’t as solid as the standard texts indicated. Those texts had talked of demand, supply, labor, income, production, consumption, prices, and inflation almost as if they were governed by self-regulating mechanisms that governments could tweak but not fundamentally alter. But now I was also coming across writers who directly addressed issues of economic power, inequality, and systemic change that were hidden or downplayed in conventional models that focused on national income, growth, and averages such as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. I was fascinated, for example, by Barrington Moore Jr’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which showed that the most dramatic political changes, including the birth of modern democracy, were intimately tied to seismic economic shifts.1 I was relieved to find that systems weren’t as static and self-perpetuating as the conventional models implied. And I was even more relieved to find that some of my earlier intuitive hunches were backed by strong argument and evidence. But all that was still theoretical, and my problem was not just theoretical. It troubled my heart to see conventional texts sideline nature’s role in powering human systems and downplay the suffering and tensions of extreme poverty, inequality, and lopsided power dynamics. In describing the mechanics of the existing economic and political models, these texts seemed subtly to accept the validity of those models and to skirt

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even the potential for deep, systemic change. And so, despite the refreshing discovery of new approaches to economics and politics, I was still uneasy, because I could see no way forward to redirect existing economic and political forces toward greater ecological sustainability, equity, and efficient resource use. It took sixteen more years to discover a practical path toward developing new, sane, and more equitable and sustainable economies around the world. I still remember the moment of epiphany. My wife, Gwen, handed me two articles on new ways to measure progress more holistically to account for social and environmental as well as economic factors. One was by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe in the October 1995 issue of Atlantic Monthly, titled “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?” The second was an interview with Hazel Henderson in the fall 1995 issue of Whole Earth Review, in which she described her new Country Futures Indicators.2 The same month, the National Film Board of Canada released a documentary, “Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics,” that I also found revelatory.3 All three sources had a trenchant critique of progress measures based on GDP, which were widely touted by politicians, economists, and journalists as the ultimate measures of a society’s economic health. By contrast, all three critiques saw GDP being used to prop up an inherently biased value system that assesses how well off we are simply according to whether we’re making, selling, and buying more stuff. Each source presented a vision of saner, more comprehensive progress measures that integrate social, economic, and environmental perspectives and thereby lay the foundation for a new well-being and sustainability-based economic paradigm. And so, in the fall of 1995 at age forty-eight, a light went on that launched me on the twenty-four-year odyssey described in this book. Suddenly I realized why I had felt that what I was reading was so claustrophobic and divorced from reality when I struggled with Economics 101 thirty years earlier. The conventional texts and professors were presenting the economy basically as a closed box in which households provide labor to firms in exchange for income that households use to buy what firms produce and sell. The larger social and environmental

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realities within which the economy operated were largely excluded from that standard equation, from the widely accepted measures of progress based on that model, and therefore from policy priorities. Although I had previously sensed that basic flaw at some visceral level, I had never seen it articulated, analyzed, or expressed within the context of a solution or alternative progress measures and a new path forward. So dominant, unexamined, and taken for granted is the conventional paradigm based on the assumption of endless economic growth that I’d just blindly assumed this is the way things are and wrung my hands in despair. As in Plato’s famous Allegory, one has to step outside the cave even to breathe fresh air and recognize the existence of the cave in which one has been so long confined. In retrospect I now see that a major chain that bound me to the cave and a huge blind spot that stopped me from understanding the problem is our modern academic proclivity for specialization. As a so-called political scientist, I was able for far too long to keep distasteful economics at a distance and thus was shielded by my discipline from even exploring the problem. Until this revelatory moment, I could not have labeled untrammelled economic growth and its social and ecological effects as a core feature of the problem, and thus I had no idea where to search for solutions. After considerable digging and extensive reading in the mid-1990s, my second discovery was, if anything, even more startling: outstanding scholars, statisticians, economists, and researchers, such as Herman Daly, Mathis Wackernagel, and many others, had already developed the necessary tools that could enable us to develop far better progress measures. And I realized simultaneously that those new measures could provide a practical and effective foundation for a new economic paradigm that was capable of addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges. (See chapter 15 for an example of such a new paradigm.) Instead of assessing how well off we are according to whether we’re making, selling, and buying more stuff, as we do at present, these experts had devised some robust ways of assessing whether we’re really making what I considered genuine progress. For example, are our communities safer and stronger? Are we healthier and better educated? Are we economically and financially more secure? Is our natural world cleaner and

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healthier, and are we leaving the conditions of life on the planet in better shape for our children and for other species? I was particularly drawn in these analyses to the emerging discipline of full-cost accounting, which tries to include the social and environmental benefits and costs of different economic activities and thus to tell the whole story of the real impacts of production and consumption. That same formative year (1995), for instance, saw the founding of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia, which worked to assess the full economic benefits and costs of car, bus, and other transport modes, including crash, travel time, and congestion costs; effects on climate change; air pollution; resource depletion and land use; and more.4 For the first time, I saw a strong economic case for public transport, renewable energy, sustainable urban planning, and other policy shifts the world seems urgently to need. Now, at last, thirty years after I’d turned my back on economics, economics started to come alive, and I was drawn to it as if by a magnet. The new measures seemed globally relevant and revealed, more clearly than anything I had ever seen, our deepest assumptions about the meaning of prosperity and well-being and about the economy on which our livelihoods depended, and they exposed our blind adherence to the dogma of limitless growth. And they did this using hard evidence, through a medium that I thought people could readily accept and relate to, in a familiar and widely shared language, and with a terminology shared with the world of conventional economics. Most important of all, in my view, the new progress measures could serve as the thin edge of the wedge of potentially profound economic and human transformation toward a more sustainable and equitable world that could further the well-being of our own and other species. But it took one more revelation in the mid-1990s to set me on the long journey described here. Through all my voracious reading, one puzzling question kept recurring, to which I simply could not find an answer no matter where I looked. Why was no government anywhere in the world using such robust methods and insights as the basis for actually formulating policy? Why were policy makers ignoring both the analysts and the telling facts and figures being churned out by their own

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statistics agencies? And so I started wondering: might one government somewhere on this planet be persuaded actually to adopt and use the new tools to gather better and more accurate evidence and thereby be able to craft good, innovative policies that would lay the foundations of a viable and sustainable new economic system that furthers economic, social, and ecological well-being? And might its success not provide a beacon for others at a time of increasing global insecurity and concern about the future? Thus began a journey that started with developing a rigorous, policyrelevant set of measures for what was now my home province of Nova Scotia. That work made the rounds of all major Canadian political parties and then took me from the briny, sea-tossed shores of Canada’s Atlantic coast to the islands of New Zealand in the South Pacific, to the high mountains of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, to one of the world’s largest summit conferences in Rio and the halls of United Nations headquarters in New York, and back again to tiny villages in the foothills of the Himalayas. For twenty years I worked with governments, including directly with the prime minister of Bhutan, to try and bring the new measures and the powerful social, economic, and ecological evidence they revealed into the fabric of government policy making. This is the story of my roller-coaster adventure—with tremendous hopes as the practical foundations of a new, sane, sustainability-based economy seemed to be laid, and with equally bitter disappointments as those efforts encountered enormous resistance from powerful, entrenched interests with a vested stake in holding onto the conventional way dedicated to economic growth for its own sake. Most challenging, I was to discover, because it was so difficult to spot, was the way those established interests often co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability and well-being to resist real change and to maintain and even strengthen business as usual. There were watershed moments, such as Bhutan’s dramatic 2012 presentation of a “New Economic Paradigm” based on sustainability and well-being to the United Nations. In response, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declared: “The old model is broken. We need to create a new one.” And my colleagues and I then went on to assemble a global

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team of 70 top-notch economists, scientists, and other scholars to craft a possible framework for that new economy. Recalling the pivotal 1944 Bretton Woods gathering, which laid the foundation and created the institutions of the present global economic system, we dared to say we were crafting a “new Bretton Woods.” And then there were heartbreaks as we watched that initiative (and others) unravel in so many places. Along the way from Nova Scotia to Bhutan, my colleagues and I learned compelling lessons—as much from our failures as from our achievements. Human and social (let alone global) transformation is not an easy process, and it runs up against deeply ingrained patterns, greed and ignorance, vested interests, fear of the unknown, and one’s own impatience. But in the midst of all those challenges, we did gain some hands-on insights into what works, what doesn’t, and why, and we have had some successes. There are some hard, practical lessons here that can teach us what it will take to create the new economic system that the world so desperately needs if humankind is to have a future on this planet.

1 THE MAGIC NUMBER

I

ronically, once I saw a description of economics that made sense to me, that explained the reality I had observed around the world, and that envisioned a new, more just economic order, I became intensely interested in studying exactly what I’d abandoned thirty years earlier. I needed to know what the current economic worldview offers, what it is missing, and why it has such a tenacious hold on our minds and society and on the entire discipline of economics. It quickly became clear that a key dimension of that worldview, which propelled the journey described in this book, was the belief in continuous economic growth.

WHAT IS GDP?

Given all the complexities of our current economic system and of the so-called closed-box economic model that describes exchanges between firms and households, I was struck that the health of this economy is so often symbolized by a single, almost magical, number called GDP or gross domestic product. GDP summarizes a country’s total output or total economic activity over a specific period. But that function alone can’t explain the extraordinary clout and authority of GDP when cited

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by economists, politicians, and journalists, or why it’s been called “the most powerful statistical figure in human history.”1 It doesn’t tell us why experts tout GDP as “a comprehensive scorecard of the economy’s health” or why 3 percent GDP growth in the United States was cited in 2018 as marking a “burgeoning economy” and new “economic boom,” celebrated with the headline, “Trump has set economic growth on fire.”2 To answer those questions and grasp the power of GDP, we have to understand the difference between what GDP is and how it’s used. The largest component of GDP—68 percent in the United States—is usually personal consumption. That’s why policy makers often judge their country’s economic performance by how much its residents buy. The other components of GDP are investment (about 16 percent of GDP in the United States), government spending (about 18 percent), and net exports (about −3 percent, which means U.S. imports typically exceed exports). Other countries have different patterns: in Germany, for example, personal consumption is 52 percent of GDP; in India 60 percent; and in China, just 39 percent.3 Saving more means consuming less, so whereas American households save about 6 percent of their disposable income, the French and Germans save about 10 percent and the Chinese 38 percent.4 Use of GDP largely replaced gross national product (GNP) in 1991. The difference between them lies in how they count income from foreign sources. GNP measures the monetary value of goods and services produced by all the citizens of a country wherever they are, whereas GDP measures the total value of all goods and services produced within the boundaries of a country. That total GDP statistic for a country is compiled from data collected from every economic sector. So there is a GDP of agriculture, manufacturing, forestry, mining, tourism, the automobile industry, construction, healthcare, and so on. Thus not only does GDP tell us about the overall output of the market economy, but the components that make it up tell us how much each economic sector is contributing to the monetary value of the economy at a given point in time. This information enables policy makers to identify changes in the composition of the market economy, likely areas of labor demand and shortages, export opportunities, the impact of changes in these areas on inflation, and so forth.

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GDP can be calculated in three basic ways: by how much we produce, by how much we spend, or by how much we earn. Those three methods should produce roughly the same result. That’s because consumers, businesses, and governments buy what firms produce. What consumers, businesses, and governments spend in turn becomes income for others through wages for workers, profits for businesses, dividends for shareholders, interest for investors, and rental income for property owners. Knowing the rate of changes in GDP also helps governments make economic policy. If growth is comparatively sluggish, for example, central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of Canada may reduce interest rates to encourage borrowing, investment, and job creation, and government may introduce incentives, tax breaks, and other stimulus measures for economic sectors in trouble. If growth is relatively rapid, interest rates may be increased to control inflation. When I got this far in my understanding, I was frankly a bit puzzled at my earlier resistance. All this made sense, and I could see the utility of GDP for policy purposes—particularly in responding appropriately to economic fluctuations and thereby contributing to economic stability. I  still wondered, though, how those undoubted uses made GDP “the most powerful statistical figure in human history.” To this point at least, GDP appeared to me as a relatively objective statistic that simply described the size of the market economy and which sectors were expanding or contracting. “In itself,” writes Philipp Lepenies in The Power of a Single Number: A Political History of GDP, “[GDP] provides a seemingly objective overview of economic processes that is purportedly free of ideology and value judgments; it is based on numbers alone. It is determined and measured in line with transparent and understandable criteria.”5 I couldn’t disagree.

HOW OBJECTIVE IS GDP?

That is, I couldn’t disagree until I looked more closely and gradually came to realize that although GDP per se is objective and useful, it is misused

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in a way that is far from objective and for a purpose its architects never intended. And that it is precisely that misuse that makes GDP so powerful. More disturbingly and subtly, that misuse has helped to distort the very language of policy makers, economists, and journalists; the release of statistics by government agencies; the way economics is taught and textbooks written; the priorities of policy makers; and—more deeply— the value system of our societies. This distinction between what GDP is and how it is used is also critically important for another reason—one that has put me at odds with some of GDP’s most trenchant critics. Unlike some who advocate replacing GDP, I’ve never seen a problem with GDP when it’s properly used. On the contrary, it’s helpful and worthwhile. But it doesn’t give us the measures we need to assess overall well-being and societal progress, which a measure of market size simply cannot do. And a focus on such larger societal progress measures, it turns out, would make Economics 101 one of the most relevant, interesting, and alluring courses available to freshmen. But that seemingly obvious shift is no small thing, as my journey of the next twenty years and this book show. Let’s look more closely. The simple reason for GDP’s predominance is, in the words of Robert Wade of the London School of Economics, the “fact that governments all over the world take as their top economic objective the increase of one number: gross domestic product.”6 In other words, what matters to policy makers is not just assessing rates of growth objectively to formulate useful macroeconomic policy but increasing GDP, which means making the economy bigger. Of course, there are reasons for that objective, given that growth as signified by a bigger GDP is often associated with job creation and economic slow-down with job loss. But in recent decades especially, we’ve increasingly seen growth that is driven not by labor but by capital, with new technologies replacing labor and leading to what’s been called jobless growth. If job creation were the main concern of policy makers, there are many other (and often more effective) ways of doing that than increasing GDP, as we’ll see later in this book. Ultimately, what gives GDP its enormous power is the belief that the more we grow the economy, and the more we produce and consume,

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the better off we are. In this way, GDP is no longer just an objective measure of market size; it is also taken as a normative measure of progress and well-being—a misuse against which the architects of GDP themselves warned more than eighty years ago. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets put it in 1934, to assess the welfare of a nation, it is necessary to ask not how much the economy is growing but what is growing, and for what purpose.7 Evidence of how deeply ingrained this misuse of GDP has become started to jump out at me from every direction—from news sound bites to policy statements to the way statistics themselves are manipulated and distorted. For instance, economic growth is now regularly equated with human health, with adjectives such as “healthy,” “vigorous,” and “robust” denoting a rapidly growing economy, whereas “weak,” “ailing,” and “sickly” have been used to describe an economy in which growth has slowed. When things get really “bad” (meaning when production and consumption fall sharply), we call it a “depression,” and during the 2008–2009 recession, leaders regularly spoke of “injecting” this or that stimulus to spur “recovery” through increased borrowing and spending. We’ve seen that language blossom in this COVID-19 era, where the supposed “health” (size) of the economy has often taken precedence over (and even come at the risk and cost of) actual human health and well-being. By contrast, we hear barely the whisper of a suggestion that both human and economic health might benefit from a redistribution of income, wealth, work hours, and other resources. Nor have we seen the massive new job creation that would certainly come from dedicated investment in renewable energy, public transportation, and other dimensions of a genuine “green new deal.” The degree to which economic growth, material output, and the predominance of GDP since World War II have come to define and become inextricably linked with American identity, values, and culture is historically documented by Andrew Yarrow in Measuring America: How Economic Growth Came to Define American Greatness in the Late Twentieth Century. Yarrow notes it wasn’t always this way, and that American values and distinctiveness were historically defined in terms of political ideals such as individual freedom, democracy and limited

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government, and the character of its people.8 Matthias Schmelzer’s The Hegemony of Growth traces this historical evolution of the growth paradigm into a societal norm and goal at the transnational level in the context of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).9 The key point is simply that however originally intended as an objective measure of national income, GDP usage has become—and is today—deeply normative, value laden, and representative of extraordinary consensus. This belief in economic growth for its own sake, as signified by increasing GDP, crosses all party lines and most dominant ideologies. Thus a Republican U.S. president declares, “economic growth is the key to our endeavors”’ a Liberal Canadian prime minister asserts that “economic growth is the foundation for all else we want to achieve in areas of social policy”; a Conservative UK prime minister says, “economic growth . . . is the essential foundation of all our aspirations”; and a Communist Chinese president vows “to double the 2010 GDP and per capita income of the Chinese.”10 The 2008–2009 economic crisis revealed the extent to which the GDP/growth paradigm is the ultimate unifying bond of modern society, with even the most bitter opponents closing ranks the moment global economic growth was threatened. In the United States partisan politics suddenly dissipated as Democrats and Republicans joined to approve a massive $1.5 trillion stimulus package to get the economy growing again.11 Indeed, Barack Obama’s first act after being elected in 2008 was to work with George W. Bush to bail out the U.S. auto industry.12 When this one statistic dominates and drives policy, its avidly watched release in a country crowds out other vital measures of progress that are assumed to be far less important due simply to the sporadic infrequency of their availability. Thus although Statistics Canada has released GDP data eighty times (every quarter) in the last twenty years, it has provided vital data on wealth inequality only four times and on unpaid work only three times in total. Key data on the health of Canadian forests, such as changes in age and species composition, often are not released at all but lie buried in provincial archives. Needless to say, the impact of such sporadic data availability escalates the distortion caused by the misuse

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of GDP. When I asked a top Canadian finance official why it was so important to release GDP numbers monthly and quarterly, he thought for a long time and finally answered: “Well, the U.S. does it monthly and quarterly, so we have to as well. . . . Besides, we’ve always done it this way. People expect it.”

WHAT GDP MISSES

Without the habitual and deep-seated belief that a growing GDP makes us better off and that a static or falling GDP imperils our well-being, it would still be a useful statistic, though it would get far less attention. But the problem with GDP runs far deeper than its use for a purpose never intended: Because it provides highly misleading (often entirely inaccurate) information when taken as a measure of well-being and overall social progress, reliance on GDP encourages the adoption of policies that hurt rather than help us and that make us worse rather than better off. Because the GDP simply aggregates the economic value of all goods and services produced in the market economy and thus reflects the total amount of money earned and spent, it makes no distinction between a dollar spent on an apple or a cigarette, on a Leonard Cohen CD or a gun, on repairing a window smashed by vandals or on a library or health clinic. Activities that degrade our quality of life, such as crime, pollution, war, and environmental destruction that require money to remedy, all make the GDP go up. The more trees we cut down, the more junk food we buy, the more prisons we build—the more the economy is said to grow. And if we have to take an extra job to make ends meet, pay someone to look after our child because we don’t have time to do it ourselves, and buy more Valium to cope with the greater stress, GDP will go up, too, because we’re getting paid more and spending more. But are we better off? Because the life-giving ecosystem services provided by the natural world do not carry a price tag, they are not included in GDP calculations, which count only monetary transactions. That’s how the natural

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world’s depletion can be counted as GDP’s gain. GDP counts the timber, fish, food, coal, and other products we extract from our natural resource base and send to market, but it fails to account for the positive health and value of what we leave behind—in our oceans, forests, soils, and atmosphere—and their contribution to our well-being and that of generations to come. This accounting failure puts no brake on policies that deplete or degrade our resources, including overfishing, forest degradation, soil-depleting agricultural practices, or reliance on fossil fuels. In fact, these destructive actions are counted as positives in GDP. And this reveals an even more basic structural limitation in the way GDP is misused. Thus politicians, economists, and journalists generally don’t understand the implications of the word “gross” in GDP, and so they fail to recognize that one cannot assess economic health by a flow account such as GDP in isolation from balance sheet accounts that report stocks. An increase in economic activity over time, as reported by GDP, may well be liquidating a capital asset, as in the foregoing example whereby excess timber harvesting (a flow) depletes the forest (a stock). Similar confusion between stocks and flows occurs in present accounting practices when, for example, highway capital and maintenance costs are expensed in a single year instead of seen as long-term investment, and when needed maintenance is deferred, thereby incurring a hidden and unaccounted-for “infrastructure deficit.”13 Only by assessing GDP flows in relation to asset balance sheets—that is, by net rather than gross accounting—can economic health be effectively assessed. If GDP counts as progress costs such as crime, war, and resource depletion, which detract from well-being, it also ignores many genuine contributions to well-being—for instance, voluntary and household work—simply because no money is exchanged. So, the work volunteers do—caring for the sick, elderly, youth, and disabled and for their churches, communities, and the environment, as well as the unpaid nurturing of the next generation that mothers and fathers do—remain invisible in GDP and therefore in our core measure of progress. As I learned what GDP did and did not count, I began to understand the disconnect between economics and life that, even as a naive freshman half a century earlier, had turned me away from Economics

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101. Others far more illustrious and astute saw through the deception long before I  did. As Robert Kennedy famously remarked more than 50 years ago: Too much and too long, we have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. . . . Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.14

Even from a purely economic perspective, the GDP measure sends highly deceptive signals to policy makers, the vast majority of whom remain largely unaware of its shortcomings. For example, GDP tells us how much total income we produce but nothing about how that income is shared and distributed. So, most households might be losing real income, as happened in the United States from 1999 to 201415 and in Canada in the 1980s and ’90s,16 while GDP continued to grow, driven by the sharp gains of only a small segment of society. Yet by the measure of GDP change, the economy appeared, and was pronounced, “healthier” even as the gap between rich and poor widened. The omission in GDP calculations of key measures of environmental sustainability, health, quality of life, equity, and financial security makes it a misleading and sometimes even dangerous statistic when it is misused as a measure of progress, well-being, or even economic security. Indeed, partly because GDP employs a gross rather than a net accounting system, measuring total market output without accounting for economic, ecological, and social costs, GDP statistics failed to send key warning signals even about the 2008–2009 economic crisis, like the fact that much of the 19 percent growth in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP in the United States since 200117 had been the result of people borrowing money against their homes to make consumer purchases.18

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A net accounting system that considered income growth in relation to debt growth and consumer spending in relation to balance sheets assessing the net value of housing stocks might have helped to predict the looming financial and economic crisis and perhaps might even have stirred policy makers to action to prevent it. To wrap our minds around this fact that GDP measures gross rather than net income, consider how quickly we’d go broke if we ran our own households that way. In fact, the word “economics” comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning “household management.” If we managed our households using a gross measure such as GDP, we’d count our salary but forget to count the payments we have to make on our car loan, house mortgage, credit card purchases, and bank loan. Or we’d plan an addition to our house without figuring what it will cost in materials, labor, time, lifestyle disruption, and more. When that failure to account for debt and changes in family and individual net worth goes global, it’s not surprising to hear the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warn us that sky-high levels of global debt (at an all-time record of $188 trillion, or 226 percent of global GDP, at the end of 2018) bring “risks to financial stability and risks to broad economic activity.”19 And in this present era of massive COVID-19 economic stimulus packages, it is remarkable how little attention is being paid to the long-term implications of the huge present accumulation of government debt. Fifteen years from now, will governments be forced to cut education, health care, social security and other vital services or risk bankruptcy? In sum, there are severe limitations to the GDP calculation even in the sphere of basic economic accounting and analysis, let alone in assessing societal well-being and ecological health. Most fundamentally, GDP is not designed to distinguish between those economic activities that are beneficial for society and those that signify a decline in quality of life or a depletion of resources for the future. It is instead a crude market measure that accounts for the quantitative size of the market economy but not for the rise or fall in the social, human, cultural, and natural wealth that underlies our true wealth as a society and on which our future viability depends. Interestingly, even the most ardent proponents of GDP accounting now openly acknowledge its limitations. Diane Coyle, author of GDP:

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A Brief But Affectionate History, says: “One of the things that looking at the history of GDP taught me is that it just can’t bear the kind of weight that we’re trying to put on it.” Her book is fundamentally sympathetic to the utility of GDP, but Coyle concludes that although GDP was a good measure for the twentieth century, it is increasingly inappropriate for a twenty-first-century economy that is driven by innovation, services, and intangible goods.20 The original failure to account for ecological costs in GDP accounting is understandable historically. At the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, where the Allied nations met to establish a new international monetary and financial order for the post-World War II world, the architects of our present global economic system did not typically recognize how limited natural resources are or that human activity could change the climate. Although some scientists had already warned of ocean depletion, soil erosion, and more, few economists conceived that ocean species could be overfished to the point of extinction, that fossil fuel use could raise sea levels, or that fresh water could become a scarce commodity. GDP as an accounting system, and its use to support the dogma of limitless economic growth, were thus devised in an era when nature’s services—to the extent they were acknowledged at all—were seen as free and infinite. Had the Bretton Woods representatives been familiar with today’s scientific knowledge, our present global financial institutions, such as the 1944-era World Bank and International Monetary Fund, might have established different criteria for development and loans, and function very differently today. Now that we have robust scientific evidence, we know in considerable detail what our grandparents did not. The flaws of counting resource depletion as economic gain are acknowledged today even by mainstream institutions, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union, and the World Bank, among others. In short, we no longer have any excuse to assess our prosperity, write textbooks, take cues on economic health, or blindly make policy based on an outdated model of the economy and progress measures at odds with what we know today.

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FAITH IN GDP—THE MYSTERY DEEPENS

Strangely, the more pieces fell into place for me on GDP and its limitations, and more broadly on how the economy works, the more the mystery of GDP’s persistent and ongoing misuse deepened. The unsuitability and inadequacies of GDP as a measure of progress, well-being and economic security, and the path to more comprehensive measures, had been so clearly documented by highly reputable scholars whose work I  had been reading that I simply couldn’t understand why governments were so tenaciously holding on to an obvious deception, or self-deception, to assess how well or poorly an economy was doing. Why were prominent economists still writing Economics 101 texts based on flawed models being used for purposes never intended by their architects? Why were governments not measuring what matters to our well-being or making better policies by using the far superior measures of progress that already existed? In fact, it was that question that really triggered the efforts described in this book. What particularly roused my passion was that none of the foregoing critique of GDP is merely theoretical; its misuse affects us directly in our everyday lives and imperils our children’s future. Conversely, however, if what we count and measure affects policy, then measuring progress accurately and in truly meaningful ways also could be the most practical tool to build a new sustainability-based economic paradigm that can ensure the well-being of our children and their children. But first, to test informally the hypothesis that what gets measurement priority also tends to get policy priority, I pulled a rather mischievous experiment on my unsuspecting students at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

2 COUNTING WHAT MATTERS

D

uring the spring 1996 semester, I repeatedly encouraged my students in one class to put their major effort into a recommended term paper. Unlike classes and assigned readings that the students could soak up like sponges and regurgitate at exam time, the term paper, I said, would be the students’ chance to hone their individual research skills, investigate what was of direct interest to them, improve their writing skills, and more. The term paper was the aspect of their semester’s work from which they would derive the most value, I assured them. Several times I offered to meet with the students individually to assist and advise them in their work on the paper. The students, however, noticed that the syllabus indicated the term paper was optional and didn’t count toward the final course grade: the final exam was worth 50 percent, the midterm 25 percent, and class attendance and in-class quizzes 25 percent. Not surprisingly, the students put their effort into the exams. Only two students even bothered with the paper. Despite my repeated, impassioned remarks on the value of the term paper, the real message I was sending was that the paper had no actual value because it was not being counted, whereas the exams mattered hugely. In a different class the following semester, I gave no speech about the term paper. I did not even mention it in class, but the course outline

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noted that it was worth 50 percent of a student’s final grade, with the various exams worth much less. Not surprisingly, the students put considerable time and effort into the paper. If it counted that much, it must matter, they rightly concluded. This rather wicked experiment with a group of innocent university students is a perfect metaphor for our political and economic arenas, in which policy makers regularly tout the importance of environmental stewardship, health, community well-being, and the like in their speeches but assign them no value in measuring progress and consequently pay them minimal attention in making policy. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it succinctly, “If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing. If our measures tell us everything is fine when it really isn’t, we will be complacent.”1 No wonder it is so difficult for even policy makers with the noblest intentions and most ardent speeches to adopt, for example, meaningful measures to combat climate change when our main progress measure— GDP—sends the opposite message. Thus a new coal-burning power plant, more fossil fuel–based production, and more spending on gas to drive large SUVs will increase GDP even as they increase greenhouse gas emissions. The big difference between my little class experiment and the world of government, as I was to discover the hard way, is that I could switch progress measures from one semester to the next and thereby shift the students’ behavior. Our GDP-based measures of progress are, by contrast, far more entrenched and resistant to change.

THE URGENCY OF ACTION

After first learning about GDP and its limitations in October 1995, my most immediate and straightforward task, as noted in the preceding chapter, was to try to wrap my mind around the workings of our present economic system and its assumptions. From that effort emerged a clear conclusion: given that GDP is not designed to, and cannot effectively,

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evaluate progress toward well-being, sustainability, equality, security, and other critical values, it became clear that we need different measures for these tasks. But to determine exactly what to measure and how to do so accurately and meaningfully in ways that would prompt governments to pay attention and act took two more years of intense research. Rushing enthusiastically but blindly into this endeavor could backfire and even discredit the new measures if they were not rigorous and credible. So the new reading required a critical examination of the strengths, limitations, methodologies, and data sources of the existing alternative measurement tools and models that had inspired me and that demonstrated the potential for a new way forward. But first I had to move beyond my vague concern about the state of the world and get a hard-nosed statistical handle on basic historical and current trends to understand where we as a species were headed economically, socially, and environmentally. It was not a pretty picture, a conclusion many other close observers around the world were coming to as well. Facing this reality squarely in 1996 injected an urgency into the mission forming in my mind and quickly changed it from option to necessity. We as a species had, it seemed, only a narrow window of opportunity to turn things around before certain destructive trends became all but irreversible. Based on the numbers it was apparent that at existing rates, we had fewer than twenty years before we would be locked into changes  that would seriously imperil our children’s future. Since then numerous dangerous trends, such as resource depletion, species extinctions, more intense pollution, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions leading to further climate change, have not changed for the better. On the contrary, they’ve accelerated. The last five years have been the hottest since recordkeeping began in the 1880s—and likely for centuries and even millennia before then2— and nineteen of the twenty hottest years have occurred since 2000. The last decade was the hottest on record, as were the three previous decades.3 Global temperatures have been climbing much faster than previously predicted. In the twentieth century sea levels rose by an average of 1.8 mm/year. But in the last twenty years they have risen by an average of 3.2 mm/year—

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about twice the rate of the previous eighty years. By 2100, sea levels are expected to rise by 1 meter, swamping cities along America’s eastern seaboard. If the Greenland ice sheet, which has seen accelerated loss in recent years,4 completely melts, as scientists expect should global temperatures rise 2–3oC, sea levels could rise by 7 meters, flooding London.5 Our grandchildren may see that happen if recent studies predicting a  3oC temperature increase by 2100 are accurate.6 Bangkok could be under water in less than fifteen years.7 The most rigorous and comprehensive estimate of future warming trends to date, released by the World Climate Research Programme in July 2020, now predicts a range of 2.6–3.9oC (66 percent confidence interval) or 2.3–4.7oC (90 percent confidence interval). These levels, based on a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from preindustrial levels, could be reached by 2060. This landmark study, based on decades of advances in climate science, has effectively eliminated the earlier more optimistic hopes to contain warming at 1.5 oC.8 Dozens of species are going extinct every day at a rate 1,000 times the natural extinction rate, and experts predict that if business continues as usual, future rates could be 10,000 times higher.9 The main threats to life are loss of habitat—including forests, swamps, and lakes—due to human harvesting, clearing, and development, as well as desertification, pollution, and sea level rise. Meanwhile, one of the most immediate threats to human life is toxic air pollution, which, according to the World Health Organization, kills 7 million people a year (4.5 million due to fossil fuel combustion), more than one in eight deaths worldwide, with 90 percent of the world’s population now exposed to dangerous pollution.10 According to William Laurance and Richard Bierregaard, the world’s “tropical forests are being cleared, burned, logged, fragmented, and overhunted on scales that lack historical precedent.” Studies show nearly 40 percent of forests have already been destroyed by human activity, and an additional 160,000 square kilometers (about 1 percent of original forest habitat) are lost each year.11 Nearly 94 percent of temperate forests worldwide have been severely disturbed by farming and logging;

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we have already lost about 80 percent of the world’s old-growth forests and 90 percent of those in the United States.12 But it’s not only environmental trends that are disturbing. The gap between rich and poor remains massive, with the richest 1 percent garnering 20 percent of world income and the poorest 50 percent just 9 percent. Global debt levels have mounted to all-time records. Physical, economic, and financial insecurity has increased in many parts of the world. And the number of people forcibly displaced by global conflicts approached 80 million in 2019—more than at any time since World War II.13 Reliable research has shown that if we continue on a business-asusual path of high greenhouse gas emissions and conventional GDPdominated material growth economies, even the best intentions may not result in effective action on some fronts.14 Instead we may begin to see wars for scarce water, a flood of environmental refugees larger than any government can handle, severed food supply lines, infectious diseases and epidemics that run wild, widespread famine in some areas, intolerable heat, uncontrollable wildfires, pervasive terrorism as the new norm, and diminishing average life spans. At the time of writing, Australia was gripped by extreme heatwaves, its hottest temperatures ever, a devastating three-year drought, and unprecedented, deadly bushfires raging out of control that destroyed 18.6 million hectares—more than twenty times all that burned in the Amazon in 2019—as well as thousands of homes, and more than a billion animals—some likely driven to extinction. And as this book goes into production, half a million people are being evacuated from devastating wildfires in Oregon, five of the ten largest fires in California’s history are all burning, and the western United States is blanketed in ash and acrid, toxic, choking smoke. The purpose of the litany here is not to forecast inevitable doom and gloom; rather, my aim is to share the urgency of change that began to grip me in 1996 as I pored over reams of statistics and trend lines that have predictably become much more troubling since then. It was crystal clear even then that we rapidly needed a fresh way of looking at the economy, society, and our natural world—one that does not confuse

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GDP with well-being, or material growth with genuine progress. As noted in the prologue, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon put it succinctly in response to our 2012 UN initiative described in chapter 13: “Let us face the facts: the old model is broken. We need to create a new one.”15 We need, then, a new economic paradigm, with new methods of accounting to supplant (but not eliminate) GDP; new forms of assessment that measure genuine progress; and markers of development that do not represent simply the extent of economic market activity but instead reflect advances (or setbacks) in human well-being and the preservation of the natural world. Such measures will point the way toward new policy priorities and institutions that at last could ensure a viable future for ourselves, our children, and our children’s children. We need a way forward—one that is feasible and practical to implement, that is sustainable over the long term, and that recognizes the true benefits and costs of different practices. This is not only necessary but, I argue, eminently possible—that is the good news! It quickly became clear to me that the issue is far bigger than measurement as such, because what we choose to measure reflects our values and priorities as a society. The deeper purpose of working with measurement is to enable citizens and the governments that purportedly represent us to identity where we should put our efforts. If we value a viable, equitable, sustainable society in harmony with the natural world, and if we see our well-being as dependent on more than income alone but also on health, education, security, social supports, work-life balance, community vitality and a healthy planet, then we must count and value such attributes that matter to us. To my immense relief, after studying both the dire statistics that were available and the proposed new ways forward in the mid-1990s, I found some surprisingly good news. Some brilliant economists, scientists, and other scholars had already been hard at work developing the methods required to create new and better measures of progress and thereby to lay the groundwork for a new, equitable, sustainability-based global economy. I owe much of what I did in the next twenty years to the pathbreaking work of these great pioneers.

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RETHINKING ECONOMICS

First, I discovered a whole new field I knew nothing about and that didn’t exist when I dropped out of Economics 101 in 1965. In sharp contrast to conventional economics, which portrays and analyzes the economy largely in isolation from environmental and social concerns, ecological economics investigates the interdependence of human economies and natural ecosystems. The field of environmental economics may owe its genesis to the ideas of Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906–94), who was one of the first to predict the eventual exhaustion of the earth’s mineral resources.16 It was his student Herman Daly whose 1973 book, Toward a Steady-State Economy, challenged standard economic growth theory by postulating the viability of an economy of relatively stable size that doesn’t exceed ecological limits, consumes energy and materials at sustainable levels, and thus conserves resources for the well-being of future generations.17 In the 1980s, Daly (who was the World Bank’s senior environmental economist from 1988 to 1994) formally cofounded the field of ecological economics with Robert Costanza, who, in 1989, became editor-in-chief of a new journal, Ecological Economics.18 The ecological economists, I realized, were pointing out something that was of supreme importance and at the same time immediately obvious—concealed though it had been in my Economics 101 texts: the human economy is not a closed system but exists as a subsystem within, and completely dependent on, an encompassing ecosystem that provides vital life-support services to the human economy. Those services include climate regulation, pollination, nutrient and hydrological cycling, waste filtration and assimilation, and the wide range of products (from energy to timber to food to minerals) that natural resources provide. The energy and matter that enter the human economy from the ecosystem also return to the ecosystem, partly as waste. The capacity of the ecosystem to absorb that human waste in turn affects the functioning of the human economy, given that pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, for

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example, will reduce economic productivity and efficiency and increase the costs of both remediating damages and controlling emissions. In the words of Robert Costanza, ecological economics “studies the ecology of humans and the economy of nature, the web of interconnections uniting the economic subsystem to the global ecosystem of which it is a part.”19 Or, in the words of physicist Fritjof Capra: The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. . . . [It] recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature.20

But it is not enough to applaud a beautiful theory. What captured me in the 1990s were the practical implications. The new field takes into account the economic value of what conventional economists call “externalities”—namely, the costs and benefits of economic activity for third parties who are not directly involved in that activity. For example, ecological economists account for the health costs of pollution that are borne by residents and the public rather than by the companies producing the pollution. Those pollution costs are not only invisible in and external to company and conventional accounts that count only the value of direct production but, perversely, they even increase GDP and contribute to what passes as economic growth by increasing spending on medical, hospital, drug, and pollution cleanup costs. The last twenty-five years have seen enormous strides by ecological economists in accounting for such externalities to estimate the economic costs of ecological degradation at not only the macro (national and global) level but also the project level, such as in proposals for a new factory or dam. In addition, ecological economists consider the economic value of ecosystem services. In conventional economic analysis, which accounts for only monetary exchanges, the services provided by nature are largely regarded as free and therefore remain invisible, unvalued, and unaccounted for when they are depleted or degraded by economic activity. In sharp contrast, ecological economists explicitly value

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nature’s provision of food, water, and other necessities; nature’s regulatory functions, such as climate and disease control; its supporting functions, including nutrient and hydrological cycles and crop pollination; and nature’s cultural, spiritual, and recreational benefits.21 To cite one example, forested watersheds protect the quality of drinking water and save expensive filtration costs. Thus a study by the World Bank and World Wildlife Fund estimated that a $1–$1.5 billion land and forest resource protection strategy designed to restore watersheds in the Catskill Mountains could save New York City about $9 billion over ten years compared with replacing those natural services with a treatment plant that would cost $6–$8 billion to build plus annual operating costs of $300–$500 million.22 The argument that the value of effects on nature’s services should be figured into mainstream economic considerations has contributed to dramatic advances in what, as noted in the prologue, is commonly called “full-cost accounting,” which recognizes the environmental, health, economic, and social benefits and costs of economic activity. Full-cost accounts thus assess the real economic value of nonmarket assets that are not traded in the market economy by bringing those so-called externalities right into the core fabric of the new accounts. Full-cost accounting also treats natural, social, and human assets (such as forests, fish stocks, safe communities, and population health) as subject to depreciation, just as manufactured capital is, and recognizes that these assets require reinvestment to maintain their optimal functioning and productivity. So, although GDP values a forest only when its timber is cut down and sent to market, full-cost accounts see declines in the capacity of the standing forest to sequester carbon, recycle nutrients, and protect watersheds, soils, and habitat as a “depreciation” of natural capital. And whereas conventional accounts figure conservation and restoration forestry as costs, full-cost accounts see them as investments in forest value.23 If adopted and implemented, full-cost accounts could make the market economy much more efficient, as we shall see in chapter 5. Indeed, they are essential for making sane decisions about financial incentives and penalties such as subsidies, taxes, duties, and loans to

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encourage sustainable activities that improve well-being and to discourage harmful activities. I was even more encouraged during my 1996–98 reading spree to find the new field strongly supported by the pioneering efforts of statisticians. In natural resource accounting, for example, the Washington D.C.–based World Resources Institute has taken a lead since 1982 in accounting for, among other things, water, agricultural, and energy resources; forest and soil health; climate; and waste management.24 Many statistical agencies have assembled reliable inventories that track changes in forest cover, fish stocks, greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions, and more.25 Parallel to these efforts was the birth of ecological footprint analysis, developed in the mid-1990s by University of British Columbia scholars William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel. Footprint analysis compares our demands on nature—how much we use to produce the resources we consume and the waste we generate—with nature’s supply—the biocapacity or productivity of our farmland, forests, fishing grounds, and other ecological assets. If we are consuming at a rate faster than these resources regenerate, footprint calculations tell us the size of the “ecological deficit” we are running. This brilliant innovation allows us to assess the state of the environment from a consumption as well as a production perspective, thus placing the onus for environmental responsibility on the shoulders of consumers and not just on corporations or local producers such as loggers, farmers, fishermen, and others dependent on natural resource health for their livelihood.26 Similar advances in the collection of data also were occurring in the social field and were beginning to provide real insights on the broader constituents of well-being and quality of life. In 1992 and 1998, Statistics Canada, for example, conducted its first time-use surveys, providing valuable information on the volunteer and household work not counted in GDP and on how people spend their time beyond the paid work tallied by conventional economic statistics. Statistics Canada’s 1994–95 National Population Health Survey for the first time assessed people’s “social supports,” and in 2003, the agency conducted its first full-fledged “social capital” survey, which assessed people’s social networks, civic engagement, sense of trust and belonging, and more.

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Since the 1950s, starting with tobacco’s links to cancer, outstanding work by epidemiologists has increasingly linked specific diseases and health outcomes to particular risk factors.27 That groundbreaking work now enables us to assess the economic costs of health hazards such as smoking, obesity, physical inactivity, and poverty. And measurement methods in all these areas continue to improve, enabling increasingly accurate assessments.28 Best of all, the new population health data on health risks has made possible a policy focus on wellness and disease prevention in contrast to the still dominant sickness treatment perspective that directs “health” spending overwhelmingly to hospitals, drugs, and doctors and that remains embedded in GDP. In a nutshell, what this late 1990s literature investigation showed me was not only the troubling trends that imperil our children’s future but also the conceptual, statistical, and methodological advances that provide the tools we need to develop appropriate programs to reverse those destructive trends. By properly understanding the economy in its social and ecological context, and by measuring progress accurately and holistically, these pioneers, in my view, were overcoming long-standing distortions and misconceptions about economic growth and laying the foundations of the new economy of the future.

A NEW WAY FORWARD

Based on the data sources available in the mid-1990s, I discovered that there also had been significant advances in constructing composite indices of progress that incorporated a range of economic, and environmental variables. Some of these efforts built on and adjusted GDP for social and environmental impacts, while others had been constructed independently of GDP and presented either as supplements or alternatives to conventional economic indicators. Among the notable landmarks in those efforts were the following. In 1972, Yale economists William Nordhaus and James Tobin developed the measure of economic welfare (MEW), which adjusted crude

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GDP to account for unpaid work, leisure time, costs of environmental pollution, and government investment in health and education.29 Then, in 1989, Herman Daly and John Cobb went considerably further in their Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which started with personal consumption (68 percent of U.S. GDP), adjusted up or down for improved or declining income equality, added the value of unpaid household and voluntary work, and subtracted the costs of environmental pollution, car crashes, crime, and depreciation of natural capital due to resource depletion, land loss, climate change, and more.30 The ISEW ended with a single dollar figure to provide a net rather than gross assessment of economic prosperity.31 The ISEW was refined and expanded into a Genuine Progress Indicator developed by Redefining Progress in California in 1995.32 Consisting of twenty-six indicators and again aggregated to a single dollar figure, this GPI has been updated several times, with data going back to 1950, and it has been replicated for several countries. Results for seventeen countries that have 53 percent of the world’s population and 59 percent of global GDP show that although GDP per capita increased more than threefold from 1950 to 2003, GPI per capita rose into the 1970s, peaked in 1978, and has decreased slightly since then due to rising inequality and environmental degradation.33 By the mid-1990s, some communities also had begun to take the lead in developing comprehensive local measures of well-being and progress that accounted for health, education, social, and environmental variables. Although national averages can conceal vast regional and local disparities, it is at the local grassroots level that the “rubber hits the road” in terms of safety, economic security, clean air and water, health, social supports, and other key indicators of quality of life. One of the undisputed leaders in this field was Sustainable Seattle, which in 1996 earned a UN award for Excellence in Indicators and subsequently spurred dozens of similar municipal and community efforts.34 By the end of 1997, my review of the existing literature on new and better measures of progress and well-being indicated four conclusions that would set the tone for my own work for the next twenty years.35 First, the tremendous strides that had been made in data collection, measurement methodologies, and conceptual contributions meant that

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comprehensive measures of progress and well-being could viably replace the misuse of the GDP for that purpose.36 Second, it seemed clear that the new measures, concepts, and insights could form the basis of a new sustainability-based economic paradigm geared toward societal well-being to replace the existing growth-based paradigm. Indeed, if they gained a sympathetic ear, I thought the new measures had the potential to stimulate a dramatic change in the agenda of governments to include consideration of the social and environmental impacts—positive as well as negative—of their proposed policies. Such measures would enable policy makers to craft policies that would further the well-being, sustainability, and long-term prosperity of their country or region. The third and somewhat surprising conclusion to emerge in that late-1990s survey was that no such integrated and comprehensive measures had been adopted by any government anywhere in the world to assess progress in enhancing well-being and developing a sustainable economy. Environmental data collection and public health and other surveys were being undertaken and made use of on a piecemeal basis, but overall and across the globe, governments continued to assess how well off they were by conventional GDP-based economic growth measures. Maybe I should not have been surprised, considering that the new measures might initially make countries look worse off despite evergrowing GDP numbers. But I was naive enough to believe that governments have a vested interest in improving their people’s well-being, which requires telling the truth and knowing their country’s strengths and weaknesses. At the time I simply couldn’t fathom why governments would not want to use the robust, accurate, comprehensive, and integrated evidence so readily available to inform and change policy.

WHERE ECONOMISTS FEAR TO TREAD

The fourth insight gained from my 1990s reading was the most significant in determining the shape of my work over the next decade.

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I realized that to move beyond GDP as the prime criterion of a society’s progress, we needed two different kinds of measures. First, we needed social, economic, and environmental indicators of well-being that assess progress (or its lack) more comprehensively and that are more directed toward quality-of-life improvements than are economic growth–based measures. For example, we needed to know if people’s health, safety, and economic security were improving or not, whether air and water quality were getting better or worse, and whether greenhouse gas emissions were going up or down. But such measures of progress are not enough. After all, GDP in itself is not an indicator but an accounting system that tells us the size of the market economy. So, to move beyond GDP, it was clear that we also needed accounts that assess the economic value of the natural, human, and social assets of a society in addition to the produced capital conventionally measured. For example, a healthy and well-educated populace has economic value in improved productivity and reduced health care costs; safe communities have economic value in reduced crime costs; and a healthy forest has economic value in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and protecting watersheds and soils. Conversely, climate change produces heavy economic losses due to droughts, storms, fires, heat waves, coastal flooding, and health impacts. Though invisible in GDP-based accounts, such assets and liabilities directly affect the health of the economy as a whole.

WHAT ’S T H E DI F F E R E NC E B E T W EE N INDICATO RS AND ACCO U N TS AND W H Y DO WE NE E D B OT H ?

Indicators of well-being are statistics that assess progress over time and that therefore can be used to signal whether we are better or worse off. They are based on physical measures (e.g., employment, crime, poverty, and illness rates; greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions). The units of measurement vary with the indicator (e.g., number of jobs, crime incidents, or smokers per 100,000 population, or kilograms or tonnes per capita of pollutant emissions).

COUNTING WHAT MATTERS35

Whereas indicators assess progress, or its lack, in units appropriate to each indicator, accounts assess value and changes therein over time, with units of measurement expressed in common monetary terms (dollars) to the degree possible. When monetization is not possible, evidence usually exists that describes and points to economic value. For example, ample evidence shows that nutrient-rich soil has a higher productive economic value than badly eroded soil, even when that benefit cannot accurately be assessed in monetary terms. The key difference between conventional and full-cost accounts is simply that the former value only market economic assets, liabilities, and transactions, whereas the latter also value nonmarket social and environmental assets, liabilities, and transactions. Thus, although conventional accounts register cigarette and gasoline sales as contributions to economic growth, full-cost accounts include the health, pollution, and climate change costs resulting from such sales. Accounts depend on the data and evidence provided by indicators. If there are changes in the rates of smoking, volunteer work, pollutant emissions, and so forth, such changes enable us to calculate the related economic costs and savings (in dollars) that will accrue from improvement or decline in the indicators. For example, crime rates (an indicator) tell us—in criminal incidents per 100,000 population—whether crime is going up or down over time, with lower rates signifying progress. Accounts tell us the cost of crime to society—how much we spend in dollars on courts, prisons, burglar alarms, security guards, hospital costs due to assault, and replacing victim losses; how much we lose due to productivity losses, corruption, insurance fraud, and so forth; and how those costs change over time. This can be expressed as the amount we would potentially save and have available for more productive investments in well-being if there were far less crime. Trends in volunteer work can be a good indicator of the strength of civil society—and of generosity and community strength and vitality— and tell us, in hours, whether volunteerism is increasing or declining. Accounts tell us the economic value of volunteer work by assessing how much it would cost to pay for the services that volunteers provide

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for free. If volunteerism declines, as it did in Canada in the late 1990s, accounts tell us the lost economic value of those missing volunteer hours and point to the budgetary adjustments that may be necessary for governments to provide additional services to compensate for lost volunteer hours.37 A climate change indicator tells us—in CO2 equivalent kilotons— whether or not greenhouse gas emissions are increasing and therefore whether we are making progress in combating climate change. Accounts can tell us the economic costs of likely climate change damages and the costs of controlling and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a certain amount. By comparing the damage costs with the control costs, we can then assess the cost-effectiveness of particular measures to reduce emissions. These examples show how accounts take the crucial extra step of bringing indicator evidence into the world of economics. It is the change in the rate of a particular indicator, such as a decline in pollutant emissions or an increase in obesity rates or greenhouse gas emissions, that enables us to calculate the related economic savings that will accrue from an improvement in the indicator and the costs associated with the indicator’s decline. In short, perhaps the most important conclusion to emerge from my 1990s reading was that meaningful new work must build a system of economic valuation onto its measures of progress. Although indicators provide the physical measures on which a new accounting system can be based, they still do not challenge the accounting system that currently defines and dominates our present economic paradigm. As long as the GDP-based accounting system, which conceals social and environmental benefits and costs, determines government financial incentives and penalties, including taxes, subsidies, and investments in particular sectors of the economy, neither policy nor behavior is likely to change in socially and ecologically beneficial directions. That’s simply because those financial incentives and penalties in turn affect price, which is typically the most immediate and effective determinant of behavioral change and industry competitiveness. Until social and environmental benefits and costs are included in our national accounts, we’re likely to see, for example, continued subsidies to

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fossil fuel companies ($27 billion a year in the United States38), resistance to a carbon tax, and mushrooming SUV sales. In sharp contrast, fullcost national accounts would assess the health of our forests, wetlands, and atmosphere; the health and safety of our communities; and the literacy of our workforce as capital assets, which have measurable economic value that in our conventional accounts remains invisible. And if these assessments were taken seriously and acted on in good faith, that would drastically change government financial incentives and penalties, which in turn would send price signals in greater accord with sustainability and well-being values and principles. For example, once soil quality is recognized as a natural economic asset vital to food productivity, financial incentives for sustainable soil management would be counted as investments, and practices that deplete nutrients and erode soils would be penalized for depreciating natural capital. That in turn could make well-managed organically grown produce cheaper than chemically grown produce on monocultural industrial farms. That this is no flight of fancy is evidenced by isolated cases that already have demonstrated the power of financial penalties and incentives to change behavior. Nothing, for example, reduced teenage smoking rates in Canada as effectively as sharp tobacco tax increases. Similarly, Denmark’s global lead in wind turbine production and innovation was the direct result of government start-up subsidies to that industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those subsidies quickly enabled the new Danish industry to market its products competitively and stand on its own feet without government support.39 In short, the mid- to late 1990s literature review convinced me that indicator systems alone without economic valuations, no matter how broad and elegant, would never challenge the dominance of GDP as the foundation of the current growth-based economic system. To go beyond that narrow market focus, a new accounting system was needed that values the full range of the social, economic, and environmental assets that constitute the true wealth of society and that reports on their depreciation and on investment in those assets in the same way we currently report in relation to produced capital.

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It was also increasingly clear to me that such an accounting system reflecting the true social and environmental costs and benefits of economic activity could be a solid, evidence-based foundation for the new economic paradigm the world so desperately needs. And it is precisely because that new paradigm so fundamentally challenges and even overturns the premises of the existing economic system that this, I finally understood, is where the conventional Economics 101 textbook writers and professors feared to tread.

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o compelling were the materials I read in the mid-1990s that I  began to use them as a teaching tool in the political science classes I taught at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. What impressed me most was how convincingly the new measures, when taken together, demonstrated linkages among social, economic, and environmental realities. They were a superb way of communicating to my students that political structures don’t exist as independent entities the way so many textbooks imply; rather, they are completely dependent on and intertwined with economic, social, and ecological factors. Here is one example I used in class. By the mid-1990s, epidemiological evidence was demonstrating significant premature death and health care costs attributable to poverty. But ecological footprint evidence showed that globally, we were already using up resources much faster than they regenerate, and that if everyone on the planet consumed as much as the average U.S. or Canadian citizen, five Earths would be needed to sustain them.1 In other words, alleviating global poverty, as advocated by social justice activists—when combined with the consumption patterns of the rich—would deplete the planet’s resources far beyond the capacity of the Earth to replenish them. Therefore, from that ecological perspective, and to protect future generations, reducing poverty requires simultaneously reducing the excess consumption of the rich. Yet addressing the latter remains entirely off the agenda of governments.

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I also found evidence of such palpable linkages useful as a critical counterpoint to the tendency in the academic world to separate political science, economics, sociology, environmental science, and other subjects into specialized disciplines with little crossover in the subjects or dialogue among the specialists in these departments. That disjointed academic approach all too frequently provides a skewed and partial picture of reality, which is replicated in our social institutions and in the government ministries that so jealously guard their separate budgets and specialized mandates. Merv Ungurain, head of Nova Scotia’s tiny tobacco control unit, for example, used to complain bitterly in the late 1990s and early 2000s about the extraordinary difficulties he faced in getting representatives of the health, education, finance, tourism, and other departments around the table together. Without that, he said, a comprehensive tobacco control strategy that included raising tobacco taxes, establishing schoolbased smoking prevention programs, and mandating smoking bans in restaurants was impossible to craft. When approached, heads of the other ministries told him tobacco was a Health Department issue and not in their mandate. In sharp contrast, one of the most attractive features of some of the new measures emerging in the 1990s was their holistic approach. In my university classes, I saw that initiatives such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, the Genuine Progress Indicator, and Sustainable Seattle enabled a relatively cohesive view that woke students up to tradeoffs between compelling choices, to the vast difference between short- and long-term perspectives, and to the potential for win-win solutions that simultaneously advance economic, social, and environmental objectives.

NOVA SCOTIA AS A PILOT PROJECT

At a social gathering on Tower Road in Halifax one day in the fall of 1996, I ran into my friend Bill Turpin, managing editor of the Daily News, one of Halifax’s two daily newspapers at the time. In the course of

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our conversation, I told him of my eye-popping discoveries of the last year and my astonishment that governments weren’t using solid, available evidence that could help them make much better policies. I added that I felt Nova Scotia might be an ideal jurisdiction to adopt the new progress measures in practice and serve as a pilot project site. After all, Nova Scotia was a province small enough (population 940,000) to be an ideal laboratory. Despite performing more poorly on conventional economic indicators (GDP and income per capita, employment, etc.) than their provincial counterparts in central and western Canada, Nova Scotians prided themselves on their strong communities, slower pace, and higher quality of life, and the natural beauty of their surroundings. Since the conventional economic growth paradigm had not benefited the region as much as it had other parts of the country, surely Nova Scotians would, I thought, be open to measures acknowledging these precious nonmarket assets and consider a fresh way of thinking about the economy and policy. More than that, Nova Scotians did not need to be convinced that neglecting environmental assets and the health of natural resources could have a depressingly direct economic impact. Just a few years earlier, in 1992, the Atlantic groundfish stocks had collapsed, immediately wiping out 40,000 jobs in the fishing and fish-processing industries on which the Atlantic coastal regions so greatly depended. In large urban centers and in central Canada, environmental impacts might seem more distant or hypothetical. But Atlantic Canadians remained extraordinarily resource dependent and, I felt sure, would immediately appreciate the benefits of valuing natural resource health as a critical economic asset. Although GDP is so often disconnected from a community’s sense of economic well-being, the new measures would, I believed, speak to people’s lived reality. Bill did not take much convincing. A short way into the conversation, he said very simply, “If you work on the new measures here, we’ll give you $2,000 to get started, so long as the Daily News can write a couple of articles on it.” I agreed on the spot, and so our Nova Scotia progress measures were born. To receive the C$2,000, I had to open a bank account, which meant creating a nonprofit society with the stated aim of

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constructing the new measures for use in Nova Scotia. With the pledged sum, I immediately hired two bright students as part-time researchers to start crunching the numbers. The students understood that the $2,000 was barely pocket money and agreed to use their research for their own term papers. Two sympathetic academic colleagues also lent their expertise and joined the effort as advisers. And that is how, in April 1997, GPI (Genuine Progress Index) Atlantic was born. Whenever we had money, we’d bring on board researchers with expertise in particular dimensions of the GPI, and whenever we didn’t, we’d rely on voluntary labor, including from scholars and graduate students with an interest in our work. Depending on cash flow, we sometimes had as few as four and as many as twelve working simultaneously on different components of the GPI. A small handful of first-rate researchers who really mastered full-cost accounting methods stayed with us for the long haul, working on various reports over a period of many years. At one point our team swelled to forty-six when we conducted our own surveys and hired field staff to collect and enter data. The one constant over the last twenty-four years is that every single one of my colleagues shared and was inspired by a common vision that kept us going regardless of funding ups and downs. We’d debate vigorously on methodologies, data sources, indicator priorities, and calculation methods, but a remarkably strong and steady collegial spirit pervaded that truly united our GPI team. We had no doubt about our purpose. Around the same time that Bill gave us our start-up funding, also in the fall of 1996, I heard that Hans Messinger from Statistics Canada, the Canadian government’s national statistical agency, was visiting Halifax, and immediately got in touch with him. As director of the agency’s Industry Measures and Analysis Division, Hans soon became responsible for putting out Canada’s annual and monthly GDP statistics. I had an urgent reason for talking with Hans. Enthused and enamored as I’d become with the new progress measures over the past year, I’d also read critiques of the new measures’ methods and assumptions, mostly by mainstream economists. Among those, one of the most trenchant was written by Messinger at the request of Canada’s chief statistician, who also asked him to replicate the original 1995 U.S.

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Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for Canada. In his critique Hans had dissected that U.S. GPI and detailed its serious conceptual and methodological errors, including confusion over stocks and flows, subjective weighting, omission of renewable resources, extrapolations from inadequate data, and problems aggregating to a single number. And yet, far from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, his analysis also acknowledged the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of well-being and progress and recognized the need for new and more comprehensive progress measures.2 If we were to have any hope of persuading the Nova Scotia government to adopt the new measures and put them into practice, they had to be rigorous, reliable, and credible. We could not afford them to be discredited on conceptual, methodological, or data grounds. Inspired as I was by the original U.S. GPI, I was determined not to repeat its errors. Hans was more than happy to talk. As close to the GDP system as he was, he knew all its limitations and welcomed efforts to pursue alternative indicator work with methodologically scrupulous intent. I followed him everywhere on his trip to Nova Scotia, grilling him about measurement methods, including in the back of a truck on a three-hour ride to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish. Hans’s advice was crucial in establishing the methods and approach in our own subsequent GPI work, and he continued to advise and guide us, serving for fifteen years on our Board of Directors and providing us with key unpublished Statistics Canada data. In particular, after these detailed discussions in 1996, Hans and I agreed that our Nova Scotia GPI work would certainly demonstrate linkages among diverse economic, social, and ecological factors but would not aggregate the results into a single composite number, as the U.S. GPI had done. Lumping crime costs, air quality and climate change damages, the value of voluntary work, and other widely disparate values into a single number makes neither intuitive nor analytical sense. Above all, that single number provides no really practical or useful information to policy makers who need to know what is going up and what is going down in order to build on strengths and overcome weaknesses. Even within a single component such as health, for example, policy makers

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need to know that smoking rates are down while obesity rates are up, and it serves no purpose to aggregate those numbers into a flat average. Pilots need separate indicators of altitude, speed, fuel, cabin pressure, and much more on the instrument panel to determine the overall state of the aircraft and fly safely. Likewise, I was confident that if we produced robust data, analyses, and a wide range of reliable evidence for key factors missing from GDP, governments and the general public would be able effectively to distinguish societal strengths from weaknesses and act as needed. After talking with Hans to determine GPI Atlantic’s basic methodological approach, I contacted several groups around the world that were engaged in developing new well-being measures and full-cost accounting work to seek their advice on a range of measurement issues. In a phone call with Clifford Cobb, a lead author of the original U.S. GPI, I said I wanted to adopt its “genuine progress” name, but instead of using the word “indicator,” which implied a single number, I preferred the broader term “index.” I explained that we did not intend to aggregate our results to a single number, as his indicator had done, and I reviewed the ways in which we intended to do our calculations differently and, I felt, more accurately, based in large part on Hans Messinger’s advice. To my delight, Clifford welcomed our effort, encouraged use of “Genuine Progress” in our name, and expressed appreciation for the methodological and other changes we intended to make. His group, Redefining Progress, deliberately had not trademarked the GPI name in the hope that it would spread and that their own effort would spur others. Despite the broad differences in method and approach we discussed, the fundamental goal of the U.S. GPI and our planned Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index was the same: namely, to point to the wider costs and benefits of economic activity. Thus, for example, both GPI systems count as benefits the economic contributions of unpaid household and volunteer work and ecosystem life-support services that are invisible in GDP-based accounting mechanisms. And in stark contrast to a GDP that counts spending on the impacts of crime, pollution, sickness, and environmental degradation as contributions to economic

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growth, both GPI systems count such liabilities as costs rather than gains to the economy. However, I also wanted to take the new evidence one major step further, directly into the policy arena with practical policy recommendations based on hard numbers and cost-benefit analysis. To do that I knew our effort would have to draw on all the innovative work painstakingly developed in the previous twenty years in ecological economics, fullcost accounting, epidemiology, population health, time use, and more. What I was reading convinced me that we could prove to the government of Nova Scotia that investments in disease prevention and health promotion, education, mass transit, sustainable waste management, and renewable energy—which typically appeared as costs in conventional government balance sheets—actually produce significant economic benefits. Conversely, we could show that activities and trends that are detrimental to society and the natural world and that imperil our children’s future entail real economic liabilities. Examples are smoking, obesity, growing inequality, clear-cutting forests, and greater automobile use that increases greenhouse gas emissions. I felt confident that through hard evidence, we could make an economic case for taxes, penalties, and other disincentives for harmful activities and for tax breaks and incentives for beneficial ones. In short, by painting a very different—and more realistic—picture of a society’s economic health than do GDP calculations, which count all spending as economic gain regardless of benefit or harm, I felt the new measures could directly influence policy and fiscal structure. It was a hugely ambitious goal, but I was convinced that all the means and tools to lay the foundations for a new sustainable and equitable economy were in place. If we could convince one government to move in this direction, the results and benefits surely would convince others to follow. I had no illusions that a new accounting system alone would change the world. But it seemed a powerful strategic tool that could help to shift course from a system that was placing growing stresses on the natural world and social fabric. This concern was intensely personal. As a father I was acutely aware that this is the first generation in a very long time whose parents are no longer convinced their children will inherit

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a better world. Mounting global insecurity, depleted resources, species extinctions, climate change, a growing divide between rich and poor, spiraling rates of depression, and more have created a growing sense of urgency that it is past time for action. And yet I could not give in to despair. I firmly believed I shared with all humanity a heartfelt desire to leave a better world for our children—one that was more harmonious with nature, more equitable, and more globally responsible. And I firmly believed that hard evidence and truth-telling would win the day. But beyond such idealism and social concern was another reason I saw our Genuine Progress Index not as an academic or scholastic statistical exercise but as a practical cog in the wheel of a much larger endeavor. In 1983, I’d had the good fortunate of encountering the meditation master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who played a seminal role in bringing Buddhist teachings to the West. A core Mahayana Buddhist principle is working for the benefit of others, and Trungpa Rinpoche convinced me and many others that a key way to do that in this volatile era is to create an enlightened society that would embrace all faiths and serve as a beacon and example for a world sunk in the self-destructive mire of materialism. Hundreds of his students, my wife and I included, had moved to Nova Scotia determined to make it happen. So I figured that measuring progress more holistically to include human, social, and environmental factors and reducing dependency on the totally materialist GDP-based system that counts only money transactions might make a tiny contribution to the gargantuan task of building an enlightened society in practice. For all these reasons, I was now fired up and driven by the GPI Atlantic mission. As the work was becoming increasingly intense, requiring round-the-clock commitment, I quit my academic career in May 1997 to pursue the GPI research full-time under the nonprofit GPI Atlantic umbrella. Despite such a tenuous and shaky financial base from which to give up a steady income and launch the new endeavor, I felt confident that we would prove the value and utility of the new measures and get support to do the job. By all conventional income and livelihood standards, I suppose I have to admit that the decision to quit academia was somewhat irresponsible.

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FOUNDING PRINCIPLES

Building a new more just and sustainable economy rests not just on numbers and evidence but also on key principles and assumptions. These may be so obvious to some as barely to require justification, but to others they may represent a radical challenge to the status quo and be a harder sell to governments than the numbers and statistics that reflect these principles. What I find so interesting about these principles is that virtually everyone pays lip service to them—a testament to their power and importance—and yet it requires a real leap to embrace and practice them fully. I felt the only way to deal with this dilemma was to make the principles utterly clear and transparent in our reports and documents. In a nutshell, the three core principles on which the GPI rests are sustainability; the necessity for global, long-term (rather than parochial) thinking; and equity within and between generations. Each requires some explanation. Yet they are not at all separate but are so closely intertwined that accepting one principle means accepting all three, as was made clear in the seminal 1987 definition of sustainable development of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, commonly known as the Brundtland Commission, after its chairperson, Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway: Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. . . . Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.3

SUSTA I N A B I L I T Y AND T H E P R E C AU T IO NARY PRINCIPLE

For a society to be sustainable implies that we live within the capacity of the natural world to provide essential resources and assimilate human waste both for ourselves and for the future. This in turn requires

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our recognition that the human economy is completely dependent on the natural world for its energy and resource flows and to absorb its wastes. Dramatic changes that occur in natural ecosystems, such as climate shifts and species extinction, can imperil the very functioning of human economies. Therefore, holistic approaches consider economic and social factors as subsystems of an encompassing ecosystem rather than simply as coequal legs of a three-legged stool along with environmental indicators (figure 3.1).

Economy

Society Environment

FIGURE 3.1  The

economy as a subsystem of society and the environment: A view of sustainability as three concentric circles rather than a “three-legged stool.”

The recognition that the human economy exists within the larger society can generate useful debate on whether it is adequately serving  societal goals, such as a healthy and educated populace living in strong, safe, and vibrant communities, rather than simply generating economic growth. In particular, a sustainable view of the economy recognizes society’s ultimate dependence on the natural world and thereby raises questions that currently are sidelined in economic debates, on whether economic activities are enhancing, maintaining, degrading, or depleting the natural resources and ecosystem services the economy requires to function effectively. Recognition of humanity’s dependence on nature has made the “precautionary principle” central to concerns about sustainability. This principle states that lack of scientific certainty should not delay action to

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avert potentially serious or irreversible long-term damage. It is explicitly written into Canadian and other legislation4 and into international treaties such as the Rio Declaration,5 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,6 and the European Union (EU) laws on product safety, additives, waste disposal, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and other policies.7 The precautionary principle means that when there is significant risk of a policy harming the public or environment, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those making the decision, even if there is no scientific consensus to that effect. Here’s an immediate example of its application. The link between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel combustion and climate change is now so strong, the two thousand scientists appointed by the United Nations to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tell us that the precautionary principle requires immediate preventive action through significant reductions in GHG emissions. In the starkest language it has ever used, the IPCC concluded in 2014 that global warming threatens to reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if fossil fuels continue to be burned at present levels. That could bring food shortages, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, refugee crises, mass extinction of plants and animals, deadly heat waves, fires, droughts, and increased “likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.” 8 Sadly, since our GDP-based economy assesses only current economic activity and ignores most of the environmental costs of that activity, it remains at sharp odds with the precautionary principle. Thus energy companies worldwide still plan to extract coal and petroleum reserves several times more than the maximum that scientists say can be burned to limit warming to 3.6°F, or 2°C, above the preindustrial level—though even a 2°C increase has been shown to create far worse and more drastic impacts than a 1.5°C increase.9 The precautionary principle suggests that excess fossil fuel stock should be left in the ground. Instead, fossil fuel companies are spending some $600 billion a year to find more reserves, while governments are spending another $600 billion directly subsidizing the consumption of fossil fuels. That is more than three times what the world is spending to reduce emissions and cope with climate change.10

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LO NG-T E R M, GLO B AL T H INKING

The sustainability principle naturally leads to a second core principle — the necessity for long-term thinking that is also global in scope. Many activities that increase GDP and make the economy grow in the short term, such as profligate depletion of many natural resources, entail a decline in long-term prosperity and well-being, and possibly even societal collapse, if they lead to later scarcity or require costly repair. Only measures of progress that point to long-term prosperity rather than simply short-term gain can provide a genuine guide to anyone concerned with the well-being of future generations as well as our own. A multiaged, multispecies old-growth forest that is cut down will quickly make GDP grow as the timber is marketed, but it will take many generations to restore that forest to even a semblance of its original condition.11 Some of the carbon dioxide emitted today will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, contributing to the warming of the planet and related potential damage for generations to come.12 One  inch of nutrient-rich topsoil lost to erosion takes five hundred years to regenerate.13 Even within the much shorter span of a human life, long-term thinking is required. Although cigarette and junk food sales make GDP go up, teenage smoking and obesity today will create spikes in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and mortality thirty to forty years later. Conversely, conservation, preventive health measures, public investments in education and sustainable infrastructure, and personal lifestyle changes may initially seem costly but will have long-term pay-offs. In an era in which economic activity, resource depletion, and carbon and pollutant emissions transcend national boundaries, the need for long-term thinking is matched by the need for global thinking, as the following example illustrates. On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza factory complex in the industrial suburb of Savar in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,130 people and injuring 2,500 in the deadliest disaster in garment industry history. Eight months later, the New York Times reported that many leading brand-name manufacturers were refusing to take any responsibility for the disaster, even though their “brands depend on factories in developing countries like Bangladesh, where wages are very low and the pressure

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to work faster and cheaper has spawned familiar problems: unsafe buildings, substandard work conditions and repeated wage and labor violations. Consumers know little about these factories.”14 How many of us are aware that our bargain hunting for the lowest-cost jeans encourages factory owners to persist in maintaining the deplorable conditions under which those jeans are produced? Dare we take such personal responsibility for the Rana Plaza collapse? Similarly, how aware are North Americans that their own excess fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to flooding in Bangladesh and forcing Tuvalu residents to flee their sinking nation?15 These examples illustrate how important it is to understand the linkages between causes, conditions, and results at the global level as much as locally. Despite the rise of nationalism in some regions, our world remains an interconnected one, as we quickly see if we simply examine the origin of the objects around us right now—the paper and ink in the book we are reading, the materials of which this chair is made, the coffee we are sipping and the mug it is in, and the clothes we are wearing. As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in his famous 1967 Christmas Sermon on Peace, “And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality.”16 Nothing other than a global and long-term perspective enables us to make any sense of our very local daily lives. Thus whereas individuals may miss the global consequences of their consumption habits, multinational corporations with global operations and an eye on profits may miss the long-term environmental and social consequences of their production patterns. Similarly, conceptions of genuine progress that require a long-term global view will make no sense to policy makers with an eye only on short-run domestic economic growth.

EQUITY

This leads us directly to the third core principle underlying the GPI— that of equity. Of all three principles, this one raises the most eyebrows and is perhaps hardest for policy makers to accept, perhaps because

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it is associated with so-called left-wing views. And yet, from a sustainability perspective, greater equity—independent of any dogma or ideology—appears to be required for humanity’s long-term survival and quality of life. As a matter of simple fact, who, for example, is responsible for global resource depletion? The World Bank reported in 2008 that the richest ten percent of the world’s people account for 59 percent of global private consumption and the richest 20 percent for 77 percent, whereas the poorest fifth account for only 1.5 percent and the poorest 50 percent for just seven percent of global consumption.17 The richest 12 percent of the world’s population accounts for 85 percent of humanity’s water use.18 And the richest 10 percent produces half the world’s carbon emissions, whereas the poorest 50 percent (3.5 billion people), who live overwhelmingly in countries most vulnerable to climate change, produce just 10 percent of emissions. The carbon footprint of the richest 10 percent is sixty times that of the poorest 10 percent.19 The wealthy, then, are clearly disproportionately responsible for resource depletion and climate change and their damages. Rich countries effectively export the costs to the countries whose resources they deplete and that suffer most grievously from climate change effects. The ecological destruction under way, in other words, cannot be separated from global economic realities that sharply divide rich from poor. In a world of limited resources and limited waste assimilation capacity, excess consumption by the rich literally requires that billions of others live in poverty if we are not, in aggregate, to exceed the capacity of the Earth to provide the food, water, energy, timber, and other resources we need to survive. Conversely, reducing poverty and improving living standards for those currently suffering great deprivation also require that excess consumption be curbed if nature’s aggregate carrying capacity is not to be exceeded.20 Of course, greater equity does not in itself guarantee sustainability if the demand on resources by humanity as a whole already exceeds what the Earth can supply, as it has since the 1970s. Thus, according to the Global Footprint Network, “Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to provide the resources we use and to absorb our waste.”21

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Domestically, too, equity issues arise when we report properly on progress, not as dogma or advocacy but as a simple matter of factual reporting. As we saw in the first chapter, GDP calculations report only total and average income but tell us nothing about how that income is distributed. So an increase in income among the wealthy can skew the averages up, even if most people are getting poorer and inequality is growing. A long-standing joke among statisticians to illustrate how deceptive averages can be is that if you have your feet in the refrigerator and your head in the oven, your body temperature on average will be just fine. Your well-being, however, is another story! GDP and GDP per capita cannot tell us how well off we are as a society. An unbiased measure of social progress and well-being should apply to the whole society, so if some are better off while others are worse off, that truth should be told and not hidden, and it would be reflected in how we evaluate well-being. And being better or worse off refers to far more than income alone. Abundant evidence links poverty with physical deprivation, illness, crime, illiteracy, low productivity, stress, social unrest, and other detriments to well-being. The World Health Organization (WHO) found that people who are poor are at least twice as likely to get seriously ill and die young as those with higher incomes.22 Poverty is a reliable predictor of cancer, cardiovascular disease, arthritis and musculoskeletal disorders, diabetes, dental diseases, drug dependence and abuse, and infant mortality and morbidity.23 Among children, poverty is linked to low birth weight, infant mortality, chronic illness, low immunity, poor nutrition and brain function, injury, and a host of lifelong health and developmental problems as well as higher rates of unemployment and incarceration.24 In addition, societies with bigger gaps between rich and poor have higher rates of mortality and poorer health, independent of absolute income. Conversely, abundant evidence links more even wealth distribution with better health, productivity, and economic performance and with stronger shared values, rules, civic responsibility, and social institutions, whereas poverty and inequality undermine innovation, waste precious human assets, and stir social unrest.25

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These insights are not new. Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle warned that “revolutions arise from inequalities” and noted that the most secure, stable, cohesive, and harmonious states are “composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars.”26 In short, one cannot assess societal well-being, either globally or domestically, without reporting on equity issues. These principles of sustainability, equity, and taking a long-term, global view are core not only to the measures of progress on which my colleagues and I worked but to the new economic paradigm to which those measures point. As chapter 15 indicates, neither these principles nor the GPI alone suffice to create that new paradigm, which requires a wide range of new policies, structures, fiscal instruments, and regulatory mechanisms. Though full-cost accounts are merely one part of that complex equation, they do directly reflect the central principles of that larger paradigm and, I remain convinced, provide the evidence, accounting base, and fulcrum that can generate the much broader changes required to replace existing economic structures and relations. Thus these three core GPI principles stand in stark contrast to the short-term, parochial thinking that currently isolates the economy from social goals and from nature and that continues to generate massive inequities and environmental destruction. And yet, the foregoing examples also illustrate how profoundly these three principles—the very foundation of our Genuine Progress Index—challenge present assumptions and behaviors. And they hint at the powerful resistances I was to encounter in the succeeding twenty years. But in those halcyon, idealistic start-up days, I wasn’t yet ready to face the hard reality that you can tell the truth based on solid evidence and undeniable logic and still be dismissed or ignored if those in power don’t want to hear it.

4 THE NEW MEASURES IN ACTION

I

n the spring of 1997, with a tiny team—one academic colleague, two students, an agronomist friend, and advice and input from anyone I could find with a bit of expertise—we started to build our Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index (GPI). With the exception of minuscule temporary stipends for the students, all our start-up work was unpaid, so we had no formal contracts or GPI Atlantic membership but simply worked together collegially on the basis of a common vision. Unlike the conventional views of the economy as a closed box existing for the sake of short-term material gain, reflected in Economics 101 texts, we shared the view that the function of the economy was to serve the interlinked interests of people, communities, and the health of the planet. The new measures, we agreed, would reflect that understanding. To that end we developed a framework for our intended Nova Scotia GPI consisting of twenty social, economic, and environmental components on which the literature reflected widespread agreement on their value and importance as key constituents of societal well-being, prosperity, and progress, and we grouped these components into five domains (table 4.1). The basic domains and components also reflected extensive reading on existing measures, close consultation with experts, data availability, and potential for international comparability.

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We omitted some measures included in the original 1995 U.S. GPI, such as costs of family breakup, based on evidence that this is not always a negative indicator. And we omitted other measures widely acknowledged as vital constituents of well-being, such as arts and culture, which could not be easily defined and measured. The array of domains and components we developed therefore should not be taken as rigid and final but as a work in progress that can be broadened as improved data and methodologies become available. Because we were doing this work with Nova Scotia’s population and government in mind, the domains and indicators couldn’t be so universal and general that Nova Scotians wouldn’t recognize their own lives in the results. The measures had to be relevant to regional interests and concerns. As a maritime, resource-dependent province, we therefore included measures on fisheries, which could be omitted for land-bound jurisdictions such as Iowa or Saskatchewan, and on forests, which could be omitted for states like Nevada that have almost none. And because Nova Scotia had already developed the most advanced sustainable solidwaste management system in all of North America, we included that. A key consideration in indicator selection was the decision to create a GPI that focused on economic valuation—in other words, accounts— rather than just indicators of well-being. That meant deliberate inclusion of key economic benefits and costs omitted in ordinary GDP calculations. These included, in addition to the value of paid work, the value of unpaid household and voluntary work and of leisure time, measures of income distribution (not just total or average income), and the costs of sickness, pollution, and resource degradation. As well, our goal was to make the GPI as comprehensive as possible so that each set of measures would tell as complete a story as possible about each GPI component. To do that we had to include many dimensions that were absent from conventional progress measures and accounts. Thus, for example, our employment analysis was designed to go far beyond typical employment and unemployment statistics to analyze changes in types and quality of work, hours worked, job security, work stress, and the health costs of both unemployment and overwork—all of which substantially affect well-being. As we selected indicators, therefore, we

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also had detailed, in-depth discussions on the range of measures each component might include, to ensure that we would not omit core subcomponents that profoundly affect quality of life. Aside from all the usual criteria for indicator selection based on the literature—data availability, comparability, relevance, and so forth—we used one rather unconventional method of deciding what to include and what to omit. To ensure that each indicator reflected deeply held consensus values, we subjected each to a political test and included none that might be disputed on ideological, partisan, or ethical grounds. For example, parties of the right might focus more on crime prevention and family values than would parties of the left, whereas parties of the left focus more on poverty alleviation and environmental conservation. But no Canadian political party of the left or right would argue that more crime is better than less crime, that a sicker population is better than a healthy one, that higher rates of poverty are better than lower rates, that a polluted and degraded environment is better than a clean and healthy one, or that social exclusion and alienation are better than inclusion in strong and safe communities. After considerable discussion, therefore, we felt confident that no Canadian political party would disagree on the broad societal goals and core markers of progress we developed for the GPI. This was important because we wanted these measures to be adopted by government regardless of which party was in power, and we wanted them to survive elections, power shifts, and changes in ruling party. In explaining the absence of total or per capita GDP among our twenty components, we made clear that we were not rejecting GDP as a valid measure of market size but that we were simply recognizing that it was not intended, nor could it function, as either a measure of progress or a net accounting mechanism. As well, we noted that although GDP and market size are inputs that may or may not produce desired outcomes, our twenty components did in fact measure in considerable detail the very outcomes GDP is intended or assumed to produce— including jobs, income, and economic and financial security. Whether our arguments convinced anyone I’ll never know, but our omission of GDP per se seemed widely accepted.

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TABLE 4.1 

Domains and components of the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index

1. Time use

4. Natural capital

Civic and voluntary work

Soils and agriculture

Unpaid household work and child care

Forests

Leisure time

Fisheries and marine environment

Paid work hours/employment

Air quality

2. Living standards

Water quality

Income distribution

5. Human impact on the environment

Financial security and debt

Energy

Economic security

Solid waste

3. Human and social capital

Ecological footprint

Population health

Greenhouse gas emissions

Safety and security

Transportation

Educated populace

Table 4.1 shows the list of domains and components of the Nova Scotia GPI that became our basic framework for the work that followed. Reality, of course, is never as neat as it looks in a table. Thus several measures are not exclusive to the particular domain in which they are listed. For example, paid employment is a core measure of time use as well as of living standards and therefore belongs in both domains. Modes of transport have an impact on the environment, where they are listed, but they also have social dimensions. And health outcomes are partly dependent on how income is distributed. With a framework, action plan, extensive literature review, and even sample preliminary results for demonstration purposes in place, in fall 1997, I wrote a proposal for the Province of Nova Scotia making the case for the new measures. The proposal cited reputable authorities and robust data sources and promised practical evidence on social, economic, and environmental progress measures and associated economic benefits and costs that policy makers could use. I downplayed the principles outlined in the previous chapter that I thought might too strongly

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challenge orthodox views. To my delight, provincial leaders provided a grant of C$31,000, which then leveraged an additional C$89,000 in federal funding.1 It was all the encouragement we needed to move forward without hesitation. The two part-time student researchers soon graduated, so I brought in two new full-timers to help me research and gather statistics in earnest, paying myself a small stipend that was a fraction of my former academic salary. At about the same time, in November 1997, the Daily News, the Nova Scotia newspaper that had given us the start-up funding of C$2,000, produced two double-page spreads on the new measures of progress we were starting to develop.2 It aroused some local interest, I was asked to give a few presentations, and we were under way. It felt like a promising and auspicious start. Except that we soon ran out of money. With no other income, the initial C$120,000 didn’t last long, What GPI Atlantic was doing was still so on the fringe in those days and we were so unknown that despite every effort, we were not able to attract mainstream funding beyond that initial grant. Over the next five years, my family quickly went into deep debt so I could keep researching, poring over statistics, and churning out results. We maxed out our credit cards and first borrowed and then took over a hand-me-down computer. We had no space for an office in our little cottage, so I got a tiny bubble trailer, which I set up in the backyard. Winters were cold out there, and typing had to be done with mittens with the fingertips cut off so I could effectively strike the computer keys. I got a used propane heater, which developed a leak, resulting in a stern lecture from the local fire brigade on how lucky I was not to have blown myself up. But evidence that our research started to produce rang true, and I felt we had to keep going even if no one with money was buying it. Because my colleagues and I were still novices in this work, we had to learn as we went, and so we began with the GPI components that seemed to have the most straightforward methodologies and accessible data sources. It was clear that valuing ecological services and environmental costs would be far more challenging than what was required for many other components, and we needed to produce some credible results quickly in order to garner the support and interest needed to keep our operation alive.

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A BUOYANT FIRST LANDING

Seeing that Statistics Canada had published in 1995 a well-researched report on the hourly market rate paid for the kinds of work unpaid workers do,3 and in 1992 had conducted a careful time-use survey estimating aggregate unpaid work hours4, I wondered what we might learn by multiplying the former by the latter. It was a simple multiplication exercise—not a bad place for a rookie to start. I was astonished not only at the results but at how vividly they demonstrated what the GPI could tell us that the GDP could not. And so, in 1998, GPI Atlantic’s first report showed that Nova Scotians (with a total population of under a million) contributed annually an estimated 134 million hours of their time to civic and voluntary work— helping those in need, contributing to local communities and society, and caring for their environment. Their work was worth C$1.9 billion a year to the economy, the equivalent of 81,000 jobs and nearly 10 percent of GDP, but it was not reported or measured in any provincial or national GDP, employment, or other economic accounts. This contribution averaged out to C$2,500 a year for every adult Nova Scotian and C$3,400 for every volunteer in the province.5 To highlight the economic dimension, in our report we observed that if this voluntary contribution were withdrawn, either our quality of life and standard of living would decline dramatically or the work would have to be replaced and paid for by government and the private sector. To dramatize the shortcomings of GDP, the report noted that despite volunteers’ substantial productive contribution to well-being and quality of life, their work remains invisible and unvalued in standard economic accounts that include only monetary exchanges. In its basic structure, this first GPI report was the model for all that followed over the next decade. Each report first presented indicators of progress, tracking improvements and declines over time across a wide range of indicators. Using this model we later tracked changes in crime rates, the gap between rich and poor, levels of various pollutants, and so on—all in order to assess whether conditions were getting better or

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worse in each area. Based on those results, we then tracked the economic benefits and costs of those improvements and declines and, to the degree possible, estimated the economic value of assets such as voluntary work, carbon storage in the province’s forests, and Nova Scotia’s sustainable waste management system. When it was not possible to assign monetary values to key social and environmental variables, we described the economic value of each component based on the best available primary and secondary sources. I was amazed at the excellent coverage the press gave our first results— and not only in Nova Scotia. In the nation’s capital, an Ottawa Citizen headline read: “Nova Scotia Leads Effort to Improve Ways to Measure Economy—Research Group Publishes Pioneering Study Using New Gauge.” The article noted that our GPI was “the first project of its kind in Canada” and carried a strong endorsement from Hans Messinger, who had managed to get Statistics Canada to “designate the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index a national pilot project.”6 The Nova Scotia government itself proudly announced the results, citing positive comments from federal and provincial government representatives, and trumpeted its support for the GPI work.7 Of all our GPI studies, this first one proved to be among the most popular, appreciated, and widely used, in part because nonprofit groups and volunteers felt acknowledged and valued by the spotlight suddenly shone on them. We could barely keep up with requests to present our work to volunteer-based groups at the grassroots level. Many started to use our methods in their own fundraising proposals to report the economic contribution of their organizations’ voluntary services to the Nova Scotia economy. For those reports volunteers typically filled out simple logs and time sheets to track their hours, which were then summed and multiplied by the replacement cost values in our GPI accounts.8 These nonprofits even took our numbers right into the political arena, demonstrating the power of monetary valuation not only to raise the profile of sectors hidden by the fixation on GDP but also to garner support by highlighting their contribution in practical and concrete terms. At the next annual Volunteer of the Year dinner—usually just a feelgood affair—the volunteer-based organizations welcomed the premier

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of Nova Scotia onto the stage with a gigantic five-foot-long check and the words: “Mr. Premier. We are delighted to present you with this cheque for $1.9 billion. This is our contribution to the economy of Nova Scotia and our savings to your government during this past year.” If I was inspired and enthused before, I now become utterly obsessed by our work. Unexpectedly, these first results in valuing invisible social assets had truly struck a chord, not only with the press and general public but with government. Best of all, the voluntary work results were not reported in isolation but clearly linked to the bigger picture of what GDP is missing and why we need new measures of progress. To say I was encouraged is an understatement. I was now convinced—naively so— that by developing clear, credible, and comprehensive progress measures for Nova Scotia in all our twenty domains, the province would surely adopt our analytic framework, use the evidence we amassed to make good policy, and become a model for other regions. More than that, the surprisingly good reception to our first report gave me a tremendous boost of confidence. Not only were the results based on simple, commonsense calculations, but they were easy to communicate and readily understood and clearly pointed to the deficiencies of the present system and the need for change. At this stage at least, the evidence-based GPI language did not overtly threaten vested interests; they produced an openness and receptivity that had eluded many advocacy groups. It took some time before the radical implications of the new progress measures roused resistance. The most heartening outcome of this first research venture was that I was learning so much just by doing the work. I’d learned how to find and use Statistics Canada’s time-use microdata files and developed good relations with statistics agency personnel, who were delighted that someone was actively using their innovative survey data. I’d learned about different economic valuation methods (generalist and specialist replacement costs, opportunity costs, output vs. input estimates), how to join different data sets to produce meaningful results that were not apparent when each data set was used in isolation, how to adjust figures to current dollars using appropriate Consumer Price Index items, and much more. I knew none of this when I started, but now I felt confident to continue.

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. . . AND THEN A REALITY CHECK

With the data sources and methods now at hand, the obvious next step was to value the second major unpaid work gap in GDP—that done in our homes. In 1992, Nova Scotians put in 977 million hours a year in unpaid household work and child care—the equivalent of 509,000 fulltime jobs in a population of less than a million.9 If this unpaid work had to be replaced with wage labor in the market economy, at the average rate of $12.70 an hour paid to domestic help in the province and $10.50 an hour for child care, it would be worth $12.2 billion a year to the provincial economy—equivalent to 36 percent of its GDP. Though the numbers were easy to report, the policy implications were far more challenging to communicate than had been the case for the monetary value of voluntary work. The 1998 release of GPI Atlantic’s second report, The Economic Value of Unpaid Housework and Childcare in Nova Scotia, five months after the voluntary work release, brought a tough new lesson. The numbers were again well reported by the press, but their real significance was not. For a start, unlike the clearly defined nonprofit voluntary sector, our household work—along with our struggle to juggle its demands with paid work and to improve work-life balance—is seen as a strictly personal issue outside the purview of the policy arena. That is an illusion fostered by the exclusion of unpaid work from our national accounts. Once they are measured, we see that essential household tasks such as raising children with care and good nutrition are essential prerequisites for a healthy market sector. In fact, they contribute more to economic productivity, prosperity, and societal well-being than much of the paid work done in factories, offices, and stores, and their neglect can produce major social and economic costs. This discovery raises profound and far-reaching issues that rarely, if ever, make it onto government agendas. As brilliantly documented by New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring, whose analysis of GDP shortcomings helped get me started on this path, the exclusion of unpaid work from GDP is especially harmful to women, who still perform most unpaid work all over the world.10

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And yet, unlike the value of voluntary work, which seems to speak for itself, I’ve found it extraordinarily difficult over the years to convey the subtlety and depth of that gender discrimination. Even so-called progressives tend to define work as what happens in the paid labor force and often rebel against valuing child-rearing and household tasks as productive labor. Those individuals sometimes argue that such valuation would justify keeping women in the home rather than pursuing careers. But if we look closely, we find the failure to value unpaid work is a logical absurdity that not only distorts GDP itself but devalues broad swaths of women’s work worldwide in ways that have serious consequences. It produces wage discrimination; loss of seniority, pension benefits, and promotion opportunities; intense time stress; and particularly high poverty rates for single mothers. Let’s look at the logical fallacy first. If we pay a stranger to look after our child, GDP goes up. If we take care of our own child, it has no value in GDP-based measures of progress. This accounting absurdity, which persists today, was recognized as early as 1932 by economist Cecil Pigou, who wrote, The services rendered by women enter into the dividend when they are rendered in exchange for wages, whether in the factory or the home, but do not enter into it when they are rendered by mothers and wives gratuitously to their own families. Thus, if a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished.11

Ever since the early 1950s, when women began to enter the paid work force in large numbers,12 much unpaid household production also shifted to the paid market economy as ever more cleaners and babysitters were hired to do work we used to do ourselves. That shift from the unpaid to the paid economy did not increase actual production, yet it was now added to GDP and therefore mistakenly touted as economic growth and progress. As a result Statistics Canada calculated that between 1961 and 1992, “the increase of GDP overstates economic growth between 0.6  to 0.8 percentage points a year,” assuming no increase in household productivity.13

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In fact, the evidence shows no increase in household productivity either through strangers doing work for pay that householders used to do for free, or even through labor-saving devices such as automatic washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and microwaves. The numbers show that technological advances have been offset by household time devoted to increased consumption, maintenance, repair, upkeep of larger homes, commuting, and other factors. Thus accounting for changes in household size and labor force status, we found no fundamental change in household work hours in the last century. Full-time housewives still put in about 52 hours a week of unpaid household labor, as they did in the 1930s. Parents, both of whom work full-time for pay, put in an average 72-hour work week each when paid and unpaid work are combined; full-time working single mothers put in an average 75-hour work week. Thus when all our time is considered, the evidence shows that the massive influx of women into the paid work force has raised GDP (which only counts paid work) but has come at the cost of a major loss in free time, particularly for women who, despite their increased paid work hours, still do most of the unpaid household work.14 It is precisely because unpaid household work is a vital component of actual production that Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets, the main architect of GDP accounting, insisted that its value be included in GDP calculations. It’s also why he fell out with the U.S. Commerce Department in the late 1940s over that agency’s refusal to do so. The discriminatory impact on women goes far beyond such accounting failures that mis-state GDP, however. Take wage discrimination, which—when failure to value unpaid work is considered—goes far beyond its usual association with women getting paid less than men for the same work.15 Thus work traditionally performed for free in the household—including child care, cleaning, cooking, and other domestic labor—fetches extremely low wages in the market economy where women still dominate in these jobs. Most child-care workers barely earn minimum wage for an occupation that arguably requires higher levels of skill, responsibility, and constant alertness than many others. Failure to value unpaid child care and housework also results in a lack of adequate social support that especially penalizes single mothers,

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who carry the entire burden of unpaid household work alone. In Canada single mothers with jobs spend three times higher a proportion of their incomes on paid child care compared with their married counterparts and frequently suffer extreme levels of time stress and “time poverty,” which in turn allows them considerably less dedicated time with their own children.16 Not surprisingly, single-mother families in the United States are the poorest of the poor, and they are five times more likely to be living in poverty (28.2 percent) than two-parent families (5.4 percent).17 In Canada the rates are 23 percent for single mothers (down from 29 percent in 2016) compared with 7 percent for two-parent families.18 Recognizing and valuing this unpaid work could encourage policies that address such matters as the persistent wage gap between the sexes, the rates of low income and poverty among single mothers and their children, the decreasing time many parents have to spend with their children, and the growing time stress attributable to the “struggle to juggle” paid jobs with household duties. The Nordic countries are models of what could be done. In Norway, for example, a single mother gets twice the child benefits that a married parent receives, and child poverty rates in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian single-mother families are about one-fifth those in the United States.19 But greater support for unpaid child-rearing doesn’t keep women in the home. On the contrary, 68 percent of Norwegian women are in the paid workforce compared with 57 percent of American women.20 At the same time, Norwegian women are less time stressed than American women who are juggling paid and unpaid work responsibilities, because work hours in the Nordic countries are shorter: Norwegian workers put in an average of 7 hours less a week for pay than U.S. workers.21 Aside from discriminatory impacts on women, the failure to value unpaid work generally removes policy attention from one of the most critical ingredients in modern quality of life: the need to achieve a satisfactory work–life balance. That in turn has been shown to be a vital ingredient in physical and mental health, personal relationships, and workplace productivity and in reducing stress and absenteeism.22 Despite such abundant evidence, North American policy makers remain reluctant to follow the example of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian

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countries of adjusting work hours and conditions to make workplaces more family friendly. I confess that only by doing the measurement and related research on unpaid household work did I recognize its profound effect on social, personal, and economic well-being. And I don’t think we succeeded in communicating that effectively to the public and policy makers. The subtleties and policy implications in this second GPI report on unpaid work were simply not as straightforward as those in our first report on voluntary work, and they were correspondingly more difficult to communicate.

THE REAL COSTS OF CRIME

While I was working on these valuations of unpaid work, a former top student of mine and then-GPI Atlantic researcher, Colin Dodds, was hard at work trying to figure out the true costs of crime to Nova Scotia. We were still learning and had picked this as our third report for the practical reason that many crime-related costs—such as those for police, courts, prisons, burglar alarms, security guards, hospital costs, and victim losses—are market costs that might not be too difficult to calculate. But we now encountered some real challenges in full-cost accounting, which tries to value and account for nonmarket benefits and costs that are invisible in conventional accounts. There were no shortcuts. We studied police statistics to separate out crime-related tasks from traffic control and other police functions. We pored over victimization surveys to estimate victim losses from the many crimes—including petty theft, vandalism, assault, and particularly domestic violence—that are seldom reported to police and therefore missing from the official police-reported crime statistics. Then we reduced those unreported crime cost estimates on the basis of evidence that unreported crimes are generally less serious than reported ones. We scrutinized retail industry and insurance company reports to estimate losses due to shoplifting and insurance fraud. And to figure the value of a life lost to murder, we studied how statisticians estimate productivity losses by age.

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But the toughest part was accounting for serious harms such as the trauma of violent assault and rape, which go far beyond market costs like hospital expenses and productivity, income, and property losses. Canada’s solicitor-general expressed this dilemma eloquently three decades ago: Many of the most important costs of crime—the psychological and emotional suffering of victims, the fear and insecurity of those who believe they are at risk, the pain and often anger of the families of victims, the loss of freedom . . . that incarceration means for the criminal who is caught—cannot be measured in dollars. But these largely unmeasurable costs must be a significant part of any cost-benefit equation.23

So we found studies that used proxy measures such as court awards for grief and suffering to capture the value of “unmeasurable costs” like “shattered lives” due to crime.24 When we released “The Cost of Crime in Nova Scotia” in April 1999,25 we reported a range of estimates from the most conservative to more broadly based—a reporting method we would continue to apply for the next ten years to cost estimates of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and health and other estimates based on a wide range of scientific and epidemiological studies, climate models, and uncertain predictions. Crime conservatively cost Nova Scotians an estimated C$550 million a year in economic losses, which amounted to $600 per person, or $1,650 per household. That was composed primarily of public spending on police, courts, and prisons and private spending on burglar alarms, security guards, electronic surveillance, and theft insurance. When losses due to unreported crimes, insurance fraud, and shoplifting were added, as well as the costs of shattered lives due to crime as estimated from court awards, the loss was nearly $1.2 billion a year, or $1,250 per person ($3,500 per household). We found that households paid C$800 more per year in higher prices (2.6 percent of annual consumption expenditures) due to in-store retail theft and retail crime prevention equipment and that insurance fraud cost them an additional $200 a year in higher premiums. None of these costs included deaths, injuries, and property damage due to impaired driving,

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nonhospital medical costs, private spending on criminal lawyers, and a variety of other crime-related costs that we just couldn’t estimate. But the real significance of this GPI Atlantic release was in providing a concrete example of why we need new measures to distinguish between expenditures that create direct benefit and those resulting from harm, which GDP cannot do, and to identify societal strengths and weaknesses and preventive investments that can reduce harm and future costs. The numbers clearly showed that higher crime rates make the GDP grow because they produce more spending on prisons, police, court trials, burglar alarms, and security guards, all of which are therefore mistakenly counted as contributions to economic prosperity. By contrast, the GPI shows crime costs as a loss rather than a gain and that less crime produces cost savings that can be invested in more productive activities that enhance well-being. With the completion of our crime study, we were then able to convey plainly a key purpose of the GPI to policy makers, the press, and the public. In so doing we could also prepare them for future work on health risks, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions that would further show how detriments to quality of life appear in GDP calculations as increases and why less is sometimes better. We could remind readers as well that Simon Kuznets, a key architect of national income and GDP accounting, had cautioned that we not just look at growth but always ask, “What is growing?” However, as with the unpaid household work results, the policy implications were less easy to convey. After all, although we had argued that recognizing the value of unpaid work should reduce gender-based wage and labor market discrimination and produce stronger social supports for single mothers and improved work–life balance, some misunderstood such valuation to argue that a woman’s place was in the home! Similarly, our cost-of-crime report took pains to focus on the social determinants of crime, such as their close correlation with unemployment rates. For example, we found that only 22 percent of Nova Scotia prison inmates had full-time jobs before incarceration, whereas fully 58  percent were unemployed. But rather than attend to social causes, some people used the crime cost results to argue for longer prison sentences to deter crime—though that raises costs.

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In fact, we had touted Nova Scotia’s comparative social and economic advantage in having the lowest incarceration rate in Canada—with just 1 of every 1,600 citizens in prison, compared with 1 of 900 in Canada as a whole and 1 out of 150 in the United States. And we cautioned against going the American route, where imprisonment was one of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy, with an average growth rate of 6.2 percent per year throughout the 1990s, significantly outpacing overall GDP growth. In the U.S., per capita spending on corrections had more than tripled in less than ten years. We noted the irony that such growth helped fuel the so-called robust, dynamic U.S. economy frequently held up as a model to Canadians. So we assured Canadians that our less robust and dynamic prison growth enabled precious resources to be allocated to health, education, environmental protection, and other activities that enhance human and social welfare. For the $44,000 a year it cost to keep an inmate behind bars in Nova Scotia, for example, one could at that time send a student to university in Canada for three years, including full-time tuition, accommodation, and meals. Even though the social implications of our results were complex and challenging to convey, the results in our early reports and their basic implications for measurement and policy were so well and prominently reported in both the provincial and national press that by mid-1999, we became widely known in Nova Scotia. Policy makers, journalists, and the educated public were beginning to understand the shortcomings of GDP-based progress measures and to accept the need for better measures. Within a year after our first report, and two years after setting up GPI Atlantic as a nonprofit research institute, we were receiving requests for presentations from both government and nongovernment groups, and the message spread. Meanwhile two of our researchers worked hard on our first and much more challenging natural resource and environmental accounts—on agriculture and water quality. The journey had begun. The GPI was taking root. The work was well under way. The future looked promising. And our spirits were buoyed.

5 SCALING UP

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was totally unprepared for the burst of activity generated by the sudden publicity surrounding the release of our first Nova Scotia reports. The wave of interest brought a flurry of requests for further GPI work. At the start of 1999, for example, we were asked to work with local communities to develop holistic progress measures that they could use to craft good development policies. Government agencies and nonprofits alike asked for costing studies in their areas of interest. And the election of a new provincial government in July 1999 produced an unexpected opportunity to turn our work directly into new, innovative policy. It was our honeymoon phase, and we were deluged by appreciative suitors. As with any honeymoon, it was a mixed blessing. Whether or not we were compensated, all these requests provided, on one hand, a grand opportunity to apply the GPI approach in practice, build new partnerships, and spread our economic philosophy and approach. On the other hand, they distracted us from our core mission. With stars in our eyes, our small GPI team got so busy exploring the new terrain, showcasing the GPI view at every opportunity, getting buried in the extra work, and romancing our new allies that we did not complete any further core component of the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index for more than a year following release of our cost of crime report.

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In the fall of 1998 I was approached by Leonard Poetschke of Nova Scotia Citizens for Community Development to assist communities in developing local GPIs. Leonard was well connected with local community development agencies and also was a national executive member of the populist conservative Reform Party and its key representative for eastern Canada. If someone on the far right could welcome our work with such enthusiasm, we had every hope that the GPI work on environmental and equity issues would not peg us as left-wing. Leonard’s distrust of big government led him to support local community efforts at greater self-reliance. Indeed, Leonard later invited me to a fascinating one-on-one lunch meeting with Stockwell Day, national leader of the Canadian Alliance (the Reform Party’s successor), at the end of which Mr. Day seemed convinced that internalizing social and environmental costs would make the market economy more efficient and reduce the need for costly and heavy-handed government intervention. Without a “polluter pays” principle, for example, Day acknowledged that the burden of cleaning up pollution falls on government, society, and taxpayers rather than on producers, consumers, and market forces. I was buoyed by the discovery that the GPI could communicate across conventional political boundaries. But what led me to embrace the opportunity to work at the local level was simply the visceral, direct understanding that community developers and citizens’ groups expressed of the GPI’s practical use and relevance. As noted earlier, it is at the community level that the rubber really hits the road in terms of quality of life, and where well-being is most immediately felt and experienced. It’s at the local level that one neighborhood is safe and another crime ridden, where the schools in one district are excellent and those in another abysmal, where the air is clean and water drinkable in one area and polluted in another. Yet communities had no reliable data to confirm that felt experience and no hard evidence to guide them in responding to real needs. Statistics Canada survey samples are rarely large enough to provide data at the community level. Unfortunately, national and provincial averages can be highly deceptive in what they reveal and conceal about people’s lives and actual experience, simply because they are averages.

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Just within the small province of Nova Scotia in 1999, for example, Halifax was prospering whereas Cape Breton had unemployment rates several times higher and income per capita substantially lower. In parts of Nova Scotia, the air and water were superbly clean, but in Boat Harbour, pulp mill effluent spewed dioxins, furans, chlorine, and other pollutants into the former fishing and clam grounds, and in Cape Breton toxic waste in the infamous Sydney Tar Ponds contributed to Canada’s highest cancer rates and shortest life spans. Community-level GPI work that could directly address health, safety, economic security, environmental, and other issues at the local level thus struck a chord with community development planners. We selected two communities that expressed particular interest and enthusiasm as pilots to develop GPIs that could then be replicated for other communities: Kings County, a relatively prosperous rural region with Nova Scotia’s most fertile agricultural land, and Glace Bay, a struggling, economically depressed former coal-mining town with high unemployment in industrial Cape Breton. Kings County planners were concerned to protect and enhance their quality of life; Glace Bay planners, by contrast, knew that GDP, economic growth statistics, and provincial averages didn’t begin to address the real conditions of their lives. Both communities yearned for actions that could address the issues that mattered to them, and neither had the local-level data to do so effectively. But what were those issues in each area? For more than a year, in 1999–2000, we met with more than forty community organizations in the two communities to find out what mattered to them and, from that, to develop our own survey. The meetings were dynamic, often sparked initially by our asking provocative questions such as “What kind of Kings County do you want your children to inherit twenty years from now?” These lively exchanges enabled us to identify, jointly with community participants, suitable indicators of progress that matched local needs and aspirations. Then, again with active community participation, we were able to develop a detailed survey questionnaire on employment, security, voluntary work, physical and mental health, farming, impacts on the environment, core values, social supports, and much more.

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Statistics Canada experts reviewed the questionnaires for us and recommended some changes to clarify ambiguities and bring the phrasing of questions in line with those used to compile comparable provincial and national statistics. We then field-tested the surveys, trained dozens of local residents in survey administration and database entry, and in the next year administered 3,600 surveys in the two pilot communities.1 We had an amazingly good response rate to our voluntary two-hour survey—82 percent in Glace Bay and 70 percent in Kings County. Our partners at Dalhousie, St. Mary’s, and Cape Breton Universities helped us design the databases and analyze and write up the results. We released the results on employment, health, security, unpaid work, and other subjects in a series of well-attended community meetings over the next few years, inviting the participation as well of relevant agencies and nongovernmental groups concerned with particular issues.2 While this intense work was going on at the community level, we were also receiving unsolicited requests for provincial work. In early 1999, the Canadian and Nova Scotia governments asked us to assess the benefits and costs of shifting 10 percent of freight transport from truck to rail, which required our first effort to price greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions. A few weeks later, the Maritime Centre for Excellence in Women’s Health commissioned two studies, one on women’s health in Atlantic Canada and the other on the capacity of the broader GPI indicators to highlight gender equity issues. Environment Canada and the Halifax Municipality and Water Commission funded a study on the benefits and costs of sewage treatment that would finally clean up Halifax harbor, into which 187 million liters of raw sewage were being dumped each day. Cancer Care Nova Scotia contracted with us to assess the costs of obesity in Nova Scotia, and Recreation and Sport Nova Scotia asked us to assess the health benefits of physical activity and the costs of sedentary lifestyles. Within a year of releasing our cost of crime report, we’d produced studies in all these areas and more, and the funding agencies were using our results to promote their agendas and programs, often publishing our reports on their own sites.3 On the one hand, these commissions, which we never solicited, generated some modest income that was badly

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needed to fund our core GPI studies, they gave us good public exposure, and they brought us into the policy arena, where we were glad to see our approach and numbers put to practical use. On the other hand, our dilemma on priorities continued to haunt us for the next decade as we scrambled to raise money to accomplish our own core undertaking and to find time to work on it. Each of these specialized funders had its particular (albeit worthy) agenda, and yet our own mission was a holistic one: to demonstrate the intrinsic linkages among ecological, social, and economic realities and to see the province adopt and use the GPI as a whole. Because we couldn’t find funders for that big, integrative mission, we continued to rely for income on the contracted work from agencies eager to bite off those pieces of the GPI that were in line with their own mandates and budgets. There was one distraction that year, which we seized with relish, however, because it provided a tremendous political opportunity to demonstrate the direct policy utility of what we’d just been working on and even to position Nova Scotia as a leader in forging innovative policy. In 1999, the newly elected Nova Scotia government, facing a serious debt crisis, announced massive intended civil service layoffs in an effort to reduce debt and balance the budget. Our studies on unpaid work had shown the importance of valuing time (not just paid work time) fully and opened a floodgate to a wide range of practical and creative policies to improve work–life balance that simply don’t make it onto current policy agendas. That same year I was inspired by a new book by Anders Hayden, who was research and policy coordinator of 32 Hours: Action for Full Employment, a Toronto-based movement committed to a reduction and redistribution of work time. Titled Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet, the book showed how shortening work hours would not only create greater employment and improve work–life balance but also reduce excess consumption, save resources, and ease the ecological stress on the planet.4 I quickly contacted Anders, and we teamed up to write a detailed proposal for the Nova Scotia government showing that it could achieve the savings projected for its layoff plan to reduce its $10 billion debt and $500 million deficit without firing anyone but instead by offering civil servants voluntary work-time reduction options.

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We argued that many workers would gladly work six-hour instead of eight-hour days so they could be at home when their children returned from school each weekday. Others would welcome four-day work weeks, which would give them three-day weekends. Still others would be grateful for a nine- or ten-month working year, which would enable them to spend vacations with their children. Asked in a survey if they preferred to earn more money by working longer hours or have more time for themselves and family, 75 percent of Canadians said they’d take the time over the money.5 We backed up these claims with strong European evidence on effective work-time reduction initiatives. By making part-time work attractive through equal hourly pay for part-time workers, prorated benefits, and equal opportunity for career advancement, the Netherlands had shared work widely, saved jobs, and substantially reduced unemployment. Even today the Netherlands has by far the highest rate of part-time work in the OECD (37.3 percent), among the shortest work hours per employee (1,433/year), and 20 percent fewer work hours than the United States (1,786).6 The Belgian government had created jobs and avoided layoffs by offering civil servants a 20 percent cut in work hours at 90 percent of their former pay.7 We factored in the increased cost to government of paying unemployment benefits and severance packages and cited Canadian firms that had effectively used existing work-sharing programs to avoid layoffs. Instead of laying off 20 out of 100 employees in hard times, for example, firms could cut work hours by 20 percent for all 100 employees, with the unemployment benefits that would have gone to the 20 laid-off employees instead being divided up among the 100 who would work fewer hours. Without gain or loss to government or the taxpayer, workers then would receive 20 percent more time off—often as a three-day weekend—in exchange for less than a 10 percent cut in pay. The evidence showed that such an income–leisure trade-off improves not only work–life balance for workers and increased voluntary community participation but also company productivity. Firms reported reduced absenteeism and lateness (doctors’ visits and errands are scheduled in time off rather than work time), lower turnover, greater retention

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of skills, reduction in fatigue and costly errors, and improved employee morale and industrial relations through greater equity and a sense of inclusion among company workers.8 On the flip side of these work reduction and work-sharing benefits, layoffs carry serious costs. In a separate study GPI Atlantic calculated the costs of unemployment in Nova Scotia at nearly $5 billion in lost output and taxes, unemployment benefit payments, and increased illness, domestic violence, divorce, and crime costs associated with joblessness.9 Studies also showed that unemployment sharply reduced laid-off workers’ self-esteem, increased their sense of exclusion, damaged their social relations, and increased inequity.10 In 1999–2000, we presented this evidence to Nova Scotia’s Minister for Human Resources, John Chataway, who briefed his Cabinet colleagues, and to local labor unions and other stakeholders. They were all genuinely interested and opened discussion sessions that I was asked to attend to answer questions and present evidence as needed. The atmosphere was open and collaborative. Both the new government and the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union (NSGEU)—the largest union in the province representing its civil servants—seemed ready to talk. Both recognized work-sharing and a range of voluntary shorter work-time options as a real cost-saving alternative to the proposed 1,600 public service layoffs. It could be a win-win solution that would save jobs, make the new government look good by sharply cutting the deficit without cutting jobs, and improve work–life balance and quality of life for many workers. I was amazed and heartened at how quickly and readily the GPI approach and thinking could put hitherto invisible options onto the policy table, and how open and receptive both government and unions were. But in my enthusiasm, I’d neglected two important players, who quickly quashed the GPI proposals and the constructive negotiations that were already under way. The Human Resources minister told me, somewhat sadly and even apologetically, that although he and his Cabinet colleagues were interested, his most senior human resources bureaucrats strongly opposed our proposals. This opposition was due largely to the additional work and

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complication of administering a range of alternative work-time options that did not fit the department’s existing payroll database. Then, a few days later, new faces started to show up at the negotiating table where I was still present as a resource. The NSGEU’s parent union, the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), with 340,000 members nationwide, had flown its leaders in from Toronto, together with top brass from the Canadian Labour Congress. These national union leaders quickly made clear that they would never be seen to collaborate with government in any scheme that might reduce salaries. Our proposal died, the layoffs occurred, the unions raised their usual hue and cry, there were angry labor protests, and the bureaucrats didn’t have to complicate their lives or stay a minute after 5:00 p.m.11 I’d underestimated how difficult it is to change entrenched mindsets, structures, and vested interests. Looking back, I now see the seeds of some of the more intractable challenges we later faced. If we’d had the financial and technical resources (which as a struggling nonprofit we never did amass), we might have come better prepared with not just broad policy options but practical implementation details, such as a proposed new payroll database that would incorporate alternative work-time reduction scenarios. In any case, we learned how difficult it is to carve out a new local path that defies national and global interests to which provincial structures such as the NSGEU are inevitably linked.

FATHOMING THE POWER OF THE GPI

Despite our focus on producing a GPI that was statistically and scholastically rigorous and credible, we never undertook this work for academic reasons. We did it for one reason only: to make a modest but positive contribution to rethinking government priorities and creating a good, prosperous, and sustainable human society on this Earth. In fact, the research and results we produced persuaded us that the GPI included all the key ingredients needed to lay the foundation for a new sustainability-based economic paradigm that would ensure our children’s future.

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Only at the end of the decade did we finally learn that what was practical, reasonable, and necessary in the eyes of our GPI research team did not necessarily hold sway in policy arenas. So this section is about what we hoped and assumed would be possible. The hard lessons we learned come in a later section. The deeper promise of the GPI’s potential dawned gradually over the next decade, as we produced 108 in-depth reports on various dimensions of well-being and progress, containing thousands of spreadsheets, tables, and charts. To the extent possible we presented both indicators assessing progress and accounts with economic valuations, and we included summaries and press releases highlighting key results. This wealth of data provided the Province of Nova Scotia with more detailed, integrated information on its social, economic, and environmental status than was available, to the best of my knowledge, to any other jurisdiction in North America and possibly the world. And as we did all this, we slowly fathomed the extraordinary power of the new measures, providing benefits that, we were convinced, would make adoption and gradual application of the GPI irresistible to policy makers who were sincere about their work. We found the new indicators to be practical, policy-relevant tools that can help governments set goals and targets, clarify policy trade-offs, evaluate programs, and make informed decisions. We saw that these tools also could send early warning signals to trigger timely remedial action and could hold governments accountable at election time. At the same time, the new accounts would enable policy makers to include the health of people, natural resources, social networks, and knowledge in their budgets, balance sheets, and wealth accounts and create informed policies that could protect and strengthen these assets. And those outcomes, in the longer term, could enable governments to set financial incentives and penalties that affect prices and change behavior to reward benefit and penalize harm. Governments often seem rudderless and visionless, bowing to vested interests, looking to the next election, thinking short term, stumbling blindly into the future, and often making decisions that are misguided and dangerous. In the most practical ways, the GPI indicators can be used to set achievable goals and targets based on hard evidence.

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If we regularly and publicly track the rates of crime, smoking, poverty, waste disposal, and greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions, we can set concrete targets to reduce those rates by, say, 20 percent by a certain year and 50 percent by a later year. Together with other trends, we can then measure our progress building a safer, healthier, more sustainable, and more economically secure country or region. That in turn provides strong evidence to policy makers to inform their decisions and assess which programs are and are not working in attaining agreed-on targets. And that in turn can save money that is now wasted in perpetuating programs that aren’t performing or have outlived their usefulness. Such commonly agreed goals and targets also have an important social function: they can be a powerful unifying force in creating a shared social vision. Because the GPI indicators reflect values shared across the political spectrum—better health, greater economic security, safer neighborhoods, stronger communities, higher educational attainment, cleaner air and water, and a healthier natural environment—no political party has good reason to reject such goals or the evidence demonstrating progress toward them. Of course, those parties will differ greatly on strategies to achieve such objectives. But all that is grist for the mill of democratic debate so long as the parties agree that these and other constituents of well-being and the “good life” reflect shared aspirations and overarching social goals. Such debates may actually strengthen social cohesion by bringing vital issues of shared concern, currently sidelined by narrow economic considerations, into the political arena. Fortifying this potentially unifying function is the capacity of such shared social goals and targets to hold governments accountable according to agreed objective standards. At election time the GPI evidence would enable citizens to assess the degree to which they and their representatives have made progress toward those common goals and targets and to cast their votes accordingly. None of this precludes huge disagreements among parties on priorities, appropriate targets, and strategies for achieving those targets, according to the competing interests present in any society. This is what democratic political processes are all about, and those alternatives, too, can be hotly debated and judged by voters. But across party lines the new

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measures could still articulate shared societal goals on health, safety, economic security, environmental quality, and other core constituents of well-being. And they can establish agreed-on, comparable measurement methods by which actual performance can be assessed systematically on what matters in people’s lives—socially, economically, and environmentally. For example, if elected leaders know they will be evaluated by hard numbers that tell the truth about their success and failure to improve health, equity, and economic security and reduce crime, poverty, and pollution, they may become intent more on making effective policy than on optics and public relations. In one respect, we were not proposing anything new. The required information on all key issues is certainly available for the handful of stalwart researchers who are determined to seek it out. In fact, different interest groups—whether business associations and chambers of commerce or trade unions, environmentalists, and social justice advocates—often issue their own report cards at election time. But the information is almost never presented systematically in an integrated, comparable, and easy-to-understand way. This is not to imagine naively that personalities and slogans won’t still sway people; but despite some salient examples to the contrary, facts, evidence, and truth still matter to many people. The evidence we gradually turned up pointed to another key policy advantage of our holistic measures over the dominant tendency for each government ministry and agency to hammer out its own budget and agenda in relative isolation from, and with little regard to, the priorities of other departments. The twenty integrated social, economic, and environmental dimensions of the GPI (see table 4.1) naturally reveal linkages that enable policy makers to identify practical trade-offs between alternative policy choices. If we make progress in one area, is it at the expense of another, or can we identify win-win actions that will advance well-being in health, living standards, environmental quality, and other goals simultaneously and harmoniously? To give just one example, we presented integrated data sets that convincingly demonstrated the economic value and utility of investments in organic agriculture, which has conventionally been cast as a marginal,

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environmentalist concern. The data clearly showed not only that organic farming preserves and enhances long-term soil quality and productivity but that it also can improve population health, enhance farm income, and provide significant spin-off benefits to local economies. Scientific and epidemiological studies show that organic food is safer and healthier than nonorganic food which, according to the European Parliamentary Research Service, can create “very high costs to society” by exposing consumers to synthetic pesticides with neurotoxic, endocrine-disrupting, or carcinogenic properties. Evidence also points to health and safety benefits for organic food consumers resulting from organic restrictions on antibiotics in farmed animals, lower concentrations of crop cadmium, and reduced risks of fetal abnormalities, childhood allergies, adult obesity, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.12 On the economic side, in just ten years the global organic market is expected to increase more than four-fold from $166 billion in 2018 to $680 billion in 2027.13 In Canada demand for organics is growing at 16  percent a year, with supply unable to keep pace with demand.14 In the United States, as of 2015, organic was the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, and these statistics are replicated in many other countries.15 Such linked economic, health, and environmental evidence, in turn, can spur government support for the organic industry and dent habitual mindsets that have long been accustomed to shopping for the cheapest food regardless of origin. These multiple benefits, including organic sector growth rates, may also influence those who still view organic as a fringe environmentalist concern and who see economic and environmental concerns at loggerheads rather than in harmony. This is just one example of the potential of integrated socialeconomic-environmental data sets to identify win-win policy solutions that advance several objectives simultaneously. Such positive potential does not negate the fact that the interwoven nature of social, economic, and environmental factors can make many policy decisions difficult and sometimes highly contentious, requiring significant trade-offs and lifestyle compromises. For instance, expensive new highway construction that serves ex-urban automobile-dependent development may well increase commuting congestion and social divisions and undermine

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policies designed to reduce energy use, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. But only by understanding such linkages, which the holistic GPI approach uncovers, can truly informed decisions be made.

T RI GGE R S FO R T I ME LY R E M E DIAL ACT IO N?

Perhaps the most surprising policy benefit of the GPI approach that we found also took the longest to discover—a full decade, in fact. As we kept researching and preparing time series (which are comparable data collected at regular intervals over a number of years), the GPI demonstrated remarkable predictive power. The trick to unleashing this power, we found, was twofold: first to come up with the best and most important indicators, which often took us several years to identify, and then to turn those results into a net rather than gross accounting system.16 This predictive capacity, when used in tandem with computational modeling that can account for a wide range of the key variables that characterize any system as complex as a human society, can provide early-warning signals of potential difficulties and challenges. That, in turn, enables policy makers to take timely remedial action well before any crisis develops. So valuable is this policy function that it’s worth giving a few examples. In mid-2019, the Global Footprint Network released annual numbers, nowhere to be found in GDP calculations, showing that by the end of July, only seven months into the year, humanity had already used more of nature’s resources than the planet can renew in the entire year. For the rest of the year, due to overfishing, overharvesting forests, overconsumption, and emitting more greenhouse gases than the Earth can absorb, we depleted and lived off our children’s future. That’s why July 29, 2019, was called “Earth Overshoot Day.” If the rest of the world lived, consumed, and wasted the way Americans and Canadians did, the numbers showed, Overshoot Day would have landed in mid-March.17 This current overshoot crisis was predictable and could have been avoided. Like the GPI, ecological footprint analysis uses a net accounting system that measures human resource use against the Earth’s productive capacity. Twenty years earlier, Overshoot Day was October 1, and the

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writing was on the wall. Sadly, it was ignored, and humanity continued to overconsume at ever faster rates. So long as we continue to rely on gross accounting methods such as the GDP, which counts only what we produce and spend, present times will quickly become “the good old days,” and we will increasingly look back on them with astonishment that our generation could have been so profligate and willfully ignorant. Given the life-threatening crises facing humanity today, it’s clear that this predictive power and capacity to send early-warning signals is a vital policy function of net accounting and holistic measurement systems. In fact, we slowly discovered that it applies as much to straight economics as to ecological and social issues. In the first chapter I noted that the massive 2008–2009 global financial crisis might have been predicted and avoided by a net accounting system that tracked income growth against debt growth and consumer spending in relation to balance sheets assessing the net value of assets such as housing stocks. There we noted that the gross GDP measures had so misled the top economic experts and policy makers that they entirely failed to predict the crash, complacently cheered the spending boom and GDP growth, and took no advance preventive action. We had a similar experience in our GPI work for Canada. One month before the start of the 2008 economic meltdown, GPI Atlantic released a report on debt and financial security. It warned of unsustainable trends in the Canadian economy—for instance, the fact that debt growth during the so-called economic boom period of the previous decade had far outpaced income growth for 80 percent of Canadian households, thus threatening the ability of many to manage and service their personal debt. Only among the wealthiest 20 percent of Canadians did the rate of income growth exceed the rate of debt growth—far too narrow a base for a healthy economy.18 In Canada’s four Atlantic provinces, more than 77,000 households had become so deeply indebted that they could not get out of debt even if they sold everything they owned, including their homes. There was nothing clairvoyant about our work; we simply recognized that reliance on gross income and growth statistics inevitably underplayed rising debt levels and thus failed to signal the dangers of debt-fueled growth.

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We asked one of the top executives of Canada’s most important bank to review our report and provide comments prior to its release. This highly respected financial expert took issue with our conclusions, though not with our statistics, calculations, and methods. In line with the conventional wisdom of the time, he told us definitively that Canadian household finances had never been healthier, that Canadian households were more financially secure than ever, and that our troublesome conclusions therefore had to be wrong. He hadn’t disputed our numbers or disproved those conclusions, however, so we released our report anyway. A few weeks later the crash came, the Canadian economy fell into recession, exports declined by 16 percent and investments by 22 percent, 400,000 jobs were lost, the Canadian dollar lost 20 percent of its value, and Canadian households found their finances far from “healthy” and “secure.”19 The bank executive’s confident remarks are but one indication of how challenging it is even for hard evidence to dent ingrained habitual mindsets and practices.20

DO E S I T PAY TO FARM?

Among all our work, the research that most graphically demonstrated the GPI’s predictive power, its capacity to send early-warning signals, and the challenges of bringing that clear policy benefit into the actual policy arena was that on agriculture. The late 1990s saw Nova Scotia farmers in serious economic trouble. Every key indicator of farm viability was in decline—net farm income had declined by 46 percent since 1971, farming costs were rising much faster than food prices, debt had mushroomed, return on investment was down, and liabilities were outpacing assets.21 Our GPI report warned that if existing trends continued, farmers would be forced off the land because they could no longer afford to farm. The results got good press but were ignored by policy makers, who relied on GDP-based statistics that showed gross farm cash receipts trending upward. If you disregarded costs, of course you’d think there was no problem!

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In 2008, we updated the numbers. For many farmers, it was too late. In four of the previous six years, net farm income in Nova Scotia had dropped below zero, meaning that it was costing farmers more to farm than they were earning.22 Many already had been forced to abandon agriculture and sell their farms to developers. Although the gross farm cash receipts counted in GDP had risen by 6.7 percent since 1971, net farm income in the same period had dropped by 91 percent, and by 2007 it had reached the lowest levels ever recorded. By then the expense-toincome ratio had reached 100 percent, far exceeding the 80 percent threshold needed for a healthy farm sector. Total farm debt had risen by 146 percent, and the farm solvency ratio (liabilities in relation to assets) increased by 106 percent. That meant many farmers could not pay off their debt even if they sold everything they owned (land, buildings, and machinery). The crisis was totally predictable: the new results simply followed the same downward trajectories we’d revealed nearly a decade earlier. Farmers and the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture were ecstatic in their gratitude for our work because the truth of their economic lives finally was being told: “You’ve finally put numbers to what we farmers all knew from our hard experience,” they told us. “But we couldn’t prove it, and we were ignored because our stories were just individual and anecdotal. Now at last they’ll listen.” It was not to be, and we had to examine why. The numbers got such prominent press and were so loudly trumpeted by the Federation of Agriculture that policy makers couldn’t pretend ignorance. But as with the aforementioned bank expert, policy makers were so blinded by their reliance on the gross farm cash receipt numbers that show up in GDP that they paid no heed to numbers that also counted the cost of farming, which showed product prices in relation to farm input prices and laid bare the net income, expense, and debt levels that determine farm viability in practice. In retrospect there seems to have been another reason for the failure of policy makers to respond. In the existing global system, the replacement of smaller family farms by industrial monocultural mega-farms that are reliant on high inputs of chemicals, fossil fuels, and cheap labor

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has been well accepted as the long-term and accelerating trend. In that sense our Nova Scotia numbers reflect both the challenges that small local farms face worldwide and also the growing economic concentration throughout the food chain—from land ownership, seeds, and herbicides to farm finance and retailing. Thus Canada lost 27 percent of its farms and 25 percent of its farmers between 1991 and 2011, whereas the average farm size grew by 30 percent.23 In the United States the largest 2 percent of farms now control a third of all farmland, and the largest 10 percent control more than 70 percent. As the U.S. Agriculture Department put it bluntly, “Today’s farms are fewer and bigger.”24 Three companies in Canada control over 70 percent of fertilizer sales, two companies control over 70 percent of beef packing, and five companies dominate food retailing. Such concentration enables agribusiness firms to extract higher prices for the farm inputs farmers buy and to offer lower prices for the crop they purchase from the farmers.25 Further, as farming becomes less lucrative, it attracts fewer young farmers; farmers 55 and older now run more than 55 percent of all Canadian farms.26 From this perspective, why should government policy makers care if small farms fail? Given that intense concentration, economies of scale, and reliance on cheap labor keep food prices low, why be alarmed by a rapidly changing agriculture structure that seems to benefit consumers? As I struggled with the failure of our warnings on the decline of Nova Scotia farming to penetrate such mindsets and stimulate policy action, I gradually became aware of both a deadly serious yet subtle danger in current trends and a great potential promise of the GPI. As our team pored over evidence on farming, forests, fisheries, climate change, health, employment, security, and more over a dozen years, we saw a sad and frightening pattern emerge. With societies too seldom heeding early-warning signals or properly tracking the slow demise of precious social, economic, and ecological resources, many potential collapses of our business-as-usual world are likely to occur with a whimper rather than a bang. We are gradually becoming accustomed to an increasingly degraded world—no longer knowing what a natural old-growth forest is; not missing species, cultures, and languages that have become

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extinct; and accepting pollution, extreme weather, obesity, insecurity, and fear as normal. And yet in direct tandem with the growing despair the evidence may have aroused, the GPI results simultaneously revealed a great potential policy benefit of full-cost accounts—their capacity, if taken seriously by political leaders, to affect the prices that directly influence consumer habits. On the one hand, we were saying nothing that agronomists, meteorologists, biologists, epidemiologists, and other scientists hadn’t said before. On the other hand, we were translating the findings of these scientists into economic language and policy, creating a strategic bridge to the world of conventional economics, and sometimes stirring key policy audiences that even the best scientific evidence cannot reach. Let’s see how that can work:

T HE GR E AT E ST P OT E NT I AL PO LICY LE VE R

To return to our farming results, inadequate data don’t yet enable us to assess and compare the full economic benefits and costs of different food systems. But ample evidence of their impacts on health, nutrition, soil quality, transport, and greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions is already available to indicate that if full food production and distribution costs are included, fresh, local, sustainably grown food would be much cheaper than chemically grown food imported from 2,000 km away. At the moment it’s the opposite. Organically grown food, for example, is nearly 50 percent more expensive than comparable conventional items.27 A fast food cheeseburger is priced at just $1, ignoring external obesity and carbon costs estimated at between 68 cents and $2.90 per burger.28 Such price distortion artificially deflates current food prices—prices that fail to take into account, for example, the fact that the current global food system is responsible for a third of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.29 Full-cost accounts also point to subtler economic impacts. For example, evidence indicates that small local farms contribute significantly to the employment and income of rural areas and have a much higher multiplier effect for local economies than mega-farms.30 That is primarily

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because local farmers are much more likely to buy and spend locally than are large capital-intensive factory farms, which have far fewer workers per acre, and buy equipment, supplies, and feed from the same agricultural conglomerates that purchase their products. For example, a University of Minnesota study found that small farms with gross annual incomes of $100,000 or less made nearly 95 percent of farm-related expenditures within their local communities compared with less than 20 percent for large farms with gross incomes above $900,000.31 Beyond such basic economic advantages, small farms greatly strengthen the social and cultural fabric of rural communities and provide local populations with greater food security and independence from potential global food supply disruptions.32 The good news here is that such evidence, if systematically incorporated into regional or national full-cost accounts, can have a profound policy impact if legislators heed it. In fact, it’s that extraordinary potential that kept our little team going and our hopes high throughout the decade. GPI-type full-cost accounts that properly value the true economic, social, and environmental benefits and costs of economic activity provide a relatively objective prerequisite and factual reference point that enables policy makers to assign accurate values to the size of subsidies and tax breaks designed to encourage sustainable and beneficial activities and to duties and taxes on harmful activities. Such financial incentives and penalties act directly to lower or raise prices, thereby encouraging or discouraging particular consumer purchases. A dramatic example of the relationship between prices and behavior is the rise and fall in cigarette consumption in direct response to tobacco tax increases and rollbacks.33 Thus, smoking rates among Nova Scotia teenagers fell dramatically, from 30 percent in 1999 to 13 percent in 2005, apparently in direct response to the province’s doubling of cigarette taxes and consequent price increases.34 In contrast, a 1994 Canadian government rollback of tobacco taxes to curb cigarette smuggling due to sharply different tobacco taxes and prices among Canadian provinces had cut cigarette prices, raised consumption, and undermined smoking reduction efforts.35 It was a poignant example of the challenges of taking unilateral action out of synch with other jurisdictions.

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But when implemented in a coordinated way, the evidence convincingly shows that raising tobacco taxes reduces consumption, smoking prevalence, and the burden of disease especially on the poorest populations, while it improves overall public health and increases government tax revenues.36 The World Health Organization estimates that a worldwide tax increase that raises the real price of cigarettes by 10 percent would cause 42 million smokers to quit and prevent a minimum of 10 million tobacco-related deaths.37 The relationship between how much consumption varies in relation to changes in the price of a good or service is known as the “price elasticity of demand.” For Western countries such as the United States and Canada, it was found that a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes would cut consumption by 3 to 5 percent.38 Aside from directly affecting prices and thereby influencing consumer behavior, financial incentives and penalties also trigger wider economic impacts that reinforce desired policy outcomes. Thus if organically grown local food were incentivized and became more financially viable, economies of scale would naturally develop, for example through organic farmers’ cooperatives, which enhance marketing efficiency and therefore potentially lower prices. Financial support for farmers whose practices conserve water resources, enhance soil quality, reduce carbon emissions, and supply local markets would come from taxes and penalties on imported, chemically grown food that carries high costs in soil depletion, greenhouse gas emissions, and health impacts. Such policy in turn would tend to raise imported food prices relative to the prices of local, sustainably produced food, thereby increasing demand for the latter. GPI-type accounts would also encourage governments to protect prime agricultural land from development by purchasing land conservation easements on the best and most threatened working farmlands. Buying such development rights would remove good farmland from the real estate market and guarantee the land’s continued use for farming by compensating farmers for the losses they incur by being unable to sell it for other uses.39 Where tried, such creative solutions have effectively enhanced farm economic viability, conserved agricultural land, and supported

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sustainable farming practices in places where local farming is in trouble. The U.S. government’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) pays Indian tribes, state and local governments, and nongovernmental organizations that have protection programs up to 50 percent of the fair market value of easements that help farmers keep productive land in agriculture and prevent conversion to nonagricultural uses.40 Elsewhere farmers have been paid for protecting ecosystem services by farming more sustainably. In Tanzania and Honduras, for example, upstream farmers have been paid by downstream water users to improve farming practices and water quality by reducing runoff, soil erosion, waste, and chemical fertilizers and by constructing irrigation ditches and terraces.41 In the absence of national full-cost accounts, programs such as these are still widely scattered and very modest in size and scope. But systematized full-cost accounts, joined with such national policies and those suggested in chapter 15, would vastly expand the creative policy options and financial levers that can carve a new path forward and respond effectively to early-warning signs of greater troubles ahead. In whatever field our GPI team looked in the existing scientific and scholarly literature, we found abundant early warnings and clear policy options to avoid damages. Net accounting can translate that scientific evidence into economic language that will reach policy makers. For example, prior to 1992, scientific reports on Atlantic fish stock depletion were largely sidelined in the face of GDP-based measures that counted only what we extracted from the oceans and therefore reported that the fisheries industry was prospering.42 By contrast, a net accounting system that counts both the nominator (fish landings) and the denominator (ocean fish stocks) would have signaled impending trouble for the industry and might have prompted policy makers to adopt regulatory measures to limit catches, prevent overfishing, and allow fish stocks to recover. Such policies, enacted in a timely manner, could have avoided the catastrophic 1992 collapse of Atlantic ground-fish stocks, which threw 40,000 fishery workers out of jobs and, on a global scale, prevented the overexploitation and depletion of more than 70 per cent of the world’s commercially important fish stocks.43

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Similarly, climate change scientists now openly express their frustration at seeing their evidence and warnings ignored. At the end of December 2015—the hottest and wettest December in the hottest year on record to that date44—Myles Allen, head of climate research at Oxford University, commented: “As scientists, it’s a little humbling that we’ve been saying this for 20 years now, and it’s not until people notice daffodils coming out in December that they start to say, ‘Maybe they’re right.’ ”45 Translated into economic language, however, such scientific warnings are more likely to prompt effective policy responses. Thus climate change damage cost estimates—widely available but not yet incorporated into national accounts—can provide a reliable reference point to assess the appropriate size of a carbon tax aimed at offsetting such costs and reducing dependence on fossil fuels. In fact, despite the challenges of scattered and limited implementation, such policies that already exist demonstrate how powerfully such government action can affect prices and behavior. British Columbia’s successful carbon tax, for example, has shown that an increase of 5 cents per liter in gas prices can spur fuel efficiency and reduce gas consumption by 5 to 8 percent. By contrast government inaction in the face of falling oil prices in recent years has sped sales of large gas-guzzling vehicles.46 The potential policy benefits of full-cost accounts can be very subtle and highly fine-tuned to a wide range of national needs. Because they intrinsically link social, economic, and ecological variables, such accounts naturally point to policy trade-offs and possible win-win solutions across a wide range of policy dimensions. Thus, for example, estimates of the economic and health care costs of poverty and unemployment, such as detailed in our GPI reports, could provide the basis for using carbon tax revenues to invest in poverty reduction and job creation. Similarly, monies gained by government levies and penalties imposed on unsustainable business activities (e.g., oil sands production) could be redirected as financial incentives for sustainable investments (e.g., renewable energy, mass transit). Balancing penalties and incentives in this way can also reassure citizens that carbon, cigarette, and other new taxes are not a government tax grab but are invested in socially,

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economically, and environmentally beneficial activities. Such palpable social benefits can make tax-shifting measures highly popular. In short, despite the challenges we faced in spurring policy action in Nova Scotia in the absence of actual adoption of full-cost accounts, I  remain convinced that such accounts can eventually have profound and far-reaching policy effects. They will thrust vital early warnings onto the policy agenda to spur timely remedial action aimed at preventing avoidable damages and economic costs. And they can change the structure of market prices to reflect and reward sustainable and socially responsible production. Perhaps most significant of all, the policy benefits described in this section could eventually change the structure of the economy itself. Once goods are priced according to their true costs of production, not only will consumer behavior change as people seek less expensive goods, but the market economy itself will become more efficient—with profligate and wasteful energy use penalized, for example, and rewards for energy conservation built into price structures. Though the initial internalization of external costs and related enforcement mechanisms require government regulation, the resulting market efficiencies will eventually reduce the need for government intervention. As noted earlier, incorporating pollution costs into market prices would provide a natural incentive for manufacturers to minimize pollution in production processes and thus reduce the need for taxpayer-funded cleanup costs after the fact. Discovering these policy benefits of full-cost accounts dramatically shifted my own perspective and presentations on the GPI. At earlier stages of our work, I hadn’t yet realized that the new methods and new paradigm would also vastly increase economic efficiency. As that reality dawned in the course of our research, I shifted my hopes and arguments from values to more utilitarian presentations. If none of the principles outlined in chapter 3 on which the GPI was based would persuade hard-nosed economists, that later discovery of economic efficiency surely would! Despite the undoubted power and policy benefits of the GPI outlined in this chapter, whether policy makers seize those valuable tools and make use of them can be another story—as my colleagues and I later discovered to our dismay.

6 CHALLENGES BEHIND THE SCENES

T

o produce a credible, comprehensive GPI that a government could readily adopt and use to shape policy wasn’t an easy journey. My colleagues and I faced daunting obstacles—financial, strategic, methodological, and political—along the way. We’ll leave the politics to the next chapter but give a flavor of other challenges here.

OF FINANCES AND SILOS

GPI Atlantic’s financial struggle to pay staff even modestly and cope with running expenses never ceased, mainly because we would not compromise the integrity of the GPI by gearing it only to issues of interest to funders. For example, our work on the health care costs of preventable risks such as smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity and the economic benefits of health promotion attracted public funding mainly because policy makers were desperate to stem the escalating health care costs that ate up ever larger slices of their budgets. But we could find no major funders willing to support our work on the ecological footprint, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, income distribution, economic security, and a wide range of other subjects, though we often patched together

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partial support from several small contributions and donations. In the end about 75 percent of our Nova Scotia GPI work remained unfunded, produced largely through voluntary labor. Ultimately we were sustained by the enthusiasm, commitment, and shared vision of our wonderful researchers, but it was never easy to hold onto qualified staff for the long term when we were unable to pay them properly or consistently. And so we saw erstwhile and well-heeled mainstream collaborators like Environment Canada and Pembina Institute poach our researchers by paying them far more than we could afford. Interestingly, this hand-to-mouth existence may have had the distinct advantage of helping us maintain our independence and the integrity of our work, free from government spin or interest group pressure. In fear of losing donors, even nonprofits with the noblest mandates can be as vulnerable to such pressure as anyone if they align their efforts with financial support. If we’d done that and worked according to a smart business model, gearing our research supply to market demand, we’d likely have become a health research institute. Certainly we’d never have produced a comprehensive GPI that necessarily included components that were less popular with funders. Although we never actively marketed our work, demand for what we did in certain areas (particularly health) grew over time, and we did receive a lot of requests for spin-off work. We used the income from those contracts to help support our core provincial-level GPI research and development. For example, after producing a report for Nova Scotia, we sometimes received requests to do the same kind of analysis for other provinces. Thus we replicated our original Nova Scotia cost of obesity report for seven other provinces, our cost of tobacco report for four other provinces, and our cost of chronic disease report for Canada as a whole. In all about half of GPI Atlantic’s legions of reports have been such commissioned or contracted work, with the remainder representing direct work on the core GPI components. The funding we received provided no infrastructure support (management, bookkeeping and finances, office rental and supplies, computers, or salaries), so we kept our operations lean, working out of our homes with our own computers rather than in an office, which added to the challenge of our research

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and development work. The lack of infrastructure funding in addition landed us in a catch-22 situation in which we did not have the resources either to market our work or to engage in dedicated fundraising efforts to gain those needed resources. A key reason for the financial difficulties and stresses we have faced over two decades is simply that governments worldwide are generally structured in silos, each with its own budget and mandate. It is almost impossible to sell the GPI as a holistic concept to a government as a whole, because no particular government department is set up to support an activity that transcends departmental boundaries. When we produced our report on the growing income gap, for example, a reporter asked if we’d given it to any government minister or department. I thought hard and asked the reporter, “To whom should we give it? To the minister for equity? Who in the government is in charge of reducing the gap between rich and poor?” Unfortunately, many issues critical for well-being and sustainability require an integrated response across departments or are simply not yet priority items on government agendas. Over the years we received a tremendous amount of verbal support, acknowledgment, and encouragement from many government officials, both publicly and privately. But equally often we heard that the GPI did not fit their particular budget or the requirements of their particular mandates. Departments such as health, environment, energy, and transportation sometimes cherry-picked those GPI results of particular relevance to their own areas of responsibility, but they could not swallow the GPI as a whole. In this, the specialized, departmental structure of governments runs counter to the integrative spirit of the GPI, the very purpose of which is to reveal the links among social, economic, and environmental realities.1 We found a different kind of challenge in seeking foundation funding, as that is mostly directed to projects with more tangible, direct outcomes than ours. It is much more difficult to attract funding for indicator and measurement work at the infrastructure level than for programs that help sick children or increase literacy, for example. For these reasons and more, we never overcame the financial challenges that plagued and sometimes delayed our work.

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CHOOSING ONE AUDIENCE AND MISSING ANOTHER

These financial struggles influenced the strategic choices we had to make. In order to reach three key audiences—experts, policy makers, and the general public—we needed very different strategies and communication tools. Because we didn’t have the resources to give proper attention to all three audiences, we focused on producing well-documented work with integrity that would satisfy the experts. Early on, after reading Hans Messinger’s critique of the original U.S. GPI and other materials, I was convinced that our work would go nowhere with policy makers and the general public if we did not first satisfy an expert audience with the rigor, credibility, and reliability of our data, methodologies, calculations, and results. And so over the next decade, we labored to complete each piece of research in a large, detailed, heavily footnoted report, quickly summarized key results in a press release, and called a press conference to announce the results. The press showed up, lapped up our results, and gave us excellent coverage, which often led to follow-up opinion pieces, editorials, radio and TV interviews, and talk show appearances. I think the generally positive and interested public response was due to the fact that the GPI results were outcomes that resonated with people’s felt experience and reality. Both the evidence and the policy recommendations we drew from the evidence were intuitive and easy to understand and made sense to the general public. As soon as the results were released, though, we’d immediately move on to the next piece of research. We never lingered to promote, lobby, or package the results for key decision makers, or to work with public interest groups to keep the issue in the public eye and policy arena. We just didn’t have the money or resources for public relations. So we produced but never marketed or “sold” the product, which limited the impact of our work. From time to time we heard or read in the newspaper that the government was using our results, for example on the costs of tobacco consumption to the province or on the economic benefits of its new solid

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waste management strategy, which counted factors such as energy savings, avoided GHG emissions, and extended landfill life—all ignored in conventional accounts. And sometimes we heard an opposition party or nonprofit group using GPI numbers to critique government policies. But we had no systematic way to follow up on the use of our results in the policy arena or to ensure that our evidence entered the appropriate legislative or executive channels.2 In retrospect, I wonder if greater attention to communications might have produced a more lasting impact in the policy and public arenas. By contrast, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a British think tank founded in 1986 with the aim of building a new economy, has put substantial effort into communications. NEF’s Happy Planet Index, to give just one example, has scored far more hits than all our voluminous GPI reports combined. A single TED talk on the Happy Planet Index was viewed more than a million times.3 And yet the decision to prioritize our extremely limited resources into producing the best, strongest, and most solid GPI reports possible yielded highly credible results that have withstood scrutiny by experts  and enabled us to mount strong and sound challenges to conventional practices. For example, the most controversial evidence we amassed over the decade was in our two-volume GPI Forest Accounts, which came to a rather grim conclusion: excess clear-cutting (which was 98 percent of all forest harvesting in Nova Scotia in the late 1990s) and the loss of natural age and species diversity in Nova Scotia’s forests had resulted in • • • • • •

a decline in essential forest ecosystem services the loss of valuable species the loss of wide-diameter and clear lumber, which fetches premium market prices a decline in resilience and resistance to insect infestation soil degradation and nutrient leaching, which compromises future timber productivity a substantial decline in carbon storage capacity and an increase in biomass carbon loss

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• • •

diminution of wildlife habitat and consequent bird population declines a decline in forest recreation values, thereby diminishing the potential for nature tourism a decline in forested watershed protection, contributing to a 50 percent drop in shade-dependent brook trout.

We concluded that together, these losses represented a substantial depreciation of a valuable natural capital asset. As a contrast, we profiled case studies of sustainable and viable forestry practices showing that uneven-aged forest management and selection harvesting—selective removal of trees so as to maintain the integrity, diversity, health, and value of the stand as a whole—could increase forest values and provide more jobs than the dominant clear-cutting methods used in Nova Scotia’s forest harvesting. The evidence also showed that a shift to greater value-added production, such as making furniture or flooring, also could create far more jobs per unit of biomass harvested and four times the value per cubic meter harvested than are created through the current emphasis on pulp and paper production.4 Our analysis also found that restoration forestry practices, including both conservation practices and active intervention such as planting tree species targeted to restoring biodiversity and ecological functioning, constituted a sound investment in natural capital value. Those practices raise canopy height; improve soil quality, timber productivity, and age and species diversity; and increase the proportion of valuable wide-diameter, clear lumber. We particularly recommended the use of financial incentives to reward selection harvesting over clear-cutting to encourage such sustainable practices.5 Our report release, press conference, and news coverage sparked an uproar. Some, including environmental advocates and the Tourism Industry Association of Nova Scotia, warmly welcomed our report and strongly supported our recommendations for greater forest conservation and selection harvesting rather than clear-cutting. But the timber industry was so heavily invested in clear-cutting, with its heavy machinery and pulp and paper plants dependent on a continuation

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of business as usual, that it clearly felt threatened by our recommendations. The  Nova Scotia Forest Products Association (NSFPA), the main provincial industry trade group, at great cost hired KPMG, one of the world’s four largest and most expensive multinational accounting firms, to do a forensic audit of our GPI report for the explicit purpose of disputing our conclusions. KPMG prided itself on its “in-depth understanding of the Canadian forest products industry” and on its team of professional foresters, auditors, and financial advisers “who can help forest products companies understand their strategic issues and how they can resolve them.”6 Top KPMG auditors and experts from the firm’s Forest Products division in Vancouver flew to Nova Scotia to interrogate us and examine the evidence. We responded assiduously to each question and request for data. All our GPI reports are heavily footnoted and include extensive bibliographies, and we make explicit all data sources and calculation methodologies. We had nothing to hide and made everything available. It was obvious from the auditors’ line of questioning that they had been hired to discredit our results. We waited with great anticipation for the KPMG report or at least for a statement from the Nova Scotia Forest Products Association citing the KPMG audit. Nothing happened—no KPMG report on our GPI Forest Accounts was ever released. This is one case when no news really was good news. Our GPI results remain unchallenged, and our steadfast focus on rigor, credibility, and reliability to satisfy the expert audience was vindicated. And yet that good news remains tempered by the hard reality that to this day, our evidence has not substantially dented destructive commercial forestry practices, brought significant changes in government policy, or improved the sustainability of Nova Scotia’s forests. Facts, figures, and evidence still have their limits. We did not trumpet our victory in the KPMG case or even announce it. By that time we were focusing all our limited resources on the next research and report. Severe financial constraints didn’t let us put the time, effort, and money into the smart public relations that might have kept the issue alive and burning.

CHALLENGES BEHIND THE SCENES101

HOW-TO CHALLENGES

Anyone who tries to assess the full benefits and costs of economic activities will run into the formidable methodological challenges involved in full-cost accounting valuations. This book is not a technical manual, so just a few illustrative examples from our GPI work must suffice.

WH E R E MO NE Y DO E S N’ T WO RK  .   .   . B U T H AS   TO   A N YWAY

It’s clear that many things not generally traded in the market, including ecosystem services, health, and human life itself, have definite economic value. As we saw, forests regulate the climate, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, protect watersheds, prevent soil erosion, offer habitat for many species, provide aesthetic and recreational enjoyment, and much more. In fact, when those values are compromised, timber quality also declines.7 Healthy soils are necessary to produce healthy crops and other plants. Wetlands prevent floods and erosion, reduce storm strength, purify water, store carbon, recycle nutrients and waste, and provide habitat for fish, birds, and wildlife. All these functions have economic value. Conversely, lives lost to crime or car crashes have economic costs in lost production, family support, and more. As we saw in the first chapter, taking such nonmarket values for granted or treating them as externalities, as GDP calculations do, means they’ll be ignored or given short shrift in the policy arena. From an accounting perspective, it is also simply inaccurate to assign an arbitrary value of zero to nonmarket functions that power the market economy and to assets on which the human economy depends. But how do we assess their value to create full-cost accounts? How can a dollar value be placed on healthy soils, wilderness beauty, the health of a child, or the vitality of a community? Money wasn’t created to assess values not traded in the market and can’t properly capture the intrinsic value of the natural world or of a healthy and peaceful society.

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That doesn’t mean, however, that those nonmarket assets have no economic value and that people aren’t willing to pay money to preserve and enhance them. For example, people regularly pay to see natural beauty in higher rent for an apartment overlooking a park or natural waterway than for one overlooking a polluting factory or dump. Similarly, insurance companies compensate for loss of life and limb, and courts award money for grief and suffering, though there’s no pretence that such money fully compensates for the extent and experience of loss. Imputing monetary values to nonmarket assets is controversial. To some it commercializes and commodifies what should be valued only in its own terms, and money certainly can never capture the full range and value of any of nature’s resources or functions. But so long as prices, taxes, budgets, spending, costs, and financial incentives continue to provide the primary cues for the behavior of individuals, businesses, and governments, I am convinced that such monetization, to the extent possible, is necessary for strategic reasons to draw attention to values that are commonly ignored. Without a price tag, sadly, protection of precious natural and social assets won’t fully enter economic policy. As we found with our report on voluntary work, and often since then, dollar figures gain the attention of conventional economists, policy makers, and the public in ways that the most passionate social advocacy and the most robust science on soil quality, forest conservation, and carbon sequestration cannot. But how to monetize non-market assets credibly is a huge challenge. Here are some methods we worked with over the years. Though there is no formal market value for human life, it clearly has incalculable value not only to the individual but to family, friends, and society, and therefore it cannot be ignored in full-cost accounts. To assess the true costs of life-threatening crime, illness, road accidents, or natural disasters—and the economic value of preventive investments to avoid loss of life—statisticians use the concept of value of a statistical life (VSL). That is sometimes estimated by the value of a person’s economic productivity, for which a proxy might be average wages over a person’s productive life span. Aside from direct medical costs, indirect illness costs are often similarly assessed through economic productivity losses due to disability.

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That method can produce biases. For instance, VSL estimates are often higher for rich countries with high wages than for poor, low-wage countries. So whereas the Canadian, New Zealand, and U.S. transport ministries cost each road fatality at C$4.05 million, NZ$4.14 million, and US$9.6 million, respectively,8 most global health insurance plans value a human life at US $50,000 or less per year.9 In fact, most VSL estimates effectively assign less value to the lives of older people and those in poor countries than to the lives of young people in rich countries. Thus transport-related, waged-based VSLs may be higher than for chronic illness—given that road fatality victims are often young and in good health and therefore considered more productive. To overcome such age-related bias, economists often base VSL values on subjective criteria such as how much people are willing to pay (WTP) for measures that reduce their risk of dying. Survey responses to such questions in the United States find no difference in WTP among old people with cancer or heart or lung disease than among young people who are in excellent health. No one, old or young, wants to die!10 This willingness to pay method is sometimes technically called contingent valuation, because it is contingent on the hypothetical creation of alternative markets as assessed from survey responses. This is an indirect way of assessing what a nonmarket value is worth to people compared with other uses of their money in the market economy. When WTP is used to assess the value of nature’s services, for example, people have been asked what they were willing to pay to protect wilderness areas or endangered species such as the spotted owl, to reduce fire hazards in old-growth forests, and so on. Such studies have even been used to set the size of fees and taxes.11 For example, surveys in Halifax, Nova Scotia, found that residents were willing to pay between $100 and $235 a year per household above what they were currently paying for water and property taxes in order to build a sewage treatment plant to clean up their heavily polluted harbor.12 More objective methods are also used in full-cost accounting and cost-benefit analysis to incorporate social and environmental values. For instance, as described in chapter 2, the estimated massive cost of a water filtration plant for New York City to replace the natural filtration services

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of an upstate forested watershed illustrated a use of replacement-cost analysis. We used this method to assess the market value of the wages required to replace unpaid voluntary and household work. Critics note that this method underestimates the value of the services actually rendered, given that it counts only one input (labor) and excludes capital inputs such as the firefighting equipment used by volunteer fire brigades, the medical and other equipment used in voluntary search-and-rescue operations, and the buildings and transportation required to deliver volunteer services. That’s true, but we couldn’t find the data needed for accurate output analysis. Alternatively, opportunity-cost methods assess the value of what is given up when a particular action is chosen. For instance, what might volunteers have earned if they did their regular jobs instead, or what is the real estate value of lost office, housing, or green space when that same piece of land is used as a parking lot.

C L I M AT E C H A N GE I N DO L L A RS AND CE NTS

For our GPI Greenhouse Gas Accounts, we found that the most appropriate method of pricing compared the predicted damage costs due to climate change with the control costs required to reduce GHG emissions. By comparing the damage costs with the control costs, we could assess the cost-effectiveness of particular measures to reduce emissions. This wasn’t easy to do because of the wide range of climate change models— ranging from conservative (optimistic) estimates to those predicting catastrophic damage in the near future. For this case, as well as for our air pollution, crime, transportation, and other accounts, we released a range of monetary estimates, taking care to include the most conservative estimates that experts could not dispute. Thus our GPI Atlantic analysis found that a 25 percent reduction of Nova Scotia’s GHG emissions below their 1990 levels by 2020 would produce a net cumulative benefit of more than $1.8 billion in avoided climate change damage costs. In fact, every $1 invested in reducing Canadian GHG emissions between 2008 and 2020 would save about $29 in avoided climate change damages.

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Even when we used the most conservative cost assumptions—comparing the lowest predicted climate change damage costs with the most expensive predicted costs of reducing emissions—the economic benefits of reducing emissions were still found to exceed the actual costs of reducing emissions. GHG emission reductions were shown to be costeffective at any price compared with predicted climate change damage costs—using any range of estimates in the literature.13 These results provide a strong antidote to the conventional policy argument that large cuts in GHG emissions are too costly and will weaken the economy. Thus in withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, U.S. President Donald Trump stated in June 2017 that due to compliance with the accord and the Obama administration target of cutting GHG emissions by 26–28 percent below 2005 levels by 2040, the cost to the economy at this time would be close to three trillion dollars in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that.14

To backup his numbers, Trump cited projected production losses in paper, cement, iron and steel, coal, and natural gas, but he did not mention projected new jobs from investments in renewable energy, mass transit, and other energy-saving, low-carbon industries. For example, in 2016 alone, a single year, U.S. jobs grew by 25 percent in solar and by 32 percent in wind technologies.15 But the much bigger omission in the conventional GDP-based argument that emission cuts weaken the economy is that it looks only at short-term costs of action and ignores the long-term costs of predicted environmental and economic damages resulting from climate change. Our GPI analysis looks at both sides of that equation and finds that damage avoidance provides substantial long-term economic benefits when all costs are considered. Our conclusion was strongly supported by the most thorough and comprehensive analysis of the economics of climate change ever undertaken. Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, compared the most rigorous and reliable damage and control cost estimates and found that reducing GHG

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emissions sufficiently to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations would cost a lot—about 1 percent of global GDP per year. But he also found that doing nothing would cost the world far more—the loss of at least 5 percent of GDP per year “now and forever” according to the bestcase scenario of climate change damages. When Stern included impacts on human health and the environment and feedback mechanisms that can sharply increase the rate of warming, he found the likely cost of global warming would be 20 percent of global GDP.16 As this example suggests, full-cost accounting and economic costbenefit analysis could potentially have a powerful impact in the policy arena. From that perspective climate change and pollution costs constitute a hidden subsidy to fossil fuel companies, as those damage costs are paid by society, not by oil and coal producers. Thus an International Monetary Fund study estimated global fossil fuel subsidies in 2015 at $5.3 trillion or 6.5 percent of global GDP, when costs of climate change, air pollution, and other externalities are included.17 And a University of Cambridge study found that averaged over the five-year period from 2008 to 2012, this implicit climate subsidy, which shifts climate change damage costs to the public, annually exceeded all fossil fuel company profits and total coal company revenues.18 Such full-cost accounts that include the costs of climate change and pollution should quickly lead not only to the elimination of all government subsidies to fossil fuel companies but also to sharply increased fossil fuel taxes and subsidies to renewal energy that concomitantly reduce its price. This is in contrast to current practices based on conventional accounts, which count fossil fuel subsidies as contributions to economic growth. Canada gives C$3.3 billion a year to oil and gas producers in government extraction incentives and subsidies for research and development. This amounts to paying polluters $19  for each ton of CO2 they emit.19 The U.S. government spends US$27 billion a year on oil and gas production, fossil fuel exploration, and other fossil fuel subsidies.20 In short, full-cost accounts, if considered without bias, could produce major changes in government financial incentives and penalties.21

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WHAT TO DO W H E N DO L L AR S A ND CE NTS R EAL LY DO N’ T WO R K

Sometimes, despite our best efforts to impute monetary values to nonmarket assets, we just couldn’t do it because we lacked adequate data or evidence quantifying the link between cause and result. That doesn’t mean that such assets can be taken for granted and implicitly priced at zero, as conventional accounts do. We were building accounts as well as indicators, so we had to find other nonmonetary ways to identify and describe these economic values. But how to do that? We always started with the scientific literature in each field—the peer-reviewed work of epidemiologists, biologists, agronomists, hydrologists, and others—in order to identify the key functions performed by each resource under scrutiny. Second, we assessed the health of that resource by its capacity to perform those multiple functions optimally. These indicators told us whether or not that resource was getting healthier over time. The third step, accounting, might point to a loss of resource capacity—through depletion (e.g., overharvesting), degradation (e.g., pollution), or conversion (e.g., for development)—and as such is a depreciation of natural capital. Conversely, actions like wetland restoration and good soil practices, for example, are seen as investments that improve the capacity of the resource to perform its vital functions. This is not unlike the way we conventionally assess the economic value of manufactured capital such as machinery or equipment in need of repair in order to perform its required functions optimally. It is also an essential step in avoiding serious future costs and protecting the social and natural wealth on which our economic prosperity ultimately depends. To illustrate how we did this practically, let’s return briefly to the forest example. As we saw, the first step was to identify a wide range of key forest functions far beyond the value of the timber that is extracted, sold, and counted in conventional accounts. The next step, also from the scientific literature, was to identify key indicators denoting capacity to perform those functions. For forests we found age and species structure to

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be key to such capacity: older, diverse forests are far more effective than younger forests in preventing soil erosion, protecting watersheds, storing carbon, providing habitat for a wide range of species, and producing trees whose lumber fetches higher prices. For example, the rich canopy provided by diverse older forests breaks the fall of precipitation, whereas clear-cutting harvest practices offer forest soils no such protection and therefore accelerate erosion, which in turn compromises future timber productivity. Similarly, studies show that species diversity dramatically enhances the forest’s resilience against disease and pests. We then dug through Nova Scotia’s unpublished historical forest inventories, many buried in dusty archives, to discover a shockingly sharp decline over time in age and species structure and diversity. Forests more than eighty years old declined from 25 percent of all forests in 1958 to just over 1 percent in the late 1990s. True old-growth forests (more than one hundred years old) had virtually disappeared, along with valuable species such as white pine, eastern hemlock, yellow birch, and oak. They’d been replaced by very young forests that became younger on average with each successive forest inventory.22 We were able to put a dollar value on one forest function—carbon storage capacity—because global prices have been placed on carbon trading and predicted climate change damages. The indicators and scientific evidence told us that in 1999, Nova Scotia’s forests stored an estimated 107 million ton of carbon, and the economic valuations told us that this carbon storage avoided an estimated $2.2 billion in climate change damage costs based on conservative climate change models. Based on the 1958 Nova Scotia forest inventory, the carbon stored in provincial forests forty years earlier would then have been worth an estimated $3.5 billion. Increased cutting and the loss of old-growth and mature forests since 1958 had drastically reduced Nova Scotia’s carbon storage capacity by 38 percent, costing an estimated $1.3 billion in lost value. In fact, the loss of carbon due to intensive logging is now contributing to global climate change.23 Although we could not assign such monetary values to other forest functions, we had enough scientific information on their value and enough hard data on their decline due to losses of age and species

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diversity that we could confidently conclude, in economic language, that the value of Nova Scotia’s forests had sharply depreciated in value and urgently required reinvestment through restoration forestry and a dramatic switch in harvest methods.

T HE B I GGE ST C H AL L E NGE — DIS CO U NT ING O U R C H I L DR E N ’ S F U TU RE

We always attempted to do our GPI work with integrity—using the best available data and methods; being fully transparent with all calculations, assumptions, and limitations; and holding to the core principles described earlier. So of all the methodological challenges we faced over the decade, the toughest was the gradual discovery that some so-called objective methods can turn out to be deeply value laden when we dig below the surface. This came to a head as we wrestled with what the experts call “discounting,” because this was one place where we knowingly had to compromise our principles over and over again. Based on the assumption that a dollar in hand now is worth more to people than a dollar received in the future, economists discount future values when they estimate the likely future benefits and costs of current actions in today’s dollars. In that way predicted environmental and social costs and benefits in future years are converted into a common current value so they can be used to assess the likely cost-effectiveness of alternative actions now. Given that greenhouse gases must be reduced now in order to prevent future climate change damage, the future damage costs are discounted so they can be compared with current control costs. Choosing a discount rate is highly controversial, because it depends on how the future is valued by decision makers in the present and therefore expresses society’s willingness to trade the future for the present. If the needs of the current generation are considered paramount, then a high discount rate is chosen and the future value of costs and benefits is deemed correspondingly low. If a high value is placed on costs and benefits for future generations, the discount rate is low.

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The discount rate chosen has an enormous impact on the outcome of studies, particularly those with a time range of fifty years or longer. In 2007, the Treasury Board of Canada lowered its recommended discount rate from 10 percent to 8 percent to be applied to future projections based on present-day costs or benefits.24 By contrast, true sustainability requires that we leave behind environmental resources for future generations in as good a shape as we found them, which argues for a discount rate of zero. Unlike manufactured capital, which deteriorates even when not used, there is no inherent reason for natural capital to depreciate, as renewable resources such as forests, fish stocks, and wildlife customarily replenish themselves when used sustainably or left untouched, and nonrenewables do not diminish unless extracted, processed, or burned. Also, unlike manufactured capital, which theoretically can continue to be reproduced as long as sufficient raw materials, labor, capital, and technological innovation are available, natural resource capacity is finite and limited. From both perspectives—natural capital’s finite limits and its inherent capacity to maintain itself—there is no reason to value the right of future generations to enjoy the benefits of the Earth’s ecosystem services at a rate lower than that applied to the well-being of the current generation. For example, whereas factories can continue to churn out machinery rapidly, scientists warn that soil is being lost from agricultural areas ten to forty times faster than the rate of soil formation, imperiling humanity’s future food security. The planet has lost half its topsoil in the last 150  years, with 30 percent of arable land rendered unproductive over the last 40 years alone due to erosion.25 Unlike machinery, soil regenerates when used sustainably, does not inherently depreciate, and can be conserved and even enhanced by organic farming methods, including composting, cover cropping, and crop rotation.26 If future generations have an inherent right to this resource and to a healthy, productive environment, and if the rights of future generations are therefore equal to those of the current one, as the definition of sustainable development considered earlier implies, then discounting may not apply to environmental studies at all. Despite the philosophical and scientific arguments that favour a discount rate of zero (and which are in line with the GPI Atlantic view

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and approach), there is a virtual consensus among mainstream economists that monetary valuations comparing natural resource values with produced capital values nevertheless require that some discount rate be used. Without discounting, they argue, no meaningful assessment of trade-offs with goods and services traded in the market economy is possible, nor can decisions on future investments be properly compared to current needs. So we, too, bowed to convention and used discounting in assessing impacts of GHG emissions, pollution, transportation, health risk behaviors, and more. In the interests of transparency, however, we also showed how different discount rates drastically affected results and conclusions. Without such an understanding, policy makers could think that the simple methodological choice of a high discount rate can justify their believing that action to prevent future damage is not economically justifiable or cost-effective. As a compromise and to counter such objections, some countries (UK in 2003, France in 2005, Norway in 2012) have adopted declining discount rates, in which the discount rate applied today to future benefits and costs declines over time, on the assumption that policy makers will put more effort into improving social welfare in the distant future than in the nearer term. Thus, for example, the UK Treasury schedule outlines a gradually declining discount rate to 3 percent in 30 years, to 2 percent in 125 years, and to 1 percent 300 years from now.27 Other choices are equally value laden. For example, a conservative model of climate change effects that excludes catastrophic impacts, positive feedback loops, and impacts on health, agriculture, forests, ecosystems, and more will produce much lower results than one that incorporates such effects.28 Our experience with discount rates and other methods left me deeply suspicious of all study results, given that they depend on supposedly objective methods that may by no means be value free. As we saw, adjustments in the value of a statistical life (VSL), discount rates, and climate change models may sharply change damage cost estimates of climate change, pollution, resource depletion, accidents, and health risks. Using methodologies that give our own interests much greater

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value than those of our children and other global citizens, as happens conventionally, makes preventive policy actions and climate change aid to poor countries, for example, look less cost-effective and inhibits their adoption. These days—chastened by our GPI experience— I can only suggest that no one should accept any study results, conclusions, recommendations, and policies without considering the values and principles underlying the methodological choices that may have affected the results.29

7 GENUINE PROGRESS MEETS POLITICS

I

n 2009, after nearly thirteen years of work, the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index was ready to go live.1 We had updated all key results and presented all twenty GPI components (see table 4.1) in a single integrated Genuine Progress Index report—not aggregating the numbers but showing linkages among results, highlighting Nova Scotia’s strengths and weaknesses, and pointing to policy applications indicated by the evidence. We also produced a summary of results and a user manual for policy makers and civil servants, conducted workshops on their use, and gave the GPI spreadsheets and database to the province to enable it regularly to update results.2 Naively, we had no doubt—at least not then—that policy makers would welcome the wealth of evidence without hesitation to create the improved provincial policies we all so badly needed. It was a moment of sober reckoning. We’d passed the test of credibility and reliability. Our results, methods, and data sources were transparent and copiously referenced, and they had withstood scrutiny. Even more importantly, the necessity of moving beyond GDP as a measure of progress and the logic of the new measures remained unchallenged. But we weren’t trying to pass exams or gain scholastic credits. Only one thing mattered—that the new measures be adopted and used by governments

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to guide policy. So thirteen years after we began, where did we stand? Both internationally and domestically, there were reasons for optimism and hope—and for caution and disappointment.

ON THE GLOBAL FRONT

When I started on this quest in the mid-1990s, I felt utterly on the margins of conventional thinking and practices. My colleagues in this field and I were a tiny handful of scholars and nonprofits crying out from the wilderness, regarded with considerable suspicion for seeking to upset the economic apple cart. Ten to fifteen years later, highly respectable international organizations were singing our tune and openly critiquing the shortcomings of GDP. They were not particularly influenced by our Nova Scotia work but, rather, by incontrovertible evidence of the failure of GDP-based measures to register palpable threats to humankind’s natural and social wealth. In early 2005, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) published a trenchant critique of the limitations of GDP: “It measures income, but not equality, it measures growth, but not destruction, and it ignores values like social cohesion and the environment. Yet, governments, businesses and probably most people swear by it.”3 In May 2011, the OECD would launch its “Better Life Index,” which included indicators of income, jobs, education, health, environmental quality, and other measures of well-being.4 In November 2007, the European Union launched a “Beyond GDP” initiative (later retitled “GDP and Beyond” to reassure worried economists and politicians that it would not abandon GDP and growth), and in August 2009 released a roadmap to developing better measures of progress.5 There had been several precursors of this initiative as well, such as the European Commission’s 2005 Sustainable Development Indicators report6 and the Netherlands’ 2006 European Benchmark Indicators (EBI), which measured and compared environmental performance within the European Union.7

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In 2010, the World Bank launched a partnership on Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services,8 and subsequently it became increasingly explicit about the shortcomings of GDP accounting: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) looks at only one part of economic performance—income—but says nothing about wealth and assets that underlie this income. For example, when a country exploits its minerals, it is actually depleting wealth. The same holds true for over‐exploiting fisheries or degrading water resources. These declining assets are invisible in GDP and so, are not measured.9

In contrast to GDP’s failure to account for how income and wealth are distributed, the World Bank now also tracks inequalities both at the extremes and across the entire income spectrum.10 In 2012, the United Nations adopted the System for Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA), which set out an internationally agreed-on method to account for natural resources such as minerals, timber, and fisheries.11 Although this effort falls far short of valuing ecosystem services or tracking the ecological costs of economic activity, it was a major step in at least acknowledging the economic value of natural capital rather than just the timber, fish, and minerals that are extracted and sent to market, as measured by GDP. A small handful of countries also started to move cautiously in the new direction. A pioneer was New Zealand, which in 2001 started publishing Social Reports to measure social well-being more holistically;12 and in 2002, the country recognized that “sustainability requires maintaining or enhancing the stock of natural, physical and financial, human, social and cultural capital.”13 In 2010, the United Kingdom launched its Measuring National Well-Being program and subsequently has produced Life in the UK annual reports across ten domains, including health, economic security, education, and environmental conditions.14 Perhaps of greatest significance, harkening back to my Economics 101 dropout year half a century earlier, and given how wedded the economics profession has been to the GDP-based economic growth paradigm, is a notable shift within the discipline itself. Well-respected economists are

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now increasingly vocal in their critiques of the limitations of GDP. One of the most authoritative statements of recent years is the 2009 report of Nobel Prize–winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, who, with French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, were commissioned by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy to investigate the limitations of GDP and to recommend better measures of progress. They wrote, What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted. Choices between promoting GDP and protecting the environment may be false choices, once environmental degradation is appropriately included in our measurement of economic performance. . . . If inequality increases enough relative to the increase in average per capita GDP, most people can be worse off even though average income is increasing. . . . [T]raffic jams may increase GDP as a result of the increased use of gasoline, but obviously not the quality of life. . . . [S]tatistical measures which ignore air pollution will provide an inaccurate estimate of what is happening to citizens’ well-being.15

A year later the three economists published a streamlined version of their report, provocatively titled Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up. In a foreword to that book, President Sarkozy wrote, We will not change our behavior unless we change the ways we measure our economic performance. If we do not want our future and the future of our children and grandchildren to be riddled with financial, economic, social, and environmental disasters, which are ultimately human disasters, we must change the way we live, consume, and produce. . . . Our statistics and accounts reflect our aspirations.16

As we painstakingly pushed forward with our Nova Scotia GPI work from 1997 to 2009, a slew of parallel global efforts to go beyond GDP attempted to adjust GDP to account for environmental and social benefits and costs. Thus replications of the original U.S. GPI for sixteen other countries and efforts to construct a “green GDP”17 resulted in a single alternative number that invariably ended up lower than GDP. Though

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useful in showing what GDP misses, such efforts still began with production or consumption spending as their base and thus maintained intact the fundamental GDP-based premise that more production and consumption are signs of beneficial progress. That is, at best, a highly questionable assumption from sustainability and ecological footprint perspectives. Critiquing such adjusted GDP efforts both conceptually and methodologically, the Stiglitz et al. report correctly notes, “None of these measures characterize sustainability per se.”18 Attractive as single-number results might be for communication purposes and for simplifying the basic message on GDP limitations, such critiques confirmed our initial decision not to aggregate results into a single number. By contrast, as noted in chapter 1, GDP requires no tinkering or adjusting when restored to its original role simply as a measure of the size of the market economy and when stripped of the pretense that it assesses progress and well-being. Green GDP efforts at the national level also had stalled for political reasons, given that results did not corroborate the rhetoric of national progress. China, for example, began tracking green GDP in 2004 and subsequently estimated that economic losses due to environmental degradation cost more than 3 percent of that country’s GDP annually. Such calculations led to adjusted growth rates so low that China abandoned the measure in 2007. In 2009, India’s environment minister announced plans to produce a green GDP for India by 2015, adjusting GDP to account not only for environmental degradation but also for mitigation to correct that degradation, and for the value of natural resources consumed by economic growth.19 This stated intention has not been realized, again likely because the results would be unpalatable. The World Bank in 2013, for example, estimated that environmental degradation costs India 5.7 percent of GDP annually, primarily due to the health impacts of air pollution, followed by losses due to lack of clean water, poor sanitation and hygiene, and natural resource depletion.20 I watched these and other global efforts from a distance, silently applauding the expanding awareness and also critiquing their limitations— especially the failure of most endeavors to move beyond indicators to accounts that would challenge the dominance of GDP. I continued to feel

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strongly, though, that whatever happened globally, though of great importance, was not our immediate real test. GPI Atlantic had deliberately focused its work on one jurisdiction—Nova Scotia—in order to demonstrate the GPI’s practical utility and to see it adopted and used there as a working policy tool and model for other governments. Where our GPI results would find fertile policy ground and where they would not could teach us a lot about current and likely future challenges and opportunities.

BE T T E R H E A LT H T H R O U GH PRE VE NT IO N

In Canada’s publicly funded health care system, rapidly growing spending on doctors, hospitals, and drugs was so greatly devouring government budgets, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that policy makers had begun to pay increasing attention to analyses demonstrating that preventive expenditures were highly cost-effective. As a result there was no area of our GPI work that landed on more fertile ground—or was translated more rapidly into policy—and no area where policy makers more readily recognized the shortcomings of conventional measures than in population health. So discordant are the conventional statistics and accounting systems with public health realities that policy makers in Nova Scotia openly welcomed the GPI approach and results as at last giving them information in line with the realities they knew and a policy tool they could use to help leverage essential change. One current example illustrates how starkly different are the policy messages sent by the two approaches. Just as cigarette and junk food sales make the economy grow in GDP-based measures, so, too, the pharmaceutical industry sees the fivefold global increase in type 2 diabetes—from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014 to more than 500 million in 201821—as a growth industry. One industry analyst reported, “The type 2 diabetes market will double to $17.2 billion in 2011, reflecting sustained, robust annual growth of 7 percent from 2001 through 2011.”22 And James Kappel, vice president of Eli Lilly, whose insulin sales have mushroomed, proclaimed: “You’ve just got to be in diabetes.”23 But this bonanza for industry executives and shareholders is a social disaster, a ballooning expense for the public and

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individuals, costing an estimated US$760 billion in health expenditures in 2019,24 and a cause of severe suffering for those who unnecessarily develop type 2 diabetes. More than 50 percent of type 2 diabetes is attributable to obesity.25 The medical costs of obesity (which are registered as gains in GDP terms) are astronomical, amounting, according to one 2012 study, to US$190 billion a year in health care costs in the United States.26 A 2016 study puts the estimated obesity costs to the U.S. much higher—$428 billion in direct medical costs and an additional $989 billion in indirect costs due to lost work time and lower productivity.27 New evidence finds obese people have far higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19.28 Although obesity is mostly preventable with good nutrition and exercise, public health expenditures on all forms of wellness and prevention typically come to less than 3 percent of U.S. and Canadian health care budgets—only a small fraction of the medical care costs of obesity alone. When all forms of primary and secondary prevention, screening, and research are added, according to one U.S. estimate, the total comes to just 8.6 percent of health care budgets.29 Indeed, most departments of health might more correctly be labeled “departments of sickness treatment.” In sum, conventional accounts, business practices, and government policies see medical costs attributable to preventable conditions and risk factors as contributions to GDP and economic growth; in addition, they see spending on health promotion as a cost rather than investment and therefore underfund disease prevention initiatives. In sharp contrast, a GPI Atlantic study found that preventable chronic disease in 2001 cost Nova Scotia (with its 940,000 people) half a billion dollars annually—25 percent of all health care spending—in excess health care costs that potentially could be avoided if Nova Scotians didn’t smoke, had healthy weights, and exercised regularly.30 The deputy minister of health told me directly that although rates of illness and risk factors were of interest to health officials, it was this GPI dollar figure that caught the attention of the finance minister and Cabinet, who were concerned with the ever-increasing budget share of upward-spiralling health care costs. And so, within a matter of months our GPI results prompted the Nova Scotia government to create the new Department of Health Promotion and Protection, with its own budget and minister at the Cabinet table.31

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The financial realities of escalating health care costs explain why Canadian federal and provincial governments were so receptive to our studies in the health field: a healthier population will make fewer costly demands on a taxpayer-funded health care system. Furthermore, across the board our evidence showed that investments that reduce preventable chronic diseases, risk behaviors, and socioeconomic causes of disease will produce a substantial rate of return and long-term benefits in lives saved, better long-term health outcomes, and significant cost savings. For example, smoking prevention investments in Canadian schoolbased programs, brief physician counseling, prenatal counseling, and media advertising showed benefits of $15, $12, $10, and $7, respectively, in avoided costs for every $1 invested in each of these interventions.32 As noted in the last chapter, it is therefore no surprise that our population health work was mostly funded by government agencies, whereas our work on income distribution, ecological footprint, and other less politically appealing components was mostly self-funded or undertaken voluntarily with no government support. At least we had the ongoing satisfaction of seeing the government adopt and trumpet our research results in promoting new health promotion policies. Launching its first comprehensive tobacco control strategy in 2001, the Nova Scotia government regularly quoted our 2000 GPI finding that smoking costs the province $170 million annually in direct health care costs.33 The new strategy quickly helped bring smoking rates down from 30 percent (the highest in the country) in 2000 to 22 percent in 2006 and halved the rate of teenage smoking.34 The province then commissioned us to research the economic impact of smoke-free workplaces.35 Citing highly reputable epidemiological evidence on the health impacts of secondhand smoke, the results demonstrated significant economic benefits, which were widely cited by both Nova Scotia and other Canadian jurisdictions that went on to ban smoking in restaurants and bars. GPI recommendations on the value of affordable, accessible, and healthy food, cited in its obesity cost reports, also contributed to the government’s 2006 Policy Directives and Guidelines for the Food and Nutrition Policy for Nova Scotia Schools.36 These set nutritional standards for food and beverages in school cafeterias, put healthy food in

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vending machines and priced it affordably, promoted nutrition education in the curriculum, and gave parents educational information on healthy diets. The directives forbade corporations from promoting any products not meeting the new school nutritional standards on sports scoreboards, vending machine facades and other facilities, and they pointed out the benefits to the province of eating locally grown produce: Nova Scotia produces an abundance of produce and products. Buying food that is grown and produced within the province supports Nova Scotia agriculture and business and means that more money remains in the community. Locally grown, fresh food is often more nutritious if it is used shortly after harvest.37

To make a case for more walkways and bicycle paths in Halifax, the city referenced our provincial study on the costs of physical inactivity and in 2004 commissioned us to replicate it for the municipality.38 Federal and provincial government agencies and nongovernmental organizations such as the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Cancer Society, the Lung Association, and the Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health regularly used existing GPI health reports and commissioned new ones to further their health promotion agendas.39 Most satisfying was the burgeoning interest in doing something about the health impacts of poverty, inequality, illiteracy, and other socioeconomic determinants of health. To address that interest we translated the expanding epidemiological evidence into benefit-cost studies that made an economic case for interventions that reduce those more subtle risk factors.40

I T PAYS NOT TO WAST E WAST E

Another area in which Nova Scotia embraced our work and even the principle of full-cost accounting was that of solid waste management, in which the province has become a leader both nationally and internationally in composting and recycling. By the mid-1990s, Nova Scotia had so exceeded its existing landfill capacity that it faced a serious

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waste disposal crisis as communities vigorously opposed the building of new landfills in their backyards. Through default, therefore, the government suddenly became remarkably open to sustainable alternatives and extensively used GPI Atlantic’s full cost-benefit analysis to justify, defend, and promote the environmentally benign but seemingly more expensive new system it adopted in 1996.41 In 1995, 95 percent of Nova Scotia’s waste went into landfills. Five years later, only 58 percent went to landfills; the remaining 42 percent was composted or recycled—the highest rate in the country and more than 70 percent higher than the Canadian average.42 The province’s ban on sending compostable organic material to landfills substantially reduced greenhouse gas emissions from methane gas and protected surface and groundwater from leachate contamination—the liquid that drains or leaches from a landfill. Nearly all Nova Scotians now have access to curbside recycling, and 76 percent have access to curbside organics pickup, with the remainder in more distant rural areas. In 2011, 90 percent of residents in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital city, used curbside composting—more than twice the average for all Canadian cities (41 percent) and far more than in Montreal (30 percent), Calgary (20 percent), and other cities.43 From a conventional accounting perspective, Nova Scotia’s new system looked costly, with operating and capital costs increasing from $64 million annually ($69 per capita) in 1995 for the old system, which diverted almost no waste from landfills, to $95 million ($101 per capita) in 2001 for the new system. The additional $31 million per year paid for changes such as instituting curbside recycling and compost pickup, sorting recyclables and organics, providing compost bins for all households, and investing in second-generation landfills. Conventional cost accounting typically stops there and therefore discourages lawmakers from adopting more sustainable waste management systems. From a GPI fullcost accounting perspective, however, the new system produced a net savings of at least $41 million ($43 per capita) a year compared with the old system, using a conservative (optimistic) model of climate change damage costs for the greenhouse gas component of the equation.44 How did the new system more than pay for itself? Costs considered in the GPI analysis included operating and amortized capital costs, costs

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of managing the new recycling systems, education, and even “nuisance” costs to households reflecting the additional time required to sort waste. Benefits included reduction in greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions, energy savings from recycling materials, extended landfill life, the addition of more than a thousand new jobs,45 and avoided liabilities such as payments made to compensate for landfill-induced contamination.46 For example, evidence showed energy savings on recycled goods compared with production from virgin materials of 2.4 million Btu for every ton of glass recycled, 8.5 million Btu for every ton of paper recycled, 20.1 million Btu for every ton of plastic recycled, and 166.9 million Btu for every ton of aluminium cans recycled. We found that, all told, Nova Scotia’s new recycling system produced total energy savings of $37 million compared with costs of production from virgin materials. We also found $25 million in annual savings just from diverting waste from landfills and therefore extending landfill life.47 Not surprisingly, the Nova Scotia government trumpeted these numbers to deflect criticism and vindicate its new system in economic terms. Several Canadian municipalities subsequently used our numbers to introduce sustainable systems of their own. Of course, I was cheered by such immediate policy uses of our GPI results. But our team also was chastened by the reality that those particular health and waste management results conveniently fit existing government priorities and budgetary concerns and were limited largely to justifying and vindicating existing policy. Far more broadly, we encountered deeply entrenched resistance to policy uptake and action whenever our evidence—no matter how convincing or welldocumented—conflicted with current trends and vested interests, and when it pointed to a more holistic approach altogether. Let’s look at one specific example and then at the larger political response.

C H A N GI N G H OW W E MOVE

One of the most thorough (and therefore, we thought, one of the most persuasive) full-cost accounts we developed was for transportation. There the results made a strong case for greater investments in mass

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transit and a range of other solutions that would reduce automobile use. Despite extensive presentations and overtures to various government entities, including to our Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and at a high-level Transport Canada meeting in Ottawa that included both federal and provincial representatives, our results barely dented the policy agenda and Canadians’ habitual reliance on their cars and on deeply embedded auto-dependent infrastructure. It’s not that government representatives rejected our results, conclusions, or recommendations. On the contrary, they nodded in vigorous agreement, asked excellent questions, and voiced their support for both the logic of our approach and the results it yielded. In fact, some North American cities have introduced bicycle and high-occupancy vehicle lanes and other reforms. But we have yet to see full-cost transportation analyses produce more fundamental structural changes to the way people move—changes that actually reduce automobile use. We usually think the costs of driving are what we spend on car payments, registration, insurance, repairs, fuel, and parking. But there are many other costs that drivers don’t directly pay, including their vehicles’ contribution to climate change, air pollution, resource use, roadway land value, traffic services, road maintenance, crashes (injuries, death, and property damage), and congestion. Counting nineteen economic, social, and environmental costs, GPI Atlantic conservatively estimated the full cost of private automobile use in Nova Scotia in 2007 at $7.2 billion a year, or $8,500 per person, at least one-third of which is borne by society at large rather than directly by car owners.48 Failure to consider the true costs of driving has produced market distortions and economic inefficiencies that encourage private motor vehicle travel—including underpricing of road and parking facilities, planning and investment practices that favor improvements in private motor vehicle travel, and various land use policies that favor more dispersed development practices but without the public transit services to support them. As a result people drive more kilometers and spend ever more money driving. In Nova Scotia, for example, total road passenger movement increased by 32 percent between 1990 and 2011 despite a mere 3 percent increase in population, and the use of fuel-inefficient SUVs,

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minivans, and light trucks increased by 87 percent. Most Nova Scotians (85 percent) commute to work by car. Overall, transportation is the second largest contributor (after electricity generation) to the province’s greenhouse gas emissions. These trends are not only widely mirrored in North America but are now spreading globally. U.S. and Canadian vehicle sales hit record levels in 2016, with the vast majority of sales being SUVs and light trucks.49 The number of cars on the world’s roads is set to double to more than two billion by the year 2030, mostly burning carbon-emitting gasoline or diesel fuels.50 Road transport causes an estimated 27 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and a third of the air pollution that produces smog in the United States.51 The World Health Organization says road transport is responsible for up to 50 percent of particulate emissions in OECD countries and more in poorer countries with older vehicles. Those emissions in turn are the deadliest contributor to the ambient air pollution, which kills 4.5 million people a year worldwide including 10,000 to 30,000 in Delhi alone.52 A recent report found that air pollution costs China $38 billion a year in 1.1 million premature deaths and lost food production.53 So long as we fail to count climate change, pollution, health, accident, congestion, and other costs in transport cost estimates, policy makers will do little or nothing to reverse these troubling trends. By contrast, accounting accurately for the full benefits and costs of different transportation modes and then developing price and tax incentives to adjust for these costs would produce a much more efficient and equitable market in which we could choose to drive a lot less, rely more on improved alternative modes of transportation, save lives, and ensure a better future for our children. Better public transit services, improved walking and cycling conditions, and more efficient pricing also could help reduce traffic congestion, road and parking facility costs, and energy consumption, as well as pollutant emissions, while improving public fitness and health and supporting strategic land use objectives such as reducing sprawl, redeveloping urban areas, and even preserving heritage. To that end our GPI transportation report included a wide range of practical, cost-effective, and proven policy and planning reforms that could

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help provide such benefits.54 Each intervention was designed to achieve multiple benefits across economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Here is just a handful of such win-win policy options we cited: •

• •

• • •

Integrated land use and transportation planning that sites offices, services, and recreational and other amenities within walking, bicycling and transit distance from homes; tax shifting that increases fuel and other vehicle taxes, with concomitant reductions in income taxes; public transit and rideshare improvements, including high-occupancy vehicle lane priority, which encourage transit use and van and carpooling; a network of bicycle lanes and pedestrian walkways; commuter financial incentives that encourage transit and bicycle use and walking; and employer-levied charges for workplace parking, with equal cash payment to employees not using parking.

Municipalities that have instituted some of these options report high success rates. But overall the car remains king, and even our most modest proposals were not subjected to serious debate in Nova Scotia. The resistance to action now goes far beyond vested interests such as the oil and gas industry and reaches into our very lifestyles. From highways and supermarkets, with their massive parking lots, to lack of integrated transportation land use planning in suburban and ex-urban development, our entire built infrastructure has become automobile dependent. In 2011, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that by 2017, without drastic immediate action, all CO2 emissions will be so locked in by existing infrastructure, such as power plants, factories, buildings, and highways, that “rising fossil-fuel energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”55 The action didn’t happen, greenhouse gas emissions increased by nearly 3 percent in 2018 and a further 1.3 percent in 2019, and the IEA’s due date has passed.

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We have habitually become so locked into fossil fuel and automobile dependence that policy makers seem paralyzed and unable to consider comprehensive policy approaches to transportation that are truly sustainable and cost-efficient. And so, despite the excellent press our GPI transportation cost results got, including front-page news stories, they made virtually no impact on overall Nova Scotia transport policy. The good news is that outstanding practical working examples of comprehensive, sustainable, efficient transport systems do exist. Curitiba, a Brazilian city of 2.2 million, an oft-cited example of such success, had the good fortune of a brilliant and visionary urban planner and architect, Jaime Lerner, as its three-time mayor between 1971 and 1992. With integrated transport and urban planning, the city has one of the most heavily used, low-cost transit systems in the world, with buses running frequently and reliably, unimpeded by traffic signals and congestion, with fares collected prior to boarding to facilitate quick passenger loading and unloading, and with convenient, well-designed, comfortable, and attractive bus stations. About 70 percent of Curitiba’s commuters (compared with 10 percent in Canadian municipalities56) use public transit to travel to work, resulting in relatively congestion-free streets and pollution-free air.57 Curitiba is not the only example of an innovative and well-connected public transport network: Hong Kong, where 90 percent of daily journeys are by public transit, was ranked the top sustainable transport city in the world according to twenty-three indicators, followed by Zurich, Paris, Seoul, and Prague.58 What full-cost analysis such as the GPI provides is the economic and business case for investment in such solutions. In many of these instances, market mechanisms can be used to balance penalties on inefficient, unsustainable transport modes with incentives toward effective solutions so that taxpayer costs are minimized. But no matter how robust the data, how convincing the cost-benefit analysis, or how strongly we clung to the hope that such compelling evidence would actively inform decision making, we learned the hard way how deeply embedded and resistant to real change are our conventional norms, vested interests, and habitual patterns.

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AND INTO THE POLITI CAL REALM

Tough and disappointing as such reality checks were, our little GPI team was convinced that the truth would prevail and gradually forge the political will for genuine action. As we’ve seen, this conviction was based on more than wishful thinking. The numbers were out there; we were producing results and coherent analyses on issues of vital importance; and they were getting remarkably good press and resonating with key bureaucrats, scholars, and community and nongovernment groups. At the grassroots level, we were putting numbers to realities that people recognized but that had been neglected, and we were giving citizens hard evidence to back up what many of them already knew anecdotally and from their lived experience. All of this fueled our enthusiasm, determination, and expectation that the will for real action would inevitably follow and that Nova Scotia would adopt and use the Genuine Progress Index to make good policy. Again, there were direct reasons for optimism. Increasingly, federal, provincial, and municipal governments asked us to present different aspects of the GPI results, as did all three provincial political party caucuses— Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic. The Nova Scotia Statistics Agency was keen to update the GPI results annually, so we gave them, free of charge, our full electronic database and all its charts, tables, and spreadsheets.59 At the invitation of several officials, we also held gratis training sessions for government representatives from nearly all departments on how to use the GPI in their fields of interest and jurisdiction. And we wrote an easy-to-read GPI manual titled New Policy Directions for Nova Scotia demonstrating the direct utility, value, and applicability of the GPI to formulating innovative policy based on hard evidence.60 These positive signals on our home ground were reinforced by wider interest and recognition. Other provinces asked us to replicate some GPI research; we presented the GPI to various federal agencies and joined a new national initiative on sustainability measures; we led the research for the Canadian Index of Wellbeing and produced its national journal, Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing;61 and we responded to

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inquiries from abroad. At the cost of serious work overload, I said yes to every invitation and request in the hope that all of it reflected a growing interest in adopting and using the new measures to reformulate policy, which in turn might help to pave the way for a new economic paradigm. Our hopes on the home front reached a peak at the best possible moment. In June 2009, just as we completed the Nova Scotia GPI with all its twenty components, full database, and strong credentials after thirteen years of work, the province held elections. In a stunning upset, for the first time in Nova Scotia history, the New Democratic Party (NDP) won an absolute majority in the legislature, promising “historic change.”62 For more than a decade NDP members, while in opposition to the governments of the time, had expressed the strongest support for our GPI work, regularly used GPI results in legislative debates, frequently showed up at GPI presentations, and invited GPI researchers to present results at their meetings—something we did for every political party that asked. Most promising of all was that the NDP election platform promised to adopt the GPI and use it to make policy. And so, full of vim and hope, we wrote a proposal to the new NDP government in July 2009, right after it was installed, offering one of our best and most experienced senior GPI Atlantic researchers, Linda Pannozzo, to assist in implementing the GPI and to prepare internal briefs to demonstrate its utility to policy. We noted that we had turned our database over to the Nova Scotia Statistics Agency in easily updatable format; and we outlined a phased, non-threatening introduction of the GPI that would gradually lead to full adoption in four years. The only cost to the government was a modest half-time salary for the one GPI researcher. The silence was deafening. Our proposal was ignored, and we received no response to several phone calls and requests for meetings with the new NDP Cabinet ministers who had vociferously and enthusiastically supported the GPI while in opposition. In retrospect, we should not have been surprised. Vested interests that can promise jobs and threaten to leave for more business-friendly jurisdictions proved too strong for real change, and the new government was apparently determined to prove its responsible credentials by not doing anything that might rock

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the established boat. Poverty, inequity, environmentally destructive forestry, and more continued as usual. Three and a half years later, the press reported “a chorus of complaints that very little has changed,”63 and the NDP was soundly thrashed at the next election, held in October 2013. To this day our Nova Scotia GPI database sits at the provincial statistics agency untouched and unused, with no interest from two successor governments. Nonetheless, we were convinced that we had produced what is arguably the most comprehensive holistic evidence base available to any jurisdiction in North America. We had done it not as an academic exercise to sit on a shelf but to be actively used—and we had received ongoing and continuous support and encouragement from across the political and nongovernmental spectrums. We were perhaps foolish to raise our hopes so high and were correspondingly frustrated and disheartened when intentions and words did not readily translate into action. The demoralizing letdown forced us to face and examine a hard reality: we had subtly and unwittingly bought into the widely prevalent democratic myth that it is the arena of government and policy making that primarily determines our lives and future. What we discovered the hard way, which our democratic blinders had concealed, was the extent to which elected politicians are beholden to powerful economic forces with a vested interest in business as usual and to bureaucracies that thrive on maintenance rather than change. Indeed, what best characterized the NDP government’s betrayal was its support for large private developers, its bailouts of a pulp and paper industry reliant on forest clear-cutting, subsidies to large corporations, and forgivable loans to wealthy businesses. Indeed, the experience made us question whether the resistance to the GPI and its challenge to the doctrine of limitless growth sprang not just from powerful economic forces but from the very nature and inner structure of a capitalist system that is reliant on growth for its survival. That’s a big question to which I’ll return in chapter 14. But certainly, GPI full-cost accounting and its holistic long-term approach may well threaten the short-term business bottom lines and immediate shareholder interests that largely run our lives, control the political arena, and determine our

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future. We saw that graphically and in technicolor in the massive bailouts and economic stimulus packages of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, when political party differences faded into insignificance and climate change and environmental conservation fell completely off the policy agenda in the frenzy to get the economy growing again. But perhaps the biggest disappointment has been even closer to home. I never had the illusion that our provincial effort by itself in a tiny corner of the world could make a real difference. But I did think that collectively, the growing movement for better measures could do so, especially with the rapidly growing awareness of the serious shortcomings of GDP and the urgent necessity of valuing the social and environmental benefits and costs of economic activity. Sadly, however, even the most stalwart advocates of new progress measures have rarely dared to venture into the realm of economic valuation. As explained in chapter 2, GDP is an accounting, not an indicator system, so without both indicators and accounts that translate data on indicators into economic benefits and costs, we will never dent the dominance of GDP and the still prevalent measures of progress based on it. Though the European Union,64 OECD,65 and United Kingdom66 indicators, as well as Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing,67 and many others claim to go beyond GDP, they remain deeply conventional in failing to challenge the existing economic paradigm that is typified and represented by GDP and its singular use to focus on overall growth in the market economy. In discussions with those who work on various alternative measures, and reading their materials, I see three reasons for this failure. First, because GDP has so long been misused as an indicator of well-being, proponents of the new indicator systems rarely recognize that GDP per se is not an indicator but an accounting system. So they mistakenly think that adding some social and environmental indicators to existing GDPbased indicators will dethrone GDP from its current dominance. Second, for all the reasons explained in the previous chapter and more, economic valuation of nonmarket assets and services is far more challenging and complex than compiling indicators. For one thing, each accounting component may require indirect extrapolations of likely economic benefits

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and costs based on the weight of historical evidence, whereas indicator results are based on direct physical measures. And third, because they assess the full benefits and costs of economic activity, full-cost accounts inevitably challenge current systems of production, distribution, and consumption and challenge the status quo far more radically than publication of data on indicators alone. Indeed, that fundamental challenge to the existing economic ideology may help to explain why most new indicator proponents still dare not venture into the realm of full-cost accounts.

SO WHAT WORKS?

Looking back over more than twenty years of trying to bring the new measures into the policy arena and to forge a strategic path toward a new economic paradigm, I have to confess a deep disappointment. Even armed with reliable, hard evidence that speaks the language of economics, I’d had no idea how hard it would be to penetrate the thick skin of bureaucracy and powerful resistance from vested interests that influence higher levels of government. From time to time, as the environmental and social costs of economic activity become ever more glaringly obvious on the ground, I’m heartened to see the logic of the GPI approach increasingly referenced in policy circles. But with trends showing greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, pollution, economic insecurity, and more generally getting worse and not better, it remains difficult to identify any real structural change in the existing economic paradigm or any determined shift in national or global policy directions and priorities. Yet an unexpected glimmer of hope shines through these two decades that has not waned over time and that seems to hold great promise for real change. At the grassroots level, proceeding quietly below the radar, my colleagues and I often found remarkable success in turning hard numbers into practical local action with minimal political interference and in such a way that powerful interests did not feel immediately threatened. Here are some examples from our Community GPI work

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in Kings County and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, which at first might seem mundane and prosaic but that I think carry deeper significance. At a Glace Bay meeting at which we released our safety, security, and victimization results, we reported that residents of that community had identified vandalism as the most pressing concern to them. The local chief of police, in attendance at the meeting along with parole and corrections officers, burst out: Well, I’ll be darned! We regularly respond to calls on assault, break-ins, and theft. But vandalism wasn’t even on our radar screen. Next staff meeting I have with our officers, we’re going to start paying attention and relating to this.

Citizens at the meeting then expressed their concern at the shabby appearance of their downtown area, with buildings defaced and windows broken. The chief responded, “I promise you we’ll address this now. We’re going to have a downtown that looks good and that we can be proud of again.” At another Glace Bay meeting that included public health officials, addiction counselors, doctors, teachers, and community representatives, we reported on the excessive rates of teenage smoking we’d discovered there, which were considerably higher than the provincial and national rates. Those present quickly galvanized into action and decided to meet with local school principals to urge adoption of an excellent school-based smoking prevention curriculum that was available but not being used. When we presented our agriculture results to Kings County farmers, which revealed widespread use of chemicals, the meeting quickly turned into a remarkably fruitful session in which farmers shared information on sustainable farming methods. One farmer described the outstanding improvements in soil quality and productivity he’d found by shifting from chemical fertilizers to compost. Other farmers leaned forward eagerly and peppered this farmer with questions on compost ingredients, storage procedures, optimum field application times and methods, and more. Several swore they would try the compost method immediately. The farmers in the room agreed not only on the health

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and environmental benefits of adopting such natural methods but on the substantial cost savings they would see by reducing their dependence on chemical inputs, which in turn would make farming more viable. At the end of the meeting one farmer remarked, to widespread approval, You know, we’re all pretty isolated out there on our farms. We never get to meet and talk and share good information like this. We ought to do this more often.

At that moment the GPI and its statistics were forgotten, but I didn’t care. They had done their job! It was now about farmers talking to one another. I got quite teary at this meeting. This, finally, was what our GPI team had always wanted. This was our dream and what we’d always believed could happen: good, relevant evidence could trigger constructive action among a receptive population. And it was at the most local, community level that this was occurring. In sum, communities such as those we worked with can use GPItype measures to mobilize behind a common vision, learn about themselves, and initiate actions to improve their well-being without waiting for anyone. Whenever we released local results, we found community members intensely interested to learn about themselves, to discuss and debate causes and challenges, and to use the evidence to take the future of their communities into their own hands. The results generated passionate awareness and sparked a level of community interaction, vitality, and responsibility that was truly gratifying. No legislation had to be passed, no complex bureaucracy had to be set up or persuaded to shift gears, and no political posturing stood in the way of local communities’ rapid and effective implementation of evidence-based recommendations that could help them create a better future for their children and to measure their progress toward that goal. Two remarkable books and a conference that we hosted reinforced my faith in the power of communities to effect real change in the world. The titles speak for themselves. In 2002, renowned Canadian geneticist, broadcaster, and environmental advocate David Suzuki, and Holly Dressel published Good News

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for a Change: Hope for a Troubled Planet, subtitled in a later edition as How Everyday People Are Helping the Planet. The book profiled communities and small enterprises around the world that were taking positive and innovative actions that were both economically viable and ecologically sustainable.68 Most impressively, those remarkable models could clearly be upscaled to benefit their nations and the larger world. Three years later, in 2005, GPI Atlantic hosted an extraordinary gathering in Nova Scotia called “Rethinking Development: Local Pathways to Global Wellbeing.”69 The 450 delegates from thirty-three countries included not only leading-edge community and small business leaders  who profiled their outstanding efforts but also luminaries such as Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface Inc., who had vowed to make his multinational company (the world’s largest commercial carpet tile manufacturer) completely sustainable. And then, two years later, in 2007, American entrepreneur and environmental activist Paul Hawken published Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.70 For me the book was the perfect complement to the inspiring stories and case studies I’d studied earlier, because it showed convincingly how, collectively, the diverse nonprofit groups, community organizations, and small enterprises dedicated to many different causes constitute an extraordinarily powerful global movement. Though not recognized by governments, the media or the general public, and despite having no identifiable leader or unifying ideology, this movement, Hawken argues, has huge potential to benefit the planet and its beings. All this and our own GPI experience made me rethink what works and what doesn’t; why some strategies are successful and some are not; and why all our collective knowledge and expertise sometimes lands on fertile ground and sometimes doesn’t. We had started out at GPI Atlantic thinking that the pathway from measurement to policy in Nova Scotia would be the provincial government’s eventual adoption of the Genuine Progress Index. As I’ve described, that hope was dashed, at least for the moment. In light of our community GPI experience, however, I began to wonder whether the process might rather occur through a trickle-up effect, with lots of community GPI-inspired analyses happening at the

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local level until higher levels of government can no longer ignore either the measures or the actions flowing from them locally. That still remains a hope—certainly far from being realized but also still not shattered. GPI Atlantic did not have the money or resources to expand our two local pilot projects to other communities. All we could do based on our experience was to give presentations and produce manuals and detailed reports on community dynamics for indicator selection, survey tools, methodology, data collection, results, and the infrastructure needed to sustain such projects.71 But the hope generated by Suzuki, Hawken, and many others strongly supported our community-level efforts and encouraged us to see our work as a small part of this much larger global grassroots movement that collectively holds great potential for positive change. Yet despite all its promise and the real satisfaction of seeing some of our results translated into quick action, there is one gigantic limitation to such community-level work of which I remain constantly aware and that continually frustrated even our most enthusiastic community partners: namely, that communities have little and sometimes no control over the big issues that our higher-level measures addressed. Whether it is changing the nature and distribution of work, educational and health care reform, forest and fisheries policy, or resolute action on climate change—these are largely provincial and federal government mandates and often issues of global concern. Our community GPI work in some ways made communities even more frustrated than they had been. Through the visioning, indicator selection, and results, they saw more clearly and articulated more explicitly than ever before where they wanted to be in ten to twenty years and how to get there. At the same time, they ran up against provincial and federal policies, structures, and regulations that ran counter to their vision and wishes. The more inspired they became, the more they recognized the constraints on their own capacity to act as they deemed necessary and desirable. Maybe bottom-up and top-down can happen effectively only in tandem. And so our determination to see higher-level adoption of the new measures, full-cost accounting, and the new economic paradigm that those measures reflect must also remain undiminished. But for that to happen, real political will is necessary.

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I didn’t find that political will in Nova Scotia or in Canada. But in 2003, something had happened that hit very close to home and subtly started to shift my focus in ways that changed my work and life for years to come. Invitations arrived from two countries that had expressed the will to adopt and put the new measures into practice. In New Zealand I was asked to present the GPI to national government agencies, municipal governments, political party caucuses, and nongovernment groups. And the tiny Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan asked me first to present the GPI, then to help design a national survey and database for Bhutan’s own measures of progress that would join social, economic, and environmental indicators in an integrated way, and eventually to help forge a new sustainability-based economic paradigm. Even as we plowed ahead with our Nova Scotia GPI work, I accepted both those 2003 invitations, first in New Zealand and a few months later in Bhutan.

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I

n 2003, I was invited for the first time to present our Genuine Progress Index work in New Zealand (Aotearoa, as it is known in the Maori language) and was heartened at the warm reception it received at all levels of government—from the municipal to the national. To my great surprise and delight, I was treated not as an outside nongovernment advocate touting the benefits of holistic measurement and full-cost accounting but, rather, as an active, hands-on resource for work previously initiated under Helen Clark’s Labour government, which came to power in 1999 (and would remain on top until 2008). In New Zealand, unlike other places where I gave presentations—including Canada, the United States, the UK, and Thailand—neither elected nor appointed officials needed to be sold on the GPI idea. They were already doing some form of holistic indicator work and wanted advice on methods and how to improve their work to make it more rigorous, robust, and relevant to policy. Over the next six years I was invited back several times, prepared reports, and provided advice and materials both in person and long distance, with the relationships and collaboration among us deepening along the way. Here at last I was working with partners rather than audiences.

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THE SURPRISING NEW ZEALAND CONTEXT

In taking seriously sustainable development and social well-being, and using broader measures to track progress in these areas, New Zealand in 2003 was far ahead of most developed countries in overcoming the typical fixation on GDP-type thinking. In sharp contrast to Canada, where I felt we were forever knocking at the door of government, trying to pry it open an inch, and celebrating every sign of receptiveness to even isolated, cherry-picked components of our work, I was amazed at the degree to which integrated measurement systems, and their deeper holistic significance, were already embedded in the fabric and structures of New Zealand government.1 I may be wrong, but that understanding and openness seemed to me to come partly from within New Zealanders’ own culture and partly from the policies of the government in power, rather than from familiarity with the scholastic literature in the field. But whatever the cause, I found officials refreshingly interested in the GPI as a whole and particularly in what they could learn from its economic valuation and fullcost accounting dimension, which was not yet part of their reporting systems. In retrospect, based on subsequent experience, I now see I was too carried away by the wave of openness and enthusiasm that greeted the GPI work in New Zealand. It can be a fatal weakness in implementing progress measures if they are too closely associated with a particular government rather than reflecting the aspirations of the entire society beyond partisan concerns, as discussed in chapters 4 and 6. It was a hard lesson, to be repeated in Bhutan years later. And yet despite later setbacks, New Zealand’s strides toward wellbeing and sustainability reporting remain remarkable. Since 2001, New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development has published eleven Social Reports with wide-ranging indicators of social well-being.2 In 2002, Statistics New Zealand’s Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand adopted precisely the kind of expanded capital model we had long advocated at GPI Atlantic. In fact, in addition to valuing human,

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social, natural, and built capital, New Zealand also proposed valuing “cultural capital,” which includes, for example, the strength of its native Maori language and traditions. Statistics New Zealand also acknowledged a sixth type of capital—institutional capital—defined as “the range of formal and informal civic, political, and legal arrangements that underpin market activity and civic life.”3 Although this framework has not yet been systematically applied in practice, in 2002, Statistics New Zealand had at least theoretically adopted a sound model of sustainability that shows the economy within a larger society, which is itself nested within an encompassing ecosystem.4 In this model human development (comprising human, social, economic, cultural, and institutional capital) is seen ultimately as completely dependent on the services provided by natural capital. Just as in our GPI approach outlined in chapter 3, the different forms of capital in this model are not coequal. Rather, human development, with its associated forms of capital, exists within the larger sphere of natural capital, which provides (a) resource flows that produce the food, water, medicinal plants, raw materials, and energy that power the human economy and society; (b) life-support services, such as climate regulation, nutrient cycling, and crop pollination, on which human survival depends; and (c) the capacity to absorb and assimilate the wastes generated by human society.

In other important respects, too, New Zealand’s measurement systems have exhibited some principles and values similar to those of GPI Atlantic. Equity considerations, for example, lie at the heart of both sustainable development and social indicator approaches to progress in New Zealand. Thus the extent of income equality has been a key indicator of sustainability and well-being both in Statistics New Zealand’s Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand and in the Ministry of Social Development’s Social Reports.5 New Zealand’s Social Reports also acknowledged the value of unpaid household work and assessed the strength of social networks, social supports, volunteerism, and caregiving.

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And, similar to our GPI, those reports acknowledged—again at least in theory—the relation of such social characteristics to the economy.6 Perhaps most encouragingly, I found that New Zealand had begun to bring these principles into legislation, at least at the local level. Thus the country’s 2002 Local Government Act recommended that all municipalities develop and report on a wide range of social, economic, environmental, and cultural indicators and outcome measures. That act required local authorities to promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of communities, and to facilitate long-term sustainability by considering the economic, social, environmental, and cultural consequences of the decisions they made.7 The Local Government Act of 2002, for example, urged municipalities to develop environmental standards for air quality, water quality, noise, and waste and a timetable for their implementation; to develop a methodology for that purpose; and to commit to the collection of data on the state of social and environmental well-being in urban areas. The municipal councils of Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, Manukau, Waitakere, and North Shore produced comprehensive well-being indicator reports based on existing data, with key results jointly published in The Quality of Life in New Zealand’s Six Largest Cities (expanded to eight cities in a follow-up 2003 report and to twelve cities in the 2005 report).8 Certainly, all I witnessed and heard signified a strong intention to use those new results to shape policy, but the measurement initiatives were too new in the early 2000s, when I first went there, to point to actual policies influenced by those first results. All this helps to explain the nature of GPI Atlantic’s work in New Zealand. With many of the country’s leading politicians, officials, mayors, and town councilors already sold on GPI-type measures, and with enthusiasm so high, the context so conducive, the commitments so genuine, and the opportunities for adoption and implementation of well-being policies so real, I simply could not resist accepting invitations proffered by national government agencies, municipal councils, and nongovernment entities in New Zealand. The invitations were entirely unsolicited, and despite our lack of marketing, a few New Zealanders had somehow discovered GPI Atlantic’s work and sought it out.

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Although I was asked to advise on many aspects of measuring sustainability and well-being, the New Zealanders’ main interest, as mentioned, was in our economic evaluation and full-cost accounting work and how it could be applied in the New Zealand context. Our approach was of particular interest there because we had already undertaken analyses in line with many aspects of New Zealand Statistics’ capital accounting framework, which had been superbly conceptualized but not yet operationalized. Thus at the request of the government, in 2004, I prepared a detailed report on the utility and applicability of the Genuine Progress Index to New Zealand’s own endeavors.9 The report specifically referenced the country’s own measurement efforts and how those data could feed into a potential New Zealand GPI, though it did not attempt the much larger and longer-term task of actually producing a GPI for the country based on New Zealand data.

THE MAORI AFFINITY

The most satisfying and inspiring dimension of my work in New Zealand was with the Maori, the indigenous people who arrived in New Zealand from eastern Polynesia more than 700 years ago, and who today constitute 15 percent of the country’s population. In fact, I have often wondered whether New Zealand’s overall receptiveness to GPI-type measures can be attributed at least in part to the subtle Maori influence on the country’s culture. What I can attest to without doubt is the seemingly instantaneous meeting of minds that occurred in the course of initial briefings on the GPI and the philosophy behind it to Maori members of Parliament and other Maori political leaders, educators, and community leaders in 2004. As soon as I presented the view and practice of the Genuine Progress Index, the Maori got it in a way I’d never experienced in my GPI work with any other community. The holistic perspective of the GPI, based on the intrinsic linkages among the social, economic, cultural, and environmental spheres of life, was the way the Maori viewed the world—as

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one deeply interconnected reality. I felt an immediate bond with the community that went beyond the intellectual dimension of the GPI work, one that extended into moving ceremonial receptions at Maori gatherings and that deepened with each visit and interaction over the next few years. After the highly specialized and fragmented silo approach of so many officials and policy makers I was used to in Canada, what a breath of fresh air and delightful relief it was to come to New Zealand and see the Maori take in the GPI as a whole, as if it were their own. And for their part, the Maori told me how relieved they were to now have a systematic framework and way of assembling and presenting the hard evidence and statistical backup for what they already experientially knew was true. This, they told me, was what they’d been waiting for. Wherever the Maori invited me to discuss the GPI, and to demonstrate its findings and results, they welcomed me and my family, who accompanied me on some of these visits, with warmth and grace. In other forums in Canada and elsewhere, I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convey basic principles, such as the inherent connection between local and global realities or the dependence of human well-being on ecosystem health and social bonds, whereas the Maori seemed to grasp such concepts instantly. So with the Maori, it took almost no time at all to go deeply into a shared exploration of the GPI and its utility and into its practical relevance to their needs and concerns. Maori receptiveness to the GPI may have been related to the remarkable Maori cultural and linguistic resurgence underway at that time. In North America indigenous languages and cultures were disappearing rapidly, with about half of them already extinct. And with their loss we were also losing a fountain of wisdom, especially on ways of living in harmony with the natural world generation after generation. In Canada only three (Inuktitut, Cree, and Ojibway) of more than fifty remaining Aboriginal languages currently have a sufficient base of speakers to be considered relatively secure from the threat of imminent extinction.10 And even these remaining three are showing signs of rapid decline, especially among young and educated people.

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By contrast, starting in 1982, the Maori had brought their language from the brink of extinction by creating Maori “language nests” in which older, fluent Maori speakers taught infants and toddlers in immersion settings. Such language revival efforts increased the number of fluent Maori speakers from less than 20 percent, and declining rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, to 25 percent in 1996–2001. In an age when the loss of cultural diversity worldwide exceeds even the pace of biological diversity decline, the Maori language and cultural revival of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the most remarkable reversals of this global trend. Sadly, the latest census figures again show a decline of fluent Maori speakers, this time to 21.3 percent in 2013.11 In 2006 and 2008, I was invited to present the GPI approach, framework, and methods with sample Canadian results at Te Wānanga o Raukawa—the Maori tertiary education institution established in Otaki in 1981 with only two students. An outstanding testimonial to this Maori cultural revival, Te Wānanga o Raukawa had grown to 2,000 students when I was there, and today has 3,500. There my family and I were warmly hosted by one of the prime architects of this revival and of the Maori self-determination movement, Whatarangi Winiata, president of the Maori Party and founder and head of Te Wānanga o Raukawa. At faculty meetings there, agreement was readily reached to  incorporate GPI ideas into the Wānanga’s economics and accounting courses. When Whatarangi later introduced me at a large conference, he said with a big smile that I was, in his estimate, “low-risk.” He had figured from the start, he said, that GPI Atlantic was not there to exploit or study the Maori for its own research purposes; rather, I was there to share with them as equals and to offer whatever I could. Then a remarkable exchange began to take place. As president and cofounder of the Maori Party, Whatarangi organized a full-day conference and consultation on the GPI with his colleagues, Maori Party coleaders Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples; their parliamentary caucus colleagues; and a large gathering of Maori educators and community leaders. In a series of follow-up meetings over a two-year period, I explained the GPI in detail, answered questions, and participated in many conversations that explored the congruence of Maori and GPI principles and approaches. To my great

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surprise, the Maori Party then adopted the GPI into its official party platform—the first political party in the world to do so.12 The Maori Party immediately started making use of the GPI approach deftly and expertly in parliamentary debates, as if it were second nature. Economic policies were superbly critiqued by Maori Party parliamentarians with reference to the hidden environmental and social costs revealed in the GPI. For example, when the New Zealand government allocated additional resources to hire more police, the Maori Party used the GPI approach to portray the decision as a cost of increased crime. Without any need for outside researchers or for the complex policy manual we prepared for Nova Scotia legislators and bureaucrats (which they never used), the Maori Party parliamentarians needed only a basic introduction to the GPI components and methods to begin using the concept with consummate skill and understanding. The Maori Party’s fortunes have since waned. Formed in 2004 as an indigenous rights party, it held 5 of 122 parliamentary seats in 2008 with 2.4 percent of the national vote. But it won only two seats in 2014 and one in the 2020 election, where it gained only one percent of the national vote. My connection with the Maori leaders and educators we met was entirely a two-way street, and I learned at least as much from my Maori hosts as I was able to offer. In fact, what I learned from the Maori went far beyond formal GPI-related interchanges and discussions. Our hosts at the Wānanga in Otaki invited me and my family in 2006 and again in 2008 to visit Kapiti Island off the western coast of New Zealand’s north island. Half of Kapiti Island is a government nature preserve, and the other half is under the stewardship of Whatarangi’s iwi (tribe). Free of predators, the island has one of the largest remaining populations of some of New Zealand’s most endangered flightless birds, including the spotted kiwi and the beautiful takahe, which are almost extinct, with only 418 of the birds remaining worldwide. The takahe were thought to be extinct until a few remaining specimens were discovered in New Zealand’s Murchison Mountains and moved to Kapiti in a last-ditch effort to save the species. New Zealand’s flightless birds had

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survived in what for birds was an entirely predator-free environment until the European invasion of New Zealand brought cats, dogs, rats, and other killers that decimated many of New Zealand’s species. I had often heard about endangered species worldwide and expressed the usual concerns about loss of biodiversity, but I had never before encountered an endangered species up close. It was a life-changing experience. Seeing the handsome takahe strutting proudly at our feet, so dignified and yet so vulnerable, I had the strong sense that this lovely bird simply has a right to exist on this planet because of what it is—for no definable scientific reason and beyond any rational justification, but just because of its own uniqueness. The experience gave me a whole new appreciation for the notions of conservation and biodiversity that no amount of scientific study by itself could have imparted. Our Maori hosts then showed us around the island. We were enthralled as they pointed to plants that, through their structure and configuration, represented, our hosts said, the entire Maori social organization, symbolizing how inextricably human and natural existence, and the physical and spiritual worlds, are intertwined. And they pointed to the brown bush parrots in the trees around us—the endangered kākā birds—which, they explained, disappeared for a month each year on their annual migration to the islands of Hawaiki. Where is that, I asked, imagining it (since the kākā is a slow-flight bird) to be some other Pacific islands not far distant from New Zealand. It is the land of wisdom, our hosts said, where the kākā go once a year to bring back the knowledge the Maori need for their existence. There may be no more potent force for the conservation of our world’s diminishing resources, I’ve mused, than this indigenous mindset, which understands human existence as fully and spiritually integrated in nature’s web. That is powerfully reinforced by the oft-cited “Seventh Generation” principle, thought to derive from the fifteenth-century Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, which proclaims: “Have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations.” In the words of Onondaga Nation chief Oren Lyons, “We are looking ahead . . . to make every decision . . . relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come.”13

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Though doubt has been cast on the historicity of the Seventh Generation principle, its relevance to ecological stewardship is reinforced by all scientific research: the carbon we emit today, the plastics we dispose of, the old-growth forests we cut, and the topsoil we deplete take generations, if not hundreds of years, to dissolve or restore. In that regard we ignore indigenous wisdom at our peril. If we could grasp our inseparability from nature and from one another and act on the Seventh Generation principle, our forests would not be burning, our glaciers melting, and our sea levels rising as they are today. Our GPI Atlantic team has experienced a similar close and intuitive relationship with indigenous Mi’kmaq groups in Nova Scotia, who share the holistic, eco-centric perspective I found among the Maori and that, in other language, is core to the GPI. The difference is that North American indigenous groups represent a much tinier proportion of the population, have seen a precipitous decline of culture and language, have not had any organized political presence akin to the Maori Party in its heyday, and thus don’t have the power to take and use the GPI philosophy, principles, and methods as systemically as the Maori did in New Zealand. The power of the Maori cultural revival doesn’t mean that all is well for the Maori or deny the enormous challenges they encounter in today’s New Zealand. The overwhelming dominance of European culture and the materialist ethos and of the silo structure of academia and government, the weakening hold of Maori religion, and the decline in Maori language speakers since 2001 reflect the uphill struggle that Maori culture still faces. Ministry of Health statistics for 2015 show that the Maori are three times as likely as others in New Zealand to experience unfair treatment in health care, housing, and work.14 The Maori unemployment rate in 2018 (9.6 percent) was more than double the rate for New Zealand’s European-origin population (3.8 percent).15 Compared with the rest of New Zealand’s population, the Maori have shorter life expectancy and higher rates of diabetes, infant death, infectious diseases, mortality in middle age, and behavioral and socioeconomic risk factors.16 Although the Maori are just 15 percent of New Zealand’s population, they comprise 51 percent of all prisoners.17 True equity remains a distant goal, just as the strengthening of Maori culture and language remains a constant challenge.

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FROM VISION TO ACTION?

The major challenges that the Maori face point to the same dominant interests and materialist ethos that prevented the GPI or a similar measure being taken on as an instrument of New Zealand national policy. Conditions and circumstances for adopting the GPI were far more favorable in New Zealand than they were in most countries. And yet just as the remarkable Maori efforts to revive their culture and attain a direct political voice continue to face huge barriers, so, too, the grand visions, intentions, and hopes expressed so eloquently by numerous government officials fifteen years ago have not been adequately realized in practice. Far more than other countries, New Zealand had even translated that vision of well-being and sustainable development into legal, regulatory, and reporting instruments. But some of that new legislation was weak, not enforced, and susceptible to political change. New Zealand’s Ministry for Environment, for example, noted in 2008 that the 2002 Local Government Act was “basically enabling legislation that allows for—rather than requires—bylaws to meet the needs of communities.” “Despite the presence of model bylaws” and operational practices “produced by Standards New Zealand,” the ministry said, “they are not commonly used.”18 New Zealand’s ambitious Environment 2010 Strategy, adopted in 1995, was set aside a few years later, with the OECD noting that the “nonbinding nature” of national strategies to protect the environment “makes their implementation vulnerable to changes in government.”19 And that’s exactly what happened. In 2008, the conservative National Party defeated Labour, slashed Department of Conservation and municipal funds, and merged many of the municipalities that had assiduously started reporting on well-being and sustainability. In the face of municipal mergers and tightening funds, the holistic progress reporting that the 2002 Local Government Act advocated abruptly stopped, and the last full Quality of Life report for the nation’s cities was produced in 2007.20 And with the change in government and suddenly diminished interest in holistic progress measures, national reporting also faltered. The annual release of Social Reports, produced

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for ten straight years (2001–2010), stopped, and only one (the Social Report 2016) has been published since then. Aaron Packard of the Greater Wellington Region produced a scholarly analysis of the efforts to apply our GPI approach and described the challenges faced by New Zealand’s municipal governments as follows: A synergistic link was found between the Nova Scotia GPI framework and the framework provided by the Local Government Act community outcomes process. Despite this synergy, and the commitment to the GPI on the part of local authorities, a number of challenges emerged from the context. These include the poor integration of the existing community outcomes into institutional decision-making, a weak institutional commitment to the economic valuation procedure of the GPI, and the desire on the part of the present local government minister to reduce the scope of local government.21

And yet it is a testament to the power of the idea and of the necessity of accounting for well-being and sustainability that despite these challenges, New Zealand’s initiatives of fifteen years ago continue to resurface, especially under the current leadership of Jacinda Ardern. As with the 2016 Social Report revival, renewed commitments by some city councils have also rehabilitated municipal quality-of-life reporting in recent years, and less ambitious resident satisfaction surveys continued every two years.22 New Zealand’s leap into integrated social-economicenvironmental reporting fifteen years ago may simply have been ahead of its time and encountered inevitable resistances that are taking time to overcome. In New Zealand those resistances may have been embodied in the change of political leadership that took place in 2008, when the National Party took power.

WELLINGTON’S FERTILE GROUND

Frustrated by the yawning gap between intention and action I was experiencing in Canada, and by Nova Scotia’s 2009 failure to embrace the

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GPI when all the conditions were right, I was delighted to see our efforts find fertile ground in New Zealand’s capital city. In 2006, I was invited to present the GPI approach to the Greater Wellington Regional Council, where it was received enthusiastically. Gradually deepening consultations and discussions on methods, data sources, and other practicalities followed. In 2007, the council, in conjunction with the region’s eight territorial and municipal authorities, formally announced that they would develop a Genuine Progress Index to guide their development through an overarching Wellington Regional Strategy. In 2008, I was back for more hands-on discussions, and in 2011 and 2014, the councils produced GPI results for a wide range of economic, environmental, social, and cultural variables, which have been updated annually to show trends from 2001 to 2018.23 Better yet, the region did not shy away from the crucial economic valuation dimension of the GPI, where others had feared to tread. Thus a 2011 Wellington GPI report openly declared the intention to adopt full-cost accounts “to challenge conventional economic directions or significantly reshape progress in the Wellington region.”24 As a first step Wellington partnered with Auckland and Waikato councils to use our full-cost accounting methods to produce a comprehensive report in 2013 on the costs of physical inactivity in New Zealand (NZ$1.3 billion, or 0.7 percent of GDP in 2010) and in their own regions.25 Over the course of six years I met with Auckland, Wellington, and other municipal mayors, city councils, planners, and statisticians in New Zealand and was invited to present our work to political party caucuses and leaders, at universities, and to nongovernment organizations. Overall the reception was warm and positive. I was heartened at the remarkable degree to which politicians, bureaucrats, local leaders, scholars, and community groups welcomed the approach and accepted its premises, and I had high hopes for its adoption in New Zealand. But only among Maori leaders and in the Greater Wellington Region did that interest translate into actual adoption and use. To create a GPI in practice and to make it stick requires hard trenchwork and committed effort for the long haul based on a profound passion and understanding of the underlying meaning of the new economic

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paradigm the GPI reflects, based as it is on principles of sustainability, equity, and long-term global thinking. That depth of understanding and commitment to the challenges of full-cost accounting described in chapter 6 is rare, but without it things can and do go awry, will not stick, and can even set back and discredit initiatives undertaken with the best of intentions. While I worked with Wellington, the Auckland Council in 2009 contracted with two other groups—Market Economics and the New Zealand Centre for Ecological Economics—to construct a Genuine Progress Indicator for the region in line with the original 1995 Redefining Progress model that those groups were using to create a GPI for New Zealand.26 More recently, in 2019, the same model and approach were used to produce a Genuine Progress Indicator tracking New Zealand’s progress from 1970 to 2016.27 As noted in chapter 3, the starting point of our Nova Scotia GPI work in 1996 was Statistics Canada’s critique of that original GPI and its methodological and conceptual problems. As with that original 1995 United States GPI, however, the ones developed for Auckland in 2009 and for New Zealand in 2019 repeated many errors of the original model, aggregated all measures into a single composite number, and started with the value of total personal consumption as the biggest positive contribution to the indicator. By this measure the more we consume, the faster that aggregate GPI grows—a flawed assumption in an era when overconsumption is directly tied to diminishing resources, climate change, and habitat degradation. Thus New Zealanders’ per capita personal consumption grew by 80 percent from 1970 to 2016—the single largest contributor to the 53 percent overall GPI increase.28 Whereas the New Zealand GPI authors tag that consumption growth as the “largest benefit” to New Zealanders’ well-being, our Nova Scotia GPI eschews that measure precisely because that supposed short-term benefit reflects many of the limitations inherent in GDP accounting and is likely at the expense of future generations. Given that measure’s fundamental alignment with GDP premises, it is not surprising that one trenchant critique noted, “[T]he GPI measured for Auckland region over the period 1990 to 2006 showed that

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there was an extremely close correlation between GDP growth and GPI growth.”29 Similarly, the 2019 New Zealand Genuine Progress Indicator report shows the overall rate of GPI growth and GDP growth in the last twenty-five years (214 percent vs 202 percent, respectively) to be almost identical.30 Unlike Wellington’s sustained commitment to its Genuine Progress Index components, the 2009 Auckland GPI based on the 1995 Redefining Progress model was a one-shot report that was not repeated. Aaron Packard at Wellington’s Victoria University compared the two approaches in detail and strongly endorsed the Nova Scotia GPI approach that Wellington had adopted: The recent findings in the Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz et al, 2009)31 commissioned by the French government, support the case for pluralistic approaches such as the Nova Scotia GPI. The Nova Scotia GPI is one of the few existing indicator sets that has successfully integrated a mixture of economic valuation and physical indicators in line with the recommendations of Stiglitz and his colleagues. . . . The Wellington Regional GPI is one of the first case studies outside of GPI Atlantic to apply the Nova Scotia methodology. This interpretation of the GPI reflects a stronger move away from reductionist, monistic, or positivist tendencies than other forms of the GPI. . . . The Nova Scotia GPI is a potentially powerful tool, with the scope for shifting thinking around “progress” and well-being.32

Although Packard acknowledged in 2009 that it was “too early to judge whether the [Wellington GPI] initiative will emerge as a viable alternative to the GDP for the Wellington region,” the Wellington Genuine Progress Index has begun to stand the test of time: it has been officially embedded in the region’s development strategy with results “owned by the Greater Wellington Regional Council,” is updated regularly, and is accompanied by a broader vision of well-being and a strong critique of the limitations of GDP.33

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All this is far beyond what we have achieved in Canada, where no governmental body at any level has wholeheartedly adopted the GPI. Despite this victory of sorts, there is still one key missing element that tempers any impulse to celebrate prematurely—namely, evidence that the Wellington GPI results have directly translated into significant policy initiatives. Certainly the Greater Wellington Regional Council has explicitly expressed its intention to use the new measures “to make more informed decisions about the interrelated activities that enhance or impair well-being in the Wellington region.”34 And the Council says, A GPI will enable us to make better decisions now and for the future. Valuing economic, social, environmental, human and cultural assets means decisions can be made with our overall well-being in mind and in a way that leaves a better world for our children and grandchildren.35

But whether those intentions will be realized in practice and withstand or be derailed by powerful vested interests will take further time to gauge. A causal relationship between measurement and policy is not easy to assess. Wellington already had a strong commitment to overall well-being. The city ranked high on a 2018 New Zealand quality-of-life survey,36 and in both 2017 and 2018, it was ranked by Deutsche Bank as the world’s most liveable city with the best quality of life of any city.37 Obviously, none of that can be attributed to Wellington’s use of the GPI. On the contrary, the adoption of the GPI is likely due to the region’s prior commitment to well-being. But at a more fundamental level, what does it mean to assess the impact of GPI use on policy outcomes, or even properly to deploy the GPI for policy purposes? As explained in chapter 2 and elsewhere, GPI accounts are designed to trigger fundamental structural change by providing the hard economic data needed to institute new financial incentives and penalties that will, for example, reduce inequity, ecological footprint, and fossil fuel and automobile dependence that were not among the Deutsche Bank indicators of city livability. Though the GPI is primarily an economic valuation tool, the Wellington region has

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so far undertaken only one minor full-cost accounting study (on the cost of physical inactivity), with none yet attempted for transportation, unpaid work, crime, greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions, or others. Instead Wellington has relied almost completely on indicators rather than accounts that have a much more powerful effect on policy, as illustrated in chapters 2, 4, and 6, and which would detail the true economic benefits and costs of Wellington’s development options. In other words, we have yet to see Wellington properly deploy a GPI in its accounting dimension, which is based on but goes well beyond indicators of well-being, before we can even begin to speculate about the impact of the GPI on policy. Interestingly, this is precisely the opposite challenge to what we faced in Nova Scotia, where we produced a relatively full GPI with accounts in many components but just couldn’t get it adopted. By contrast, Wellington has officially adopted the GPI but not implemented its key economic valuation features that are necessary to challenge GDP dominance and that distinguish the GPI from other indicator initiatives. A government could do what a nonprofit could not, and a nonprofit could more readily do what a government found difficult.

THE WORLD’S FIRST “WELLBEING BUDGET”

Despite these major caveats, there is something about New Zealand that gives me hope and which may be conveyed by the implicit subtext in the foregoing descriptions. The New Zealand government’s early interest in holistic measures, Wellington’s eager adoption of the GPI, and the profound Maori affinity with the GPI spirit and mindset all point to a deeper understanding of the philosophy underlying our work. I can’t pinpoint what it is about New Zealand—whether its isolation, its extraordinary natural beauty, its volatile geological activity, the palpable strength and dynamism of its indigenous people who fought the European invaders to a treaty standoff, or other factors—that generates the openness and receptiveness I discovered there. But somehow New Zealanders seemed readier than most to embrace the broader meaning

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of well-being, to grasp the true import of sustainability, and even to accept the necessity for a new sustainability-based economic paradigm such as the one GPI reflects. This is not my observation alone. At the third International Conference on Wellbeing and Public Policy held in Wellington in September 2018, international experts praised the remarkable degree of New Zealand government participation and commitment. The NZ Treasury cohosted the conference, three top ministers addressed it, and many public servants actively participated. Oxford political economist Jan-Emmanuel De Neve said New Zealand could be the first OECD nation to implement a full well-being policy and thus be “the guiding light in the years to come and a reference point for the future.”38 Perhaps most encouraging is New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s 2019 and 2020 “Wellbeing Budgets,” which embed the goal of well-being in New Zealand public policy. That policy uses new, broader measures that include assessments of natural, social, and human assets and new indicators for tracking citizens’ welfare that go beyond traditional measures of income and growth. Ardern told the January 2019 Davos World Economic Forum, “We need to address the societal well-being of our nation, not just the economic well-being.” She urged a shift from short-term cycles to long-term thinking through a lens of “kindness, empathy and well-being.”39 The failure to follow through on many of the hopes and expectations of the early 2000s, as noted earlier, may be attributed at least in part to the Labour Party defeat in the 2008 elections. Likewise the new commitment to well-being is also partly due to the 2017 elections, which resulted in Labour again taking power—indicating how vulnerable Ardern’s new directions are to political change. In fairness, this seesaw interest in well-being as a principal goal also indicates a failure to communicate the value and use of the new measures across the political spectrum. Theoretically, as I suggested earlier, the GPI should be as attractive to political parties of the right because of its potential to improve market efficiency by internalizing the full costs of production and thereby reducing the need for government regulation and intervention. For now this message does not seem to have reached the right in New Zealand.

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The evidence to date on both New Zealand in general and Wellington in particular is thus largely confined to intention, understanding, and even adoption of a GPI—which is certainly an excellent start—rather than to policy outcomes and the deep structural change required to transform aspiration into action and practice. Recent analyses have remarked that, under Ardern, New Zealand has gone from being a “slow follower” to a “fast follower” on climate change but is not yet a “leader,” and that her agenda is genuinely reformist but not transformational.40 And yet despite hard experience to date, I remain convinced that among all developed countries, New Zealand has some of the most fertile ground and greatest potential for that transformation to policy and action to take place.

9 INVITATION TO BHUTAN

S

urrounded by high Himalayan peaks, sandwiched between India and China, and never colonized, the mountainous, landlocked, independent kingdom of Bhutan—now a constitutional monarchy with just 760,000 people—remained largely isolated until recently. This isolation served to protect Bhutan’s relatively pristine natural environment and its ancient culture and to shield the nation from the onslaught of consumerism that has swept across the world. Bhutan’s road network did not begin to develop until the 1960s, and television and the internet only arrived in 1999. Even in urban centers, most Bhutanese are barely one generation removed from their rural villages. Emerging from seclusion and opening to the world, Bhutan’s rapidly changing economy is now bringing major challenges in both declining and growing sectors. Although more than two thirds of Bhutan’s population, which is 75 percent Buddhist and 25 percent Hindu, remains rural, mostly living from subsistence agriculture, the country has the highest rate of internal rural–urban migration (6 percent a year) in all of south Asia. Agriculture’s share of GDP has fallen from 55 percent to less than 20 percent in the last thirty years, and farmers are aging. At the same time, young Bhutanese moving to the capital, Thimphu, often lose their close family and village social networks; encounter unemployment, high living costs, and social isolation; and sometimes drift to drugs, crime,

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and even suicide. With just 16 percent of Bhutan’s population, Thimphu has 59 percent of the country’s crime. Given that crime is highly correlated with youth unemployment, it is noteworthy that Thimphu has by far the highest rate of youth unemployment in the country—more than twice the national average (22.1 percent vs 10.6 percent).1 Although agriculture’s share of GDP has declined sharply, hydropower exports to India now provide more than 40 percent of Bhutan’s revenues and constitute 25 percent of its GDP. Despite clear upsides to an economy powered by green energy, Bhutan’s economic reliance on hydropower has raised both ecological and financial concerns. Climate change is predicted to seriously reduce dry season flows of the glacial waters on which Bhutan’s hydropower relies,2 while the escalating costs of hydropower infrastructure construction, which contributes another 25 percent to the country’s GDP, have plunged the government into deep debt, now totaling 111 percent of GDP. Bhutan is by far the largest recipient of foreign aid from India, which bankrolls Bhutan’s five-year development plans, funds nearly a quarter of Bhutan’s government budget, holds 64 percent of its debt, and has a dominating influence on the country’s economy and foreign policy.3 If isolation had its advantages in shielding Bhutan from some of the ills of industrialization, globalization, and environmental and cultural destruction, it also had some decided drawbacks. Fifty years ago, with high infant mortality and minimal medical care, Bhutan’s average life expectancy was a mere 35 years, half of what it is today.4 Literacy has increased even more dramatically, from less than 20 percent just thirty years ago—the lowest in the world according to the UN Development Programme—to 65 percent today, with 89 percent of youth (age 15–24) now literate.5 Though initial development projects, including road building, had been undertaken by Bhutan’s Third King, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, in the 1960s, they accelerated dramatically after the Fourth King ascended to the throne in 1972 at age seventeen on the death of his father. These projects focused initially on rural development and then expanded to communication networks, electricity generation, health care, safe drinking water, information technology, and more. From the mid-1980s to the end of the Fourth King’s reign in 2006, Bhutan’s GDP

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grew fifteen-fold in just twenty-one years, and the number of households with electricity grew from 10,000 to more than 65,000.6 Those seemingly conventional development statistics, no matter how dramatic, do not tell the full story of Bhutan’s development path, however. Embracing economic development only recently, but having by then witnessed its typical damages elsewhere, Bhutan had the belated choice of adopting a different way forward. This was famously expressed in 1979 by Bhutan’s Fourth King, His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, when, in response to a journalist’s question on Bhutan’s economic growth rate, he declared that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”7 For the next two decades, Bhutan’s government felt no particular compulsion to define or explain—let alone measure—Gross National Happiness (GNH). Many Bhutanese apparently intuitively understood what their king meant: that happiness does not come from money, career, and material things alone. That view is core to Buddhism, which remains Bhutan’s official state religion and a formative influence on the country’s culture and identity. Bhutan’s rich ancient wisdom traditions and spiritual heritage, its pristine natural environs, and its extended family network and close-knit communities all provided a strong nonmaterialist foundation for people’s sense of well-being. The Fourth King was determined that Bhutan’s economic development would preserve and be harmonious with these assets, values, and traditions. He was an ardent environmentalist, actively supported the arts and culture, strongly emphasized economic self-sufficiency, and put strict limits on tourism and visitor entries in an effort to keep the downsides of foreign influence at bay. It was only as Bhutan opened to the world, developed its economy, established diplomatic relations with other countries, and joined international organizations that the country came under increasing pressure to define GNH and explain it to the world. Despite the Fourth King’s passion for self-reliance, rapid economic and infrastructure development required capital investment, foreign aid, and loans. And so, from the World Bank and other foreign aid partners to journalists and academics, outsiders inevitably began to ask: “If, as your King says,

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you don’t assess your well-being and progress according to GDP, how do you define and measure it?” And that question led, in 2003, to my receiving an invitation to Bhutan. It appears that someone there had heard about our work in Canada attempting to measure progress holistically, with a twin focus on well-being and long-term sustainability, and thought that we might have some advice on how Bhutan could measure progress according to its GNH development philosophy. Frankly, the invitation took me completely by surprise—I knew nothing about Bhutan and could not have found it on a map if asked. I quickly scrambled to learn what I could on the internet and landed in early February 2004 at Paro Airport, widely known as “one of the world’s most dangerous airports,” sandwiched between high mountains and with only eight pilots worldwide qualified to maneuver between the mountains and land on the short, narrow landing strip.8 I was whisked straight from the airport to an audience with Her Majesty Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, the eldest of the king’s four queens—all sisters whom he had married in a public ceremony in 1988. It was the beginning of a remarkable thirteen-year odyssey full of hope and inspiration as well as frustration and disappointment. Over tea the queen reminisced about Bhutan’s travails in the previous two months. After a century of peace, Bhutan had, just weeks earlier, had its first war. For many years Assamese separatist guerrillas had been using Bhutanese territory to raid India and attack Indian army units. Eight years of negotiations by Bhutan had failed to persuade the rebels to leave, and India was on the verge of taking its own military action against the separatists on Bhutanese soil. To maintain its sovereignty, Bhutan sent its tiny, untried, and combatinexperienced armed forces into action to expel the 3,000 well-armed veteran insurgents from thirty fortified guerrilla camps in southern Bhutan’s thick jungles near the Indian border. Unprecedented in this modern era, the King of Bhutan personally led his troops into action. The military operation was a success, captured militants were handed over to India, and the thirty Assamese separatist guerrilla camps on Bhutanese soil were razed. Hugely relieved, the Bhutanese people were ready to celebrate the return of their victorious army. The king forbade any celebration on the

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grounds that war is always a symptom of failed diplomacy and never a cause for rejoicing. Instead, butter lamps—a traditional Tibetan Buddhist offering that symbolizes turning darkness and confusion to light and wisdom—were lit in all the country’s monasteries, and 108 stupas (shrines) were built at Dochula Pass outside Thimphu as a memorial. Just a few weeks later, the queen was still emotional as she recalled the anxiety and uncertainty of that fraught period, in which there were no proper communications from the front lines and the people did not know if the king was dead or alive. “From the time he gets up in the morning till the time he goes to sleep at night,” the queen remarked of her husband, “he never thinks of anything except the good of the people of Bhutan.”

“GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS”— IS THIS FOR REAL?

In the days that followed, I was astonished and gratified to discover that at a very basic level, there was no fundamental difference between the  philosophy underlying the Genuine Progress Index and that of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness development approach. Both recognize that human health, prosperity, and well-being depend on the effective integration of a wide range of social, economic, and environmental factors. And in both systems wealth is defined not simply in material terms but includes good health, knowledge, strong community bonds, adequate free time to spend with friends and family, and, of course, a healthy and bountiful natural world. Not only does deprivation in any of those spheres impoverish us, but material prosperity itself depends on their strength. Unfortunately, the word “happiness” as used by the Bhutanese government has been grossly misunderstood in the West, easily caricatured and twisted for other purposes, and therefore often mocked and belittled. As clearly shown by the Fourth King’s juxtaposition of GNH to GNP,9 when he coined the term in 1979, it is intended as a counterpoint to the materialist economic growth syndrome that prevails globally.

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In the words of Bhutan’s former Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley, This “happiness” has nothing to do with the common use of that word to denote an ephemeral, passing mood—happy today or unhappy tomorrow due to some temporary external condition like praise or blame, gain or loss. Rather, it refers to the deep, abiding happiness that comes from living life in full harmony with the natural world, with our communities and fellow beings, and with our culture and spiritual heritage—in short from feeling totally connected with our world.10

In common English parlance, the term “well-being” may not have been misinterpreted and misunderstood to the degree we have seen through use of the word “happiness.” But “well-being” itself is somewhat problematic as a translation, as it is more widely used in relation to the outer conditions of life rather than to the resultant profound state of mind to which the king and prime minister refer when they use the word “happiness.” Translation itself has limits here, and no English word adequately conveys the intended meaning, which actually derives from the heart of Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, at its outer political and societal level, Gross National Happiness is the name given to Bhutan’s balanced development philosophy, which seeks to integrate social, economic, and environmental objectives in the pursuit of overall well-being. In a subtle but important distinction between conditions and ultimate goals, GNH is even embedded in the country’s constitution, where Article 9 proclaims: “the State shall strive to promote those conditions that will enable the successful pursuit of Gross National Happiness.”

THE FOUR PILLARS OF GNH

GNH is defined today as standing on four integrated pillars: environmental conservation, cultural promotion, sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development, and good governance. Before glibly dismissing the

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notion of happiness, then, it might be acknowledged that those pillars, or principles, matter not only to Bhutan but to a world that has palpably lost that multifaceted foundation in its fixation on unbridled economic growth. And as is apparent from such challenges as rural–urban migration, youth alienation, family breakup, and substance abuse that Bhutan faces, the four GNH pillars matter more than ever to the country, which is not immune from these global trends. Like other countries undergoing rapid economic development, Bhutan is subject to a new barrage of materialist messages that—particularly since the introduction of television and the internet in 1999—now define success in terms of money, career, fame, glamor, and other forms of individual gain. As well, Bhutan now faces potentially devastating climate change impacts from glacial lake outburst flooding and growing inequality, pollution, and waste generation. For better or for worse, the world has come to Bhutan, and isolation is no longer an option. In addition, ever simmering just below the surface in Bhutan is a deep-seated insecurity about its own sovereignty. Having seen Tibet swallowed by China on its northern border and Sikkim by India on its western border, Bhutan also has its own ethnic tensions, particularly in relation to the Lhotshampas of Nepalese origin, who constitute about 25 percent of Bhutan’s population and a majority in southern Bhutan. In this regard the four pillars of GNH are intended not simply as abstract principles but as practical tools to unify the country and counter the potentially divisive and disintegrative tendencies that frequently accompany rapid development. The more closely and intensively I worked with the Bhutanese over the years, the more clearly the deeper meaning of these four integrated pillars emerged. There are many interpretations of GNH and widespread controversy on the degree to which it is realized in practice, but I found extensive agreement in presentations and discussions in Bhutan at least on how the four pillars may ideally be conceived in philosophy and intent. Thus the Bhutanese seem to accept that respect for the natural environment, the first pillar, means both treading mindfully and lightly on the earth and also a sense of keen observation of and appreciation for nature’s work and marvels. Translated into action, strengthening the

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environmental conservation pillar of GNH therefore means everything from protecting ecosystem functions, conserving resources and not littering to learning from nature, such as in observing, studying, and understanding the function of local plants, soils, forests, birds, and animals. Given that human existence depends on a healthy natural environment, this pillar constitutes the essential foundation of GNH. This is more than just theory; it is reflected in the nation’s practice. In 2005, Bhutan received the United Nations’ Champion of the Earth award for placing the environment at the center of all its development policies. Bhutan has kept more than 70 percent of its land area under forest cover and 50 percent under complete environmental protection; it maintains wildlife corridors that provide habitat for several endangered species; and the country vowed at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009 to remain a net carbon sink in perpetuity. The Bhutanese view is akin to that of the Maori, wherein human existence is seen as fully and spiritually integrated into nature’s web. It’s that traditional view that has led Bhutan to ban mountaineering and often to divert roads from water bodies or other natural features because they would encroach on the abodes of the guardian deities who dwell there. Such magical ancient beliefs have served to protect lakes, mountains, and other sacred natural bodies—with the creatures that inhabit them— from violation in a way that our modern secular, scientific approach has been unable to do. Bhutan’s care for the natural world and the habitat of other species stems in part from a core component of Buddhist philosophy, which demands respect for the lives of all living beings. In line with this value, Bhutan’s Ministry of Agriculture, for example, specified in 2012 that commercial hens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and other fowl must have enough space in their enclosures to lie down, stand up, fully spread both wings, and turn in a circle without touching the side of the enclosure or other hens, and that they must be able to sit quietly without repeated disturbance. Bhutan’s chief livestock officer drew an implicit comparison with common North American practices: “Squeezing them in a very confined space and treating them like they are some kind of egg producing machines is just not right!”

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From a Bhutanese perspective, how is the environmental conservation pillar of GNH linked to human happiness? Quite simply, using the foregoing example, putting the well-being of chickens (and other species) above short-term economic convenience, and knowing that the chickens and other species are better off and suffering less as a result will, it is believed with some justification, also make us humans happier. This deep respect for the natural world does not deny the key role of human society, which is reflected in the cultural pillar of GNH. At its best, this pillar has a lively and almost celebratory quality in the traditional Bhutanese psyche and is associated with strong community bonds and the enjoyment of song, dance, art, music, poetry, village festivals, and more. The cultural pillar embodies the view that although we humans may respect and appreciate nature with some sense of awe, we can also take our seat in the midst of this natural world and express our essential human-ness and culture as part of this larger community of life. To what degree a community in Bhutan transmits and passes along traditional handicrafts, arts, stories, customs, and local wisdom, and to what extent the young practice and encourage the dynamic evolution of those traditions, might be seen as markers of the strength of the cultural promotion pillar of GNH. The word “promotion” refers to the intention to nurture and foster these trends in innovative ways that are suitable to our times rather than simply to preserve traditional culture as a moribund museum piece in the midst of seemingly overwhelming global influences. Local applications of these principles might include respecting indigenous knowledge by, for example, bringing the wisdom of villagers, elders, and local people into schools, enlivening bonds with extended families, and caring for community members in need. The current tide of rural–urban migration has put severe strains on these traditional bonds and on the security and mutual support that family and community networks once provided. The challenges now faced by youth are only the tip of the iceberg: I frequently heard Bhutan’s then Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley rue the breakdown of time-honored societal protocols and connections. He saw that disintegration in seemingly small incidents, such as a driver in a hurry honking to rush by a

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funeral procession—a mark of disrespect that would, he claimed, never have happened in times past. What vividly brought national consciousness to the tenuousness of the cultural pillar of GNH and sparked a national debate on the issue was the March 2011 opening of Bhutan’s first old age home, in Trashigang, eastern Bhutan.11 Old age homes are “needed right now,” the prime minister said in response to press questions, because aged folk were being abandoned by their families, who were migrating to the cities. But, he said, such homes were not a long-term “solution,” which can only come from drawing on past tradition in which the aged were revered and respected within the family. The opposition leader and future prime minister, Tshering Tobgay, asked, “Why don’t our senior citizens have homes? Are our communities failing? Are we abandoning our parents? If so, why? Is it urbanization? Or are our values declining?”12 And a newspaper editorial at the time expressed worry that old age homes would encourage even more families to abandon their elderly. It remarked on the growing number of elderly homeless beggars in Thimphu: “Even as Bhutan makes progress, an increasing number of its citizens find themselves on the fringes of society. . . . It is disturbing to see our parents and grandparents harshly cast aside in the twilight of their lives.”13 Through this incident and others, Bhutanese are reminded daily that the traditional cultural pillar of their society is being eroded by current trends and is in urgent need of renewal. And yet, though the trend is widely bemoaned, no viable, practical solutions are offered. So long as education expands, youth migrate to cities, and extended family and village networks disintegrate, no one argues that old age homes aren’t necessary or should not be built.14 The third pillar of GNH is officially called “sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development.” At a deeper, philosophical level, this denotes an economy based on contentment and sharing rather than acquisitive craving and greed—impulses that, in the Buddhist view, actually denote dissatisfaction and discontent rather than appreciation for the self-existing richness of the world. That view in turn implies several aspects of a viable new economy that seem to resonate among Bhutanese with whom I discussed this perspective. And that gives me

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hope that this perspective may resonate elsewhere in a world increasingly forced to come to terms with the destructive consequences of unbridled growth. In this new economy, material accumulation beyond a certain level is replaced by a concept of sufficiency—of what is needed rather than wanted. So instead of economic activity being fueled by endless desire and consumption that is in turn stimulated by advertising, it can serve to provide what people genuinely need in order to achieve decent living standards and to provide opportunities for them to fulfil their human potential. The term “sufficiency economy” is attributed to the late King Bhumibol of Thailand, who, in a 1997 nationwide television address, urged his people “to take a careful step backwards” from rapid, unrestrained growth. He declared, “The important thing for us is to have a sufficient economy. A sufficient economy means to have enough to support ourselves.” The king recognized that “[t]hose who like modern economics may not appreciate this.” Since then, sufficiency economy has been defined to include sustainable development, economic stability, and “the equitable sharing of the benefits of economic prosperity,” and to shun “the wasteful use of natural resources.”15 From this perspective, the new economy will focus far more on distributive issues—making sure everyone has what they need to live a decent life—than on simply producing more stuff, as encouraged by our present GDP-focused growth economy. In a world in which humanity is already consuming resources 70 percent faster than the Earth can replenish them, the new economy recognizes that we already have enough in aggregate. Thus the new economic focus is how the existing bounty might be more fairly distributed to ensure that no one is deprived. And that, in turn, shifts the perspective on every other aspect of the new economy. Instead of the usual competitive, individualistic, career-oriented approach to employment, for example, the economic pillar of GNH might lead citizens to ask what kinds of work a country needs; how satisfying, dignified jobs can be created to meet those needs; and how work can be of service to the larger society. And it can shift dominant views on expanding trade in a globalized economy not to a narrow protectionist

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approach but, instead, to encourage nations and peoples to stand on their own with dignity rather than to crave external goods and become dependent on imports and foreign aid. As Bhutan’s Fourth King put it, “The level of economic self-reliance achieved by a nation is one of the important measures of its status in the world as a sovereign, independent country.”16 Although the outer dimension of the good governance pillar of GNH is assessed by the Centre for Bhutan Studies largely by indicators such as institutional performance and the rights, trust, and participation of citizens in the relevant institutions,17 a profound inner meaning also emerged in my discussions in Bhutan. That is the wisdom of the best leaders to see reality clearly and to know precisely how to act in each situation to create the greatest benefit. This quality requires the capacity to understand and address the causes of problems and challenges, nurture and build on strengths, acknowledge and overcome weaknesses, and create beneficial policies for the people and country, particularly in the long term. That at least came to be my understanding of the philosophy underlying the four pillars—the integration of which is intended to lead toward GNH. It’s undoubtedly a noble philosophy and, in my view, a vital counterpoint to the dominant consumerist ethos that prevails globally. But my purpose in accepting Bhutan’s invitation and moving there for nearly a decade was not to philosophize but to see these honorable intentions translated into action.

RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT

Both in response to outside pressure to define, explain, and measure GNH and in its own search for a viable alternative to the materialist economic growth paradigm, Bhutan hosted a conference and series of consultations in February 2004 titled “Operationalizing Gross National Happiness.” A handful of foreign representatives were invited, presumably to share some expertise. The participants included a White House

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adviser on sustainability, a Stanford historian analyzing the cases for and against Bhutan’s joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), a German soils expert on sustainable agricultural practices, a Thai businesswoman on models of business that are compatible with GNH principles, and three of us with different experiences in measuring well-being and sustainable development.18 Our Bhutanese hosts earnestly grilled us in their effort to understand how holistic measurement might help them apply and integrate principles of sustainability, conservation, equity, and well-being with economic development through legislation and practice. I will venture to say that the conference was as eye opening for the foreign experts as it was for the Bhutanese. Although the work my likeminded colleagues and I were doing in areas such as holistic measurement and sustainable development remained largely marginal in our home countries, in Bhutan the highest levels of government—a prime minister, a king and crown prince, and cabinet ministers—were speaking our language. The Bhutanese were determined as a matter of high policy not to go down the road of economic growth at all costs, to avoid the pitfalls of conventional development, and to protect the country’s natural environment, ancient culture, and strong communities. Bhutan at that time was officially classified by the United Nations as a “least developed country” with low income, “confronting severe structural impediments to sustainable development . . . highly vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks and [with] low levels of human assets.”19 The country was now searching for a practical and viable strategy to meet the urgent material needs of its citizens without compromising the broader goals of GNH. We Westerners did not have answers. Not once during our stay did we hear any expression of interest among our Bhutanese hosts to export their product. They wanted to work out how best to implement GNH at home and to preserve and strengthen what mattered to them in the face of the pressures of economic development and globalization. The Bhutanese did not even call this an “international” conference, let alone a first such GNH event. It was we foreign guests, most of us learning about Bhutan for the first time, who could not stop talking about how badly the world needed such a holistic and

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balanced model of development. Right then and there, perhaps impulsively, I asked permission to host a second international GNH conference in Canada the following year. Bhutan graciously agreed, and other foreign representatives expressed enthusiasm. And so in June 2005, 450 international representatives from thirtythree countries on six continents gathered in the small university town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, for the week-long so-called second international conference on GNH. The goal of the conference was to explore successful initiatives worldwide at the community, business, regional, and national levels that attempt to integrate sustainable and equitable economic development with environmental conservation, social and cultural cohesion, and good governance—the four pillars of GNH.20 A high-level delegation of twenty-one people from Bhutan, headed by future Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley, was joined by government, nongovernment, business, labor, academic, community, and youth leaders and delegates from other countries. Working models of renewable energy, sustainable business, organic farming, restoration forestry, appropriate technology, zero-waste initiatives, cooperative social enterprises, fair trade, holistic management, sustainable building, and alternative measurement were examined to assess both their economic viability and potential for upscaling to regional and national levels.21 All speakers were asked to present in a similar format—how they had implemented their endeavors in practice, how they’d overcome obstacles, what successes they’d achieved, and what challenges remained. Ray Anderson described how his energy and greenhouse gas reductions and switch to reused and recycled components substantially improved the profitability of his multinational carpet manufacturing company. Fair trade and community development initiatives were shown to create local jobs that were maintained over time through dedicated markets and conservation practices. The Netherlands’ shorter work time was profiled as an effective strategy for both job creation and improved work– life balance. Bunker Roy described the rainwater harvesting and solar energy initiatives of his Barefoot College that had effectively trained and employed tens of thousands of illiterate village women. From Africa and Asia to Europe and the Americas, delegates were heartened to learn of

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effective working models and solutions that could reorient global development toward socially and environmentally responsible policy and practices that would ensure long-term prosperity. But the Bhutanese stole the show, if only because no other sovereign nation state had committed to implementing such integrated development on a national scale and because they were eager to learn best practices from all the other participants. They also made no bones about the major challenges they faced putting their GNH view into practice. In contemplative moments, Bhutanese delegates expressed a mixture of sincere gratitude for the remarkable networking opportunities provided by the gathering and embarrassment at suddenly being thrust onto the international stage. In fact, the New York Times sent a reporter to Nova Scotia to cover the conference and subsequently published a full-page article that helped to propel Bhutan’s GNH philosophy, still relatively unknown, onto the global stage.22 For GPI Atlantic itself, a significant feature of the conference was the birth of GPI Youth. My wife, Gwen, took the firm position, which was greatly appreciated by conference participants, that any gathering on the future of the planet must actively involve the young people who will inherit the earth. Twenty percent of the participants at the conference were under age thirty, and they actively engaged in the discussions. It was a remarkable event.23

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hutan’s achievements in areas such as environmental conservation certainly provide an example for other countries, but understanding of the GNH philosophy has encountered serious challenges both at home and abroad. Inevitably our own involvement with Bhutan had drawn us into the vortex of these misapprehensions and difficulties. Here are a few of the more subtle, obstinate, and persistent misunderstandings I’ve encountered.

THE HAPPINESS MOVEMENT

The Bhutanese notion of happiness, as I’ve mentioned, does not translate well into English and is all too frequently misunderstood and even trivialized. Interestingly, 2,500 years ago the Buddha warned that although everyone desires happiness, very few know how to achieve it. In fact, the Buddha explained that most people’s pursuit of happiness through external and material means, grasping futilely at temporary pleasures, leads deeper into misery for both themselves and others. Instead, the Buddha taught that the path to true happiness is through deep understanding of the interdependent nature of reality and through compassion, kindness, and care for others.

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That ancient warning is particularly pertinent to today’s so-called happiness movement, which has largely misunderstood and frequently misappropriated Bhutan’s originally intended use of the term. Some of the strongest proponents of this happiness movement today are found in positive psychology, an individualist approach in which reference to the natural environment and to social and economic policy is largely missing.1 The so-called World Happiness Report, first produced for a 2012 United Nations meeting hosted by Bhutan and now in its eighth (2020) annual iteration, includes not a single environmental variable alongside its measures of GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, subjective feelings of happiness and sadness, social support, perceptions of corruption, donations to charity, and whether people felt free to choose what they do with their lives.2 Not surprisingly, each year’s happiness rankings largely put the rich countries on top and the poorest ones (mostly in Africa) on the bottom.3 Countries with some of the world’s largest ecological footprints and highest rates of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are ranked in the top fifth of “happiest countries,” including Australia, Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Sweden.4 That might not make our children so happy as they inherit our rapidly warming planet. At the other end of the scale, low-income nations get no credit in the World Happiness Report for living within the carrying capacity of the Earth. Though this report was a direct spin-off of Bhutan’s GNH initiative, its authors seemingly forgot that environmental conservation is one of the four key pillars of Gross National Happiness and arguably the foundation of the other three.

MEASURING HAPPINESS OR ITS CONDITIONS?

GPI Atlantic’s own measurement work is all too often misunderstood as an attempt to measure happiness, which it definitively is not! “Are you happy?” types of survey questions not only fail to distinguish passing moods from the abiding sense of happiness as defined by Bhutan’s

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former prime minister but also have no relation to the original conception of GNH, which had nothing to do with such self-report questions. In short, there is a widely mistaken belief that true happiness is directly measurable. By contrast, all we can ever do with some accuracy in the measurement world is to measure conditions empirically associated and correlated with well-being. Thus, for example, there is ample statistical evidence that being healthy, educated, and economically secure; having clean air to breathe and clean water to drink; and living in a safe community provide greater opportunities for well-being than being sick, ignorant, impoverished, and living in a crime-ridden and polluted area. All those and many other conditions of well-being, far beyond the severely limited World Happiness Report criteria, can be reliably measured to provide a far more comprehensive portrait of well-being than can our current narrow economic growth measures. But depending on a person’s state of mind, someone could live with all these conditions that are conducive to well-being and still be miserable, or have none of them and be mentally happy. Unfortunately, Bhutan’s own attempt to aggregate results into a single number (which we never did in our Nova Scotia GPI work) and to include a self-reported happiness question in its GNH survey have fed the misconception that happiness can be directly measured. As a result, policy and public attention in Bhutan have been deflected from important information on the country’s social, economic, and ecological state to more superficial statements about which regions of the country are supposedly happier than others. If we are genuinely concerned about producing a credible, reliable, and robust alternative to the current reliance on GDP-based measures, we would do well to stick to the more modest task of assessing the eminently measurable conditions of well-being as comprehensively as possible. As well, only more objective, measurable conditions have the capacity to assess whether subjectively reported so-called happiness today is likely to translate into happiness for future generations. Thus high-income, jet-setting, SUV-driving, big-spending individuals may report ample life satisfaction today, though it may well be at the expense of catastrophic global warming consequences for their children

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and grandchildren. Greenhouse gas emission trends are likely a far more accurate gauge of potential life satisfaction for future generations. Sadly, however, the growing popularity of subjective happiness reporting is increasingly dignified not only by positive psychologists and the ecology-free World Happiness Report but by its coauthors’ respectable scholarly tomes. This is not to dismiss useful information such subjective happiness reporting provides, particularly in demonstrating that people in rich countries are no happier now than they were fifty years ago despite having more than doubled their incomes.5 It is only to warn of their severe limitations in ignoring ecological conditions and intergenerational outcomes, fostering the illusion that genuine happiness can be directly measured, distracting from an analysis of root causes and conditions, and therefore being of marginal utility to policy makers.

IS BHUTAN A MODEL GNH COUNTRY?

A third major misunderstanding is the erroneous equation of GNH as goal and policy with the flawed assumption that Bhutan is a happy country or living model of GNH in practice. As Bhutan’s former prime minister told the United Nations in 2012, “Contrary to what many mistakenly believe, Bhutan is not a country that has attained GNH.  .  .  . Like most developing nations, we are struggling with the challenge of fulfilling the basic needs of our people.” But the challenge runs deeper, with even the best-intentioned GNH-inspired initiatives sometimes meeting fierce resistance at home. A poignant example was the government’s introduction on World Environment Day, June 5, 2012, of a weekly “Pedestrian Day” in which cars would be banned from the streets of all urban centers in Bhutan every Tuesday. To set an example, the king himself bicycled the streets of Thimphu on the first Pedestrian Day, and the prime minister bicycled to work not only on Tuesdays but daily. The goal was not just cleaner air but also better health and active living and fostering a sense of community

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and equity by encouraging people to walk and socialize, free from the physical confines of an automobile and the status its ownership conveys. Strong objections of potential commercial losses from the business community and of inconvenience from others, however, caused the government to bow to pressure and downscale Pedestrian Day to the first Sunday of every month. When a new government was elected in July 2013, its first act was to abolish monthly Pedestrian Days and observe it just once a year. In sum, when GNH values and principles come up against commercial interests, consumerist proclivities, and material convenience, there is no guarantee such values will prevail. The evidence that Bhutan is still far from a model GNH country applies to every aspect of GNH. The gap between rich and poor is growing in Bhutan, as it is in most countries. The social challenges of rapid rural–urban migration have already been mentioned. Pollution and dependence on fossil fuels have grown as more cars ply the roads. Bhutan’s growing financial dependence on India is matched by its huge dependence on skilled and unskilled Indian laborers for construction, road building, and more. Those workers have minimal rights, often live in squalid roadside shacks, and are excluded from key benefits such as education for their children. Good governance also remains a distant dream, with citizens often distrusting their democratically elected representatives, whom they frequently see as self-serving and far inferior to the monarchy they knew and revered. And although Bhutan certainly has democratic forms in its elections, parliament, and courts, a democratic culture with real free expression and active citizen participation has not yet taken firm root. These and other challenges illustrate the chasm between a truly noble vision and practice that is both difficult to implement but also resisted by strong vested interests.

ARE SOME RESIDENTS EXCLUDED?

Bhutan’s GNH philosophy often is also criticized as not applying to all its citizens, particularly its ethnic Nepalese (Lhotshampa) minority.

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According to critics, up to 100,000 ethnic Nepalese residents of Bhutan were forcibly expelled in the early 1990s in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, many of them languishing for twenty years in refugee camps in Nepal before being resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries. On the other side of the issue, it is said that the vast majority of those who left had been illegal migrants and that the troubles of the early 1990s were instigated by antigovernment agitation and violence that threatened the nation’s sovereignty. In this view the ethnic Ngalop and Sharchop Bhutanese feared that the growing Nepalese population and influence would jeopardize both their culture and the country’s independence. Unfortunately, the historical complexities of the issue, including its demographic, geo-political, migration, cultural, security, and other dimensions, are rarely acknowledged and openly discussed by either side. In fact, most of Bhutan’s Lhotshampas came as part of a long history of eastward Nepalese migration that also saw Nepalese settlement in Sikkim and West Bengal. So dominant did Nepalese become in the independent state of Sikkim that they increasingly demanded greater representation and agitated against the monarchy. Antiroyalist riots in 1973 led to increasing intervention by the neighboring Indian government and then the military, culminating in a 1975 plebiscite in which residents voted to abolish the country’s monarchy. Sikkim was annexed by India in May of that year. Nepalese today constitute 67 percent of Sikkim’s population, and Sikkimese has long been replaced by Nepali as the region’s dominant lingua franca. Having witnessed Sikkim’s loss of independence and the virtual demise of its traditional culture, religion, and language, Bhutanese feared a similar fate. Bhutan’s 1985 Citizenship Act, designed to strengthen traditional Bhutanese culture—which roused fierce Lhotshampa opposition to its national dress, language, and custom requirements—was seen by the government partly as a bulwark against such losses and an attempt to safeguard its sovereignty. One factor that prevents proper exploration and understanding of this issue is the Bhutanese fear of offending India. As a mark of how sensitive it is to any discussion of its 1975 annexation of Sikkim, India at the time banned and destroyed all known copies of the famous Indian

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filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s 1971 documentary on Sikkim, which showed it as an independent kingdom. A high official in the Bhutan government told me privately that this sensitivity and India’s de facto suzerainty over Bhutan prevent Bhutan from mentioning Sikkim in any discussion of the Nepalese refugee issue, even though it helps to explain why Bhutan felt so threatened at the time. In the absence of any real discussion and resolution, the traumatic events of the 1990s that stoked such serious ethnic tensions at the time continue to cast a pall of suspicion over existing relations that is still palpable. Although there is no official discrimination, and Bhutanese of Nepalese origin can be found in the Cabinet, Parliament, civil service, and other prominent positions, many Lhotshampas today remain without full citizenship rights and documentation, experience major bureaucratic obstacles, and otherwise feel excluded from Bhutanese society.6 These are by no means the only challenges facing Bhutan’s effort to be a GNH country, but they do exemplify common misunderstandings and major stumbling blocks in efforts to implement GNH in practice.

MEASURING GNH IN BHUTAN

From 2006 to 2009, as our GPI Atlantic team completed work on the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index, I spent some time each year in Bhutan. There I worked mainly with the Centre for Bhutan Studies (CBS), the main Bhutanese think tank and research organization, which is an arm of government, as it selected indicators and constructed its first survey to measure Bhutan’s progress according to GNH principles. In our work with CBS, we made a particular effort to help frame survey questions so that Bhutanese results would be comparable with international results; at the same time, CBS researchers took care to ensure that the questions were culturally appropriate and relevant to the Bhutanese context. The eight measurement domains of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing were used and modified to produce nine GNH domains: living standards, good governance, health, education, community vitality, cultural diversity

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and resilience, time use, ecological diversity and resilience, and psychological well-being. The GNH survey has now been administered three times, in 2007 to a small sample on an experimental basis, then in 2010, and again in 2015. Those two surveys had a robust sample size of more than 7,000 individuals, which was large enough to provide reliable results at the dzongkhag (district) level. This reliance on data from a single wide-ranging survey differs markedly from our GPI methods in Nova Scotia, where we gathered macro-level data from a wide range of sources such as forest inventories, epidemiological evidence, literacy scores, pollutant emissions, and income and wealth data by quintile. Although it yields a wealth of useful information, Bhutan’s GNH survey gives a more subjective tilt to the results and reporting, which particularly limits reporting in the environmental domain where survey data are clearly inadequate. Still, the GNH survey results have been useful in revealing both the positive impacts of rapid economic development and its downsides. Data showed improvements from 2010 to 2015 in areas such as living standards, health, literacy, and years of schooling but declines in psychological well-being (including emotional health, life satisfaction, and sense of belonging), spiritual practice, satisfaction with government performance, trust of neighbors, and adherence to Bhutan’s code of etiquette. The results also showed a troubling increase in rates of victimization.7 Overall income, housing, assets, and other dimensions of material well-being all grew substantially, and many Bhutanese gained better access to electricity, clean water, hygienic waste disposal, and health care. Even from this tiny sampling of results, therefore, it is clear that measuring well-being from a comprehensive GNH perspective reveals a far broader and more nuanced picture of Bhutan’s development than the conventional GDP-based statistics. Working with the Centre for Bhutan Studies was a significant learning process for me and revealed some unexpected blind spots and cultural assumptions. One example will suffice to illustrate the point. When we worked on key population health indicators for the GNH Survey, at one point CBS Director Dasho Karma Ura asked which questions we would use on dying well. I was stymied! The hidden assumption behind all Western population health indicators is that death is something to be

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avoided—almost the antithesis of health, perhaps even the final insult to life itself. By contrast, the Bhutanese see dying as a necessary and inevitable part of life, not just as the end of life. Indeed, from the Buddhist perspective that change and impermanence are a defining mark of existence, each moment of living is also a moment of dying. In the Buddhist view, therefore, the end of life itself is simply a phase in an ongoing journey in which the human consciousness, separated from this particular body, will take rebirth in a new body. From that perspective dying well is not only central to the definition of health itself for many Bhutanese but also an important influence on a person’s ongoing journey. As we explored this issue in partnership with CBS, key indicators emerged such as whether the dying person has trusted spiritual guidance; whether requisite rituals, prayers, and ceremonies are properly performed; the dying person’s state of mind (e.g., calm and accepting or panicky and bewildered); whether life’s business is complete or if the person is instead leaving a trail of unpaid debts and unresolved conflicts; and whether the dying person is surrounded by loving and caring family and friends. Clearly such survey questions would have to be asked of surviving children, relatives, and neighbors. It was not clear how questions of this nature would fit into a normal survey in which results reflect the well-being of the person actually being surveyed. This represents just one example of how our existing Western-centered indicators and measurement systems might be limited by hidden cultural assumptions that we do not think to question. Aside from such insights into particular measures, one of the most significant things we learned from the Bhutanese is how they actually use the GNH indicators and GNH survey results to craft policy. With the few exceptions noted earlier, particularly in the health promotion field, we cannot yet claim that our Nova Scotia measurement work has influenced policy in a significant or systematic way. But in Bhutan, because the political will to balance economic development with environmental, social, and cultural considerations existed at the highest levels of government, one of our GPI researchers, Mike Pennock, worked with CBS

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to turn the GNH indicators into an actual “policy-screening tool” to ensure that all major new policies passed the GNH test.8 The government decreed that policy proposals that did not pass the test—those that, for example, showed deleterious environmental or social impacts—were to be sent back to the drawing board for revision before being introduced into Parliament. One of the most celebrated examples of the use of this screening tool in practice took place in 2008, when Bhutan was considering whether to join the World Trade Organization. The vast majority (nineteen of twenty-four) of the senior members of the GNH Commission (Bhutan’s Planning Commission) initially favored the country’s entry to the organization. When the officials then used GNH criteria to examine the impacts of WTO membership on a wide range of social, economic, and environmental dimensions, they saw the matter quite differently, and nineteen of twenty-four opposed joining the WTO.9 GNH criteria indicated particularly deleterious effects on local communities that imperiled Bhutan’s efforts at greater self-reliance, and the power of WTO tribunals threatened the country’s autonomy. Thus Bhutan’s outright ban on cigarette sales could be challenged as interfering with trade in a legal product. To this day Bhutan remains outside the WTO. It is this ten-year-old example that is still most frequently cited to demonstrate the use of the new holistic measures to craft policy in Bhutan. When asked why they don’t regularly use the GNH policy-screening tool today, Bhutanese policy makers generally say that its indicators are difficult to apply and that the tool is too complex and lacks clarity and transparency. The requirement to subject all policies to this GNH tool remains officially on the books in the Bhutan government’s Protocol for Policy Formulation.10 In addition, government publications maintain that it is mandatory for “every development policy to go through the GNH Policy Screening Tool and get a minimum score for Government’s endorsement.”11 However, there is still no solid evidence of improvements in the tool or of its systematic application in current practice. Even the political will to adopt new holistic measures is clearly not enough to turn them into policy when habitual patterns are deeply ingrained and when proposed policies run up against vested interests.

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ACCOUNTING FOR GNH

Early on we noted that the Genuine Progress Index differs from the vast majority of well-being indicator systems by adding an accounting and valuation dimension to its progress indicators. As noted throughout this book, GDP is fundamentally an accounting, not an indicator, system, so unless we incorporate currently ignored externalities such as environmental and social costs into our national accounts, we will never really challenge the dominance of GDP-based measures. So, in 2010, three years after the first pilot GNH survey was launched, I greeted with delight an invitation to work with Bhutan’s National Statistics Bureau to incorporate natural, social, and human capital factors into Bhutan’s National Accounts. This, I thought, could truly be a global first—a national accounting system that goes beyond narrow financial and produced capital accounts to include valuations of a country’s full assets and what is happening to them. Too often in conventional accounting systems, gains in material wealth registered in a country’s national balance sheets are in fact offset by unaccounted-for losses in natural wealth, such as degradation and depletion of the country’s water sources, air quality, forests, soils, and fisheries. To begin the work, I invited Robert Costanza, renowned cofounder of the field of ecological economics, and two of his close colleagues to join me in Bhutan to conduct a week-long workshop on natural capital accounting for seventy of the country’s leading statisticians, accountants, and natural resource experts, including those from all relevant government departments and agencies. Even the country’s anticorruption commissioner participated. The workshop reviewed key natural capital accounting methods, and hands-on exercises were undertaken to enable participants to wrap their minds around the new thinking and accounting methods. It was a promising and enthusiastic start to a potential landmark shift that, I hoped, might set an example for other nations. Soon thereafter the hands-on measurement work began, which required extensive collaboration among various departments. Collecting

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a wide range of data from different government agencies, Costanza and his team used an inexpensive benefit-transfer method in order to develop an initial assessment of the overall contribution of Bhutan’s ecosystem services to human well-being. The method involved transferring available information from studies already completed in other locations and contexts and adjusting those values to local conditions according to locally available information.12 Estimating the annual value of twenty-two ecosystem services in Bhutan, the team concluded that the total value was approximately $US15.5 billion/year. That figure was significantly greater than the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) of $1.5 billion/year at 2010 prices, or $3.5 billion/year at purchasing power parity (PPP).13 Most of the value of Bhutan’s ecosystem services was found to lie in forested land, which covered an estimated 74.5 percent of the nation’s land surface and contributed 93.8 percent of the total estimated value. Cropland was second, with 3.7 percent of total value, though cropland covered only 8.0 percent of Bhutan’s land area.14 Costanza’s team also estimated who benefits from Bhutan’s ecosystem services. Interestingly, 53 percent of the total ecosystem service benefits of $15.5 billion accrued to people outside Bhutan, largely from a combination of climate regulation and carbon storage ($3.5 billion/year) and tourism/recreation ($2.4 billion/year). Though separate values could not be properly assessed for all services, it is known as well that the watershed protection and flood prevention provided by Bhutan’s old-growth Himalayan forests are lifesaving for the hundreds of millions of South and Southeast Asians who are dependent on Himalayan rivers originating in Bhutan. The study results showed nature to be by far Bhutan’s largest (albeit free) export. The remaining 47 percent of ecosystem service benefits were shown to accrue to people inside the country, mostly through air quality regulation ($2.5 billion), followed by pollination ($1.1 billion) and food ($740 million).15 Of these internal services, about one-third were estimated to accrue at the national level and two-thirds at the local level. Based on these findings and a population of 700,000 at the time, the team estimated the benefits from ecosystem services alone to Bhutan residents as $10,400 per capita/year.

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Still, this is only a partial estimate; it leaves out many other benefits of nature to the people and to their social and cultural values. For example, Costanza and his team noted that they could not include the value of Bhutan’s high-altitude northern “glaciers/snow and barren land, a landuse type whose ecosystem service values have not been well researched yet. Such ecosystems likely have significant values both as water sources and also due to their high tourist/recreation value in countries like Bhutan.  .  .  . For this and many other reasons, the $15.5  billion estimate for the value of Bhutan’s ecosystem services is almost certainly an under-estimate.”16 The importance of such a study is not only to demonstrate the enormous hidden economic value of nature’s services that we assume to be free and that are entirely missed in GDP-based economic estimates. It is also to indicate the value of the responsible guardianship of these resources that Bhutan has hitherto exercised. Implicitly, it also suggests a cautionary tale of the huge costs both to Bhutan and peoples far beyond if such stewardship were abandoned and if the environmental pillar of GNH were neglected. The Costanza study went on to make a strong case for both global and national systems of “payment for ecosystem services” whereby local farmers, foresters, and others are financially rewarded for their ecologically responsible practices. Simultaneously, our GPI Atlantic researchers estimated the economic value of voluntary work in Bhutan in order to provide one example of social capital accounting. Here we found that Bhutanese citizens freely serving their religious institutions, cleaning up litter, helping youth with drug problems, volunteering in schools and basic health units, helping sick and elderly neighbors and more, provide about $US6 million a year worth of voluntary services. This is what it would cost for Bhutan to replace those free services for pay.17 Strategically, we thought it best to start our social capital accounting with a positive value, such as voluntary work, rather than a negative cost, such as crime. But to illustrate human capital accounting and test our costing methodologies, Bhutan’s National Statistics Bureau undertook a study that same year on the health costs of alcoholism.18 All three studies

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were undertaken simultaneously in 2011–12 in order to launch Bhutan’s new National Accounts, and they were published in 2012–13. In announcing these first, provisional GNH natural, social, and human capital accounting results in 2012, then Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley said: Bhutan will be the first country in the world to create comprehensive GNH Accounts that properly value our precious natural, social, cultural, and human resources, and the costs of their depreciation, along with the manufactured and financial resources that are presently counted. Such full-cost accounts are the necessary foundation of a genuine wellbeing and sustainability-based economic system, and will assess the true benefits and costs of economic activity. Bhutan’s new accounts will go far beyond GDP, just as recommended by the European Union, OECD, Stiglitz Commission, and many others, but as no country has yet done.19

Imagine our delight to see a sovereign nation state take this huge step, and to hear the prime minister of a country declare the intention to “go far beyond GDP” and start doing it in practice. But that was only the start of what the prime minister had in mind and of the job he gave us to do. So committed was Prime Minister Thinley to the vision underlying the new accounts that he was determined to embed the values and principles of Gross National Happiness into the country’s educational system and other social structures, and then to take the vision to the global community as the foundation of a new sustainable and equitable economic paradigm for the world.

11 EDUCATION—THE GOLDEN KEY

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n 2008, democracy came to Bhutan. Unlike virtually every other democratic transition the world has seen, however, it was not widely welcomed by the local population, and it was certainly not the outcome of popular struggle against tyranny, colonialism, and exploitation. On the contrary. Quite uniquely, Bhutan had experienced a century of generally benevolent, albeit absolute, monarchy that the vast majority of Bhutanese had no interest in changing. It was the Fourth King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who recognized the necessity of a transition to democracy, promulgated a new constitution, and personally went around the country for two years prior to the first elections in 2008 explaining the transition to the people. Interestingly, the Fourth King’s public meetings with citizens about the need for democracy in this modern era may not have told the whole story. A long-time aide and trusted personal confidant of the king told me privately over dinner one night that the king himself was not enamored of democracy as the best system to serve the needs of the people and country. Rather, he saw democracy as a necessary kind of insurance policy, given that there was no guarantee that future heirs in a hereditary monarchy would always be wise and benevolent. The king’s private view is remarkably reminiscent of Winston Churchill who said in 1909, “If I had to sum up the immediate future of democratic politics in a single word

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I should say ‘insurance’—insurance against dangers from abroad, insurance against dangers scarcely less grave and much more near and constant which threaten us here at home.” And in 1947, Churchill famously told the House of Commons, “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”1 In short, the aide told me, the Fourth King of Bhutan was under no illusion that democracy would produce good government, yet he was determined to introduce it as a choice-less necessity. So popular was the king, however, that it was unlikely that the Bhutanese people would have accepted democracy while he held even a titular role. He therefore abdicated in 2006 at age fifty-one after thirty-four years in power, leaving the throne to his eldest son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. His son became Bhutan’s first constitutional monarch, with an official role similar to that of the monarch in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, though in actual practice today he retains far more authority and influence than do those constitutional monarchs. In 2007, a royal edict lifted the ban on political parties and ordered their creation in anticipation of multiparty elections every five years. After abdicating, the Fourth King continued to live as he had before, and still does now, in a modest log cabin. He bicycles regularly and remains a fervent environmentalist but no longer gets involved in the affairs of state. Given his popularity, it is little wonder that his abdication was a profound shock to a populace that revered him deeply.

INVITATION TO A TREASURE TROVE

Soon after Bhutan’s first democratic elections in 2008, the newly elected prime minister, Jigmi Y. Thinley (who had headed Bhutan’s delegation to the GNH conference in Nova Scotia three years earlier), invited my wife, Gwen, and me to his office. He confided that he had always considered himself a protégé of the Fourth King and had never wanted to enter democratic politics, and he was now dismayed that an endless round of meetings and activities kept him busy from morning to night. These

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obligations prevented him from acting on his long-held, deepest dreams for the country. It first seemed odd to us that a head of government holding the reins of power attributed to that very fact his inability to act for the country in the way he wanted—until he explained further. The prime minister talked about how deeply he felt that the Fourth King’s GNH philosophy balancing environmental, economic, and social objectives was a saving grace not only for Bhutan but potentially for a world that was destroying nature so rapidly as to threaten life on the planet. He spoke of dangers to Bhutan as well, not only as materialism spread and automobiles and plastics burgeoned but as rural youth migrated to the cities, family and community bonds frayed, and career, income, and personal ambition replaced ancient spiritual values and cultural traditions. “I see it also in the kind of hurry, speediness, carelessness, lack of precision and, above all, self-concern and self-gratification that increasingly pervade so many small facets of our social interaction and lifestyles,” he said. As the country modernized and came increasingly under the influence of television, cell phones, internet, advertising, and the world’s commercial culture, Prime Minister Thinley continued, GNH values, principles, and practices might not survive into the next generation. And if they did not, Bhutan could lose its direction and go the way of every other nation, to its own and the world’s loss. That led the prime minister to explain why he had called us to his office. For many years, he said, he had cherished two long-standing dreams. First, in order to safeguard the ideals of Gross National Happiness for future generations and to prevent their erosion, the GNH approach, philosophy, and principles must permeate the educational system. Making this happen, he said, was a matter of “utmost urgency.” Currently, he said, Bhutan’s educational curriculum was purely conventional (the usual dry, uninspired instruction in language, math, science, geography, etc.), inherited mainly from Britain’s colonial legacy in India, with its textbooks mostly imported and the standard exams and grading system its dominant features. There was nothing much GNH-inspired about the current educational curricula or much that reflected Bhutan’s

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own culture and its long-standing aspirations. On the contrary, the subtle values it conveyed were more likely to undermine than promote GNH principles. Prime Minister Thinley made it clear that he wasn’t interested in teaching about Gross National Happiness or having courses on GNH. Instead, he wanted the underlying values of GNH—care, compassion, deep respect for nature and culture, generosity, manners, self-reliance, and more—to pervade the atmosphere and infuse everything that was taught. “What I think of as GNH principles and values,” he later wrote, “is some quality of sacredness, reverence, honour, and respect that reflect the dignity of what it is to be a human being in the most universal sense.”2 Changing the education system in the far-reaching way he envisioned would be a long-term process that would require the kind of time, energy, and attention he could no longer give in his present job. Could we help, the prime minister asked? A second dream that he had long nurtured, he continued, was to create an actual physical place that, as a potential model, would demonstrate how GNH values could be put into practice and what kind of atmosphere that would generate. It would be a GNH incubator that would distil the essence of GNH in the most practical way. The place he had in mind would support cooperative activity in a communal atmosphere, be fully harmonious with nature, become a center for deep experiential learning, and breathe and live GNH in all it did. It would invite Bhutanese from all walks of life, whether farmers, civil servants, soldiers, or unemployed youth, who would return to their communities inspired and with the requisite skills to bring a GNH-compatible lifestyle into their homes, workplaces, villages, and towns. For twenty years after the Fourth King first proclaimed that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product,” the notion had remained largely intuitive, the prime minister reminded us. As Bhutan opened to the world, there had been increasing pressure from the late 1990s on to define, explain, and measure GNH. Now, all the prime minister said pointed to the launch of a third phase in the  development of GNH: weaving GNH practices into the fabric of

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Bhutanese society and demonstrating GNH in action. As he would later put it, We now have to act decisively and effectively so that we embody what we express, and so that our behavior and actions, rather than just our words and good intentions, not only realize the vision of our enlightened monarchs but act as a genuine and worthy example for a world desperate for sanity.3

After explaining his dreams and their urgency in some detail, along with his dismay that he did not have the time to devote to their realization, Prime Minister Thinley turned finally to why he had called Gwen and me to his office. For the previous few years, we had been spending some months each year in Bhutan while still focusing on completion of the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index. Now, the prime minister said, he wanted our help in realizing his longer-term dreams. He told us that government employees were too preoccupied with their daily duties to devote the necessary time and energy to these deeper infrastructural changes. Could we move to Bhutan, or at least stay in Bhutan for longer periods? Given our GPI responsibilities in Canada, where, after twelve years of intensive work, we were very close to completing the Nova Scotia GPI, we could not make an immediate commitment. On the one hand, we were hugely tempted by the possibility of seeing our shared vision put into practice on a societal level. We even began work immediately on the education mission the prime minister had outlined, given that it dovetailed nicely with our own education research in Canada at the time. On the other hand, that winter of 2008–2009, we still hoped that Nova Scotia would eagerly adopt, use, and apply our GPI work to inform policy in sustainable and innovative ways. It was the disappointment several months later, in July 2009, when the newly elected Nova Scotia New Democratic Party government showed no interest in using the GPI, that sealed a greater commitment to Prime Minister Thinley’s projects in Bhutan. By October, I’d moved to Bhutan. Gwen and our daughter, Hasta, needed to stay in Nova Scotia for various reasons but often visited and worked in Bhutan on both GPI projects and a range of youth activities.

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EDUCATION—THE TOUGHEST CHALLENGE . . . WITH THE GREATEST POTENTIAL

In fact, the ground for this new commitment had already been laid by another major setback in 2008 that led me to break from the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW), of which I was research director and from which the Bhutan prime minister’s invitation and specific focus on education seemed like an amazing reprieve. For three years, GPI Atlantic researchers Karen Hayward and Linda Pannozzo had worked intensively on the education component of both the GPI and the CIW. To our great surprise, that turned out to be the toughest job any of us had encountered in all our GPI work. Nowhere did we meet greater obstacles or expend more time and effort. And at the same time, we felt we were unearthing a treasure that held the key to all that we aspired to see and do and that seamlessly joined our measurement work with the societal and economic vision we held. It was this prior Canadian work that deeply influenced my subsequent work in Bhutan. Our GPI team’s first discovery was that most current indicators of educational attainment implicitly and mistakenly equate education with schooling. We found that such indicators are used simply because data are readily available on changes over time in school enrollment, graduation, and dropout rates; percentage of population with higher degrees; and so on. But these measures don’t tell us if we’re becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and wise as a society, and they don’t account for the extensive learning that occurs in non-school settings. In many cases those measures don’t even properly track outcomes at the formal school level. For example, despite higher graduation rates, basic literacy scores in Canada have remained flat over the last twenty-six years, and mathematics literacy has declined. The United States has seen a significant decline in reading literacy since 1994, and Australian students have registered major declines in math, science, and reading literacy.4 In addition, conventional education indicators often send confusing and contradictory messages. Thus we found that the Canadian province with the lowest high school graduation rate (67 percent)

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and second-highest dropout rate (12 percent) in the country had the highest standardized test results and lowest unemployment rate. Conversely, the provinces with the lowest dropout (8–9 percent) and highest graduation rates (82 percent) had the lowest standardized test results and highest unemployment rates.5 Closer analysis revealed that these graduation and dropout rates reflected not so much educational attainment as labor market conditions, with students likely to drop out earlier or stay in school longer depending on whether or not decent jobs were available. Conventional indicator systems increasingly look to standardized test scores to assess educational achievement. But in all thirty-two countries that took part in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds had stronger literacy skills and performed better in math and science than those from poorer families.6 Standardized test results thus might reveal far more about income, socioeconomic status, and the wealth of the schools that students attend than about students’ academic and intellectual capacity and their potential attainment and knowledge. As well, we found respected educators critiquing standardized test scores as pedagogically unsound. The growing focus on these tests had led math, reading, writing, and science to dominate curricula and classroom effort at the increasing expense of history, foreign languages, social studies, music, art, and other key subject areas. Poor test scores often drive calls for a so-called return to basics while other subjects and critical thinking skills are neglected.7 Above all, test scores and enrollment, graduation, and dropout rates are simply outputs of the school system, and they fundamentally ignore the content of what is taught, including important skills such as critical thinking. What if our school systems are not teaching what’s needed and relevant in today’s world, and if they are not imparting the skills required to nurture a healthy and educated populace and a sustainable world? What if the values, subject matter, and methods taught in schools typically confirm the very systems that need to change and obstruct the  broader shift in social awareness and consciousness required to move toward a more sustainable and equitable society? And what of the

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education that takes place outside school walls—in the community, family, and workplace and through the media? In fact, the sparse nonconventional data we were able to uncover revealed some disturbing results. In Canada civic literacy, which includes basic knowledge of politics, had declined despite ever-higher graduation rates. Particularly among younger Canadians, who have the highest and fastest growing graduation rates of all age groups, political knowledge scores fell by 20 percent for 18–23-year-olds and by 17 percent for 24–29-year-olds over the 16-year period from 1984 to 2000.8 Such results, which reflect knowledge of basic political party positions, names of their leaders, and the like, are only the tip of the iceberg. We have no consistent, reliable information, for example, on Canadians’ knowledge of climate change and whether they are becoming more informed on this key issue over time, though that seems important in this day and age. Unless people know the basic causes and effects of climate change, they are unlikely to be weaned from profligate energy use, for example.9 In sum, the conventional measures in common use in Canada and elsewhere tell us about years of schooling, test scores, and the like but not about educational attainment, and they cannot assess how educated, knowledgeable, and informed a populace is. In no other area of our multiyear investigation into measures of progress in Canada did we find standard measures as inadequate, misleading, and deeply entrenched as in education. Nor did we find elsewhere as thick a veil of wilful ignorance or (though we never expected it) more resistance from vested interests. Further investigation showed we were not alone in our disillusion. As far back as the early 1990s, a Special Study Panel on Education Indicators convened by the U.S. Department of Education already had concluded that relying on conventional education indicators was “misguided,” did not “do justice to the complexity of the educational enterprise,” and relied on a “flawed” model that mistakenly “encouraged the view that the educational system produces ‘products’ by taking various raw materials (e.g., students and resources) and processing them in schools.”10 More recently this critique has been echoed in UNESCO’s Education for All report and by other experts in the field.11 Yet due largely to the absence of viable alternative measures, the standard schooling measures still hold

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sway even in many alternative progress measures such as the Canadian Index of Wellbeing. But it was clearly not enough for us just to dissect the existing education indicators. Our GPI team had to find a better way forward and to suggest viable new methods of assessing how knowledgeable and educated a populace really is. That search took years of dedicated work—far more time than any other area of the GPI—which, unbeknownst to us at the time, turned out to be crucial for our later efforts in Bhutan. The first shock was that Statistics Canada, despite its wealth of material in other areas, had nothing to offer for this exploration; it was as if the question had not been considered. To fill that unanticipated data gap, we compiled numerous materials from a vast array of reputable sources in 1,700 pages of hard evidence to point to the basic information required to produce a genuine “educated populace” domain for the GPI and other indicator systems. Based on that, we suggested a “next step” recommendation to Statistics Canada and the CIW for the kind of survey that would yield the data and analysis needed for the future. Our journey of discovery in this area convinced us that education is not only the glue that joins all our measures of progress together but also the key to building a sustainable and equitable new economy. In retrospect, what now seems obvious but took us years of number crunching to wake up to was the reality that genuine progress on any front— environmental, health, economic, social, or anything else—is ultimately impossible to sustain without an educated populace. Whether people have the knowledge and critical thinking required to improve well-being for themselves and their children is therefore a vital connective tissue linking all the components of the GPI. For example, if people do not learn how to budget and live within their means, they may end up living in chronic debt and economic insecurity. If they have no basic nutritional literacy, get their food knowledge from TV ads, and are ignorant of the effects of what they consume, they cannot live a healthy lifestyle. If there is no minimal civic literacy and people are ignorant of basic political issues and of what different political groups stand for, how can they cast their votes wisely and responsibly? And if there is no basic ecological literacy—if people do not learn about

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and understand the effect of their consumption and lifestyle habits on climate change, pollution, waste disposal, energy and resource depletion, and other species, to say nothing of their own health—they are unlikely to be environmentally responsible or make sustainable choices. For these reasons we found no area in which the potential for generating genuine societal change was greater than in education. We found that if basic truths about our lived reality can be skilfully and accurately transmitted, both the knowledge and means to create the changes needed to ensure our children’s future are readily at hand. In fact, some of the world’s most brilliant educators had tried-and-tested methods for transforming the educational system to transmit effectively the practical and relevant knowledge required for today’s world. But what exactly is that knowledge? Unless we can clearly define what we mean by an educated populace, we will never agree either on methods for transmitting the required knowledge or on measures of progress toward achieving that goal.

WHAT IS AN “EDUCATED POPULACE”?

Respected educators had already broadened the view of educational attainment far beyond existing conventional norms and measures. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for example, had declared, The goal of education is to make people wiser, more knowledgeable, better informed, ethical, responsible, critical and capable of continuing to learn. Education also serves society by providing a critical reflection on the world, especially its failings and injustices, and by promoting greater consciousness and awareness, exploring new visions and concepts, and inventing new techniques and tools. Education is also the means for disseminating knowledge and developing skills, for bringing about desired changes in behaviors, values and lifestyles, and for promoting public support for the continuing and

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fundamental changes that will be required if humanity is to alter its course, leaving the familiar path that is leading towards growing difficulties, and starting the uphill climb towards sustainability. Education, in short, is humanity’s best hope and most effective means to the quest to achieve sustainable development.12

What kinds of knowledge and critical thinking are required to create a healthy and sustainable society? we asked. In a review of the research in this field, we found broad agreement that an educated person has the following: • • •

• • •

Openness, interest, and curiosity to engage and learn throughout life; willingness to engage in personal and social transformation; awareness of contextual situations and systems, social and economic interconnections, current world events, the processes of the natural world, the influence of current lifestyles on population health, and the choices and quality of life of future generations; the ability to analyze, communicate, and integrate ideas; the ability to solve problems collaboratively; and knowledge in areas required to improve societal well-being and use of that knowledge for the public good.

We identified eleven specific knowledge areas, or “literacies,” that analysts seem to agree represent what an educated populace needs to know for its own well-being and that of future generations. These are basic adult literacy, as well as literacy in ecology, science, health, food and nutrition, civics, media, indigenous knowledge, statistics, multiculturalism, and arts.13 With the materials our GPI Atlantic team had assembled over several years and organized into easily accessible summaries, results, conclusions, and recommendations backed by voluminous references and source materials, in 2008 we felt that we had something valuable to offer on how educational attainment could be genuinely assessed and measured. In particular, we used those materials and the eleven literacies listed in the previous paragraph to recommend that Statistics Canada

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create and administer a new Canadian Knowledge Survey to assess the level of Canadians’ education and knowledge. But whatever doors we knocked on in Canada, from the Nova Scotia Education Department, to Statistics Canada and the ostensibly progressive Canadian Index of Wellbeing, we got nowhere. In order to aggregate all results into a questionable single number, the CIW people preferred to use deeply flawed conventional indicators rather than to challenge the existing paradigm. To assess “overall academic achievement and attainment,” the CIW still uses deeply flawed measures such as the percentage of high school and university graduates. I’d already harbored growing doubts about the direction the CIW was going, including its failure to move beyond indicators alone and toward economic accounts as originally promised, and its insistence on a single number result based on equally weighted and often questionable indicators. But its rejection of our education work, critique, and recommendations without challenging any of our data, findings, and logic, and its decision instead to perpetuate the existing system, led me at the time to resign as CIW research director and withdraw from further participation in that body’s work. Since then I’ve often pondered why education was the one area where our work made no headway and where existing structures simply would not budge. I still can’t answer that question definitively but wonder if it might be a combination of several factors. In my twenty years of university teaching, I became painfully aware of the subtle but powerful vested interests that shape university curricula, texts, and the values they embed. Second, bureaucracies—academic as much as government and corporate—thrive on maintenance and are threatened by any change that rocks the boat in any fundamental way. Habitual patterns—collective as well as individual—are hard to break! More mundane motives often enter as well, as I think the CIW actions show. CIW researchers and funders wanted quick results so they could construct their composite index and get their single number without undue delay. The conventional indicators, with their readily available data, made that possible. It was simply embarrassing and untidy to acknowledge that one key domain was undoable and unmeasurable

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based on existing data, and to admit that Canada was unable to answer the question, “How educated is our populace?” To answer that properly would take considerable time and money to create a whole new survey to be administered to the Canadian public and from that to build the new dataset required. Challenging the system to this degree was too much trouble and too radical a critique for my colleagues to consider. And then, just as we were despairing about years of strenuous and passionate effort being shelved without making even a dent in Canada’s educational assessment establishment, the prime minister of Bhutan told us of his intent to transform the entire education system of his country to reflect precisely the broader goals and principles described earlier. And so in 2009, our GPI Atlantic team revised and adapted all our materials for Bhutanese conditions, and I quickly moved there to work directly with Bhutan’s Ministry of Education to help make it happen.

EDUCATING FOR GNH

The prime minister was not given merely to grandiose statements of vision and principle. He also was a master strategist who saw that the people who most needed to be persuaded about revamping the country’s education system were not the teachers, students, or parents but the Ministry of Education’s bureaucrats who would be tasked with making the change happen but who had been schooled in (and trained to transmit) the conventional system. He thus identified a clear starting point: could we bring to Bhutan, he asked, some of the world’s leading innovative educators who share Bhutan’s vision and philosophy in order to discuss and work with Bhutan’s own top educators and administrators on how, practically, to reshape the educational system? The prime minister wanted his own people to see that they would not be out on a limb by themselves, inexperienced, writing and implementing the new curricula in a remote corner of the Himalayas, cut off from the rest of the world’s knowledge systems. Instead, he wanted the country’s educators to understand the universality of GNH principles and to

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realize that they would have the active support of top progressive educators from around the world. This collaborative approach, geared toward local capacity building and support for the country’s own inherent goals, became central to all we did in Bhutan in the years to come. And as we shall see, that approach contrasted sharply with the top-down imposition of external agendas that accompanies so much conventional foreign aid. Fortunately, our research of the previous three years had introduced us to some of the world’s best alternative education innovators, whose vision and understanding were closely aligned with both our GPI view and what Bhutan’s prime minister intended for his country. And so we invited a selection of those remarkable educators to Bhutan at the end of 2009 to help launch that country’s ambitious new Educating for GNH initiative. In the meantime, our research team would spend months scouring the literature in order to identify those dimensions of educational theory and practice that were most in line with Bhutan’s GNH principles and values. We found five key streams that were highly consonant with GNH principles but absent from the existing curricula and textbooks Bhutan had adopted, most of them from neighboring India: (a) holistic education, which joins cognitive scholarship with knowledge gained through the feelings, senses, and hands-on doing; (b) contemplative education, which joins cognition with contemplation and meditative insight; (c) critical thinking, which teaches reasoning and analysis so that students will not simply believe what they are told but can question, think, and explore the truth for themselves; (d) indigenous knowledge that brings traditional wisdom into core educational curricula; and (e) sustainability education, which teaches respect for nature and how to live in harmony with nature’s processes.

On the last point alone, a growing cohort of educators in the West had already recognized that educational systems have not kept pace with burgeoning scientific knowledge about the natural world and do little, if

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anything, to encourage reduction of the human footprint on the planet. Indeed, our own GPI research had demonstrated clearly that the most schooled citizens have the largest and most destructive ecological footprints, largely because they tend to be wealthier and consume more.14 In the area of sustainability education, we had a wealth of good materials from the United Nations, which in 2005 had launched the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), based on the “values, behavior and lifestyles required for a sustainable future and for positive societal transformation.”15 We realized that in all five key areas, not only was there an outstanding and growing literature, along with trenchant critiques of conventional systems, but there were also alternative schools in different parts of the world that were putting the new principles into increasingly effective practice. What was missing in the world was an organized effort to create such a new, comprehensive educational system at a national level. Existing models of new educational practices were not only isolated and local but—relying typically on private rather than publicly funded efforts—tended to cater to the ideas of a few select innovators often starting their own schools and to the children of a wealthy progressive elite. In December 2009, we brought to Bhutan thirty top educators in the five fields noted earlier, including founders and directors of leading alternative schools in India, Nepal, the UK, Canada, and the United States. Among the educators were luminaries such as John Miller, “father” of holistic education; David Orr, a pioneer in ecological literacy; and Gregory Cajete, author of many books on integrating indigenous wisdom into educational curricula. For the one-week dialogue, Bhutan was represented by the prime minister, education minister, ministry secretary, heads of curriculum development and of evaluation and other divisions, teachers’ college professors, selected school principals, and top students. Leading officials from other ministries joined as observers, as did fifty international delegates, including representatives of the United Nations and several countries. It was a powerful and dynamic interchange geared toward getting Bhutan’s new initiative off the ground in the most practical way.

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In his opening statement the prime minister expressed his belief that education is the key to real change and to putting into practice “the humane and ecological principles and values of Gross National Happiness”: What we are trying to do here is unprecedented. There are no road maps. While individual schools in different parts of the world—at least eleven of which are represented right here in this room—have created brilliant and transformative curricula and learning environments from which we’ll learn a lot this week, no country has ever attempted to transform its entire educational system along the lines we propose. So I genuinely believe that what you generously contribute to Bhutan this week must also have a transformative effect on educational systems, and thus on society at large, far beyond our borders.

After several days of looking at key aspects of educational systems, from curriculum and physical school design to teacher training and assessment methods, the assembled national and international participants agreed on this consensus vision statement: WHAT: The principles and values of Gross National Happiness will be deeply embedded in the consciousness of Bhutanese youth and citizens. They will see clearly the interconnected nature of reality and understand the full benefits and costs of their actions. They will not be trapped by the lure of materialism and will care deeply for others and for the natural world. HOW: Bhutan’s entire educational system will effectively cultivate GNH principles and values, including deep critical and creative thinking, ecological literacy, practice of the country’s profound, ancient wisdom and culture, contemplative learning, a holistic understanding of the world, genuine care for nature and for others, competency to deal effectively with the modern world, preparation for right livelihood, and informed civic engagement. WHEN: 5-year goal: Bhutan’s school system will have GNH-minded teachers and a GNH-infused learning environment, and access to these

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by all Bhutanese children and youth. Within three years, all of Bhutan’s teachers will have received effective education in these areas, and within one year, all of Bhutan’s school principals will have received GNH-inspired education.

FROM VISION TO ACTION

By the fifth day of the workshop, an action plan had taken shape. The secretary of the Ministry of Education announced that in late January and early February 2010, all the country’s school principals (elementary and secondary), as well as district and assistant district education officers from every region in the country, teachers’ college lecturers, heads of university departments, and ministry officials—630 in all—would be gathered for three, seven-day training sessions (210 educators in each) to initiate them into the new GNH-based educational paradigm. These workshops would prepare every school for what was coming and provide practical guidance on how they could introduce GNH principles and practices even as the longer-term work of rewriting curricula was undertaken. The international educators offered resources, curricular materials, advice, and hands-on guidance, including on how conventional subjects such as math, science, language, and history could be taught in innovative and meaningful ways to reflect GNH values. As soon as the international visitors departed, we began planning the seven-day principals’ workshops, which took place at Paro College of Education between January 19 and February 12, 2010. The prime minister and the education minister took an active role in all three workshops, and each school principal was given the task of drawing up, before the end of the workshop, a concrete plan on how they would advance the principles, values, and practices of Gross National Happiness in their own schools. Part of their assignment was to engage their teachers and students in helping to create GNH-based schools. The principals discussed daily how every aspect of education, from curricula and texts to sports, community service, management, and school atmosphere,

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could reflect GNH values. Remarkably, the principals embraced the new initiative with enthusiasm and without dissension on basic goals and principles. Basic meditation practice and instruction were offered daily at each workshop, and many principals said they intended to begin and end each school day with a few minutes of silent reflection—with some promising to begin and end each class during the day in this way. Although Bhutan’s state school system is supposed to be secular and entirely separate from the religious education conducted in monasteries, Buddhism is the official state religion, and the principals easily accepted the introduction of meditation as a nonsectarian component of the country’s ancient culture. They heard scientific evidence demonstrating that meditation can also improve students’ focus, concentration, and academic performance. To demonstrate practical ways to bring GNH values quickly into their schools, we designed dozens of small group activities simulating a variety of school, class, and curricular settings. In a statement typical of responses at the end of the workshops, one principal said he now finally understood what his job really was. All these years, he had thought his job was to run the school, deal with myriad administrative and human resource details, ensure discipline, and have his students perform well on the statewide examinations. After those seven days of discussions and activities, he realized that his job was to raise the next generation of citizens as wise, caring, and concerned human beings living their lives and serving their country and fellow citizens to their full potential.

VISIONING THE NEW CURRICULUM

The principals’ workshops also began to explore the kind of curriculum required for a true GNH education. Bhutan’s Buddhist heritage, which teaches the mutual dependence of all phenomena, was seen as suitable ground for a GNH-based curriculum that encourages students to explore the social and ecological conditions under which things are produced and the impacts on society and the environment when those

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things are discarded. How sustainably, and under what labor conditions and forms of ownership, are things produced, transported, distributed, and discarded, and do these benefit or harm nature and communities? To that end, we showed the school principals how they could introduce this curricular approach by exploring the origin of everyday objects in their students’ lives. For example, instead of treating a can of CocaCola simply as a 40-rupee product for consumption to quench their thirst and deliver taste and other sensations, students might investigate the process by which that Coke came to be and its effects on the world. Examining the social, economic, and ecological conditions of producing Coke—and its consequences for health, communities, the economy, and the environment—would naturally incorporate all four pillars of GNH without needing to present GNH as a separate subject. So in this case, the students would explore what nutrients the Coke contains; how much sugar, caffeine, and other ingredients go into it; and where those components originate. Other questions included where the sugar was grown, by whom, and under what social, economic, and environmental conditions; how it was processed and transported; who owns the plantations and factories; what chemicals are used to grow and process sugar; where the Coca-Cola was processed and canned; how it got into students’ hands from that factory; the effects of the Coca-Cola ingredients on health; what the can is made of and how it was produced; what happens to it when it is discarded; and where their 40 rupees go— how much to the local economy, the sugar growers, the processors and transporters, to Coca-Cola shareholders in the United States, and so on. After deconstructing common consumer items like this, a GNH curriculum could introduce discussion of potentially sounder ecological and social alternatives. What are the causes, conditions, and effects, for example, of spending the same 40 rupees on a bottle of locally produced natural apple juice from Bumthang in central Bhutan? What are the ingredients and where do they come from; under what conditions are they grown; are there additives aside from apples; what are the impacts on health; what happens to the reusable bottles; how much of the 40 rupees remains in the local economy rather than leaving Bhutan; and so forth. We also integrated math learning into this contrast by using

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epidemiological evidence to graph the increased probability of developing diabetes for someone who drinks two cans of Coke a day compared with an equal amount of natural apple juice, and the higher health care costs as a result. Through narrative form, dealing with daily dimensions of students’ real lives, this curricular approach could introduce all the elements of a GNH society, enhance participant mindfulness and awareness, and, we suggested, naturally encourage changed behavior. For example, participants might leave feeling very good (even happy) about changing some daily consumption habits from Coca-Cola to locally produced apple juice next time they are thirsty, with the knowledge that they are simultaneously building the economic, social, and ecological foundations of a GNH society through very simple actions. Aside from that graphic example, our GPI Atlantic research team prepared materials for Bhutanese educators on dozens of other examples of such a life-cycle, cradle-to-grave ecological approach that deconstructs daily products, investigates how they came to be and are disposed of and shows the effects of our daily actions and behaviors. During the 2010 workshops, Bhutan’s school principals discussed many other potential new curriculum design options in an atmosphere pervaded with the spirit of a true GNH-based approach to education. For example, growing vegetables in school gardens could be closely tied to school science curricula, promote teamwork, and be used to teach about local food security, the global food system, sustainable farming and nutrition, and preservation of traditional culture and community ties. We even looked as well at changing the structure of formal education to go beyond classroom walls to include community service as part of the curriculum. At the time of the principals’ workshops, the world was still in the throes of the worst recession and financial crisis since the Great Depression. The economic collapse in 2008–2009 was triggered in part by speculative banking practices that led to excessive household debt and incapacity of many homeowners to make payments on mortgage debt. Teaching students in school how to live by a balanced household budget, it was suggested, could greatly support sustainable economic

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development and help to avoid excessive debt, financial stress, and bankruptcy. It could even introduce full-cost accounting principles to demonstrate the different social and environmental benefits and costs of alternative household behaviors. To introduce GNH-based math, we used the example of car ownership, which increasingly is a symbol of wealth and status in Bhutan but which sends many families into debt after buying cars they can’t afford. How can students learn to calculate not only interest and depreciation rates but also the impact of monthly car payments and operating and maintenance costs on other priorities such as reduced capacity to send money from the city to their home village to support aging parents? What impact has increased car ownership had on air quality in Thimphu, and what are the hidden costs of that pollution? In short, instead of the dry, abstract math typical of textbooks, every subject can be taught in ways relevant to the students’ lives and infused with GNH values. It may be objected that education should be value free. But all our GPI work, including on the supposed objectivity of GDP, had convinced us that the failure to address relevant social and ecological realities embeds its own values and effectively perpetuates the status quo and its dominant interests. There is no escaping that both the GPI and a GNH society have a vision and values that challenge the materialist ethos that now holds sway, and that a GNH educational curriculum will therefore reflect those values. In fact, I believe that making those values explicit, as the GPI also does, is more open and honest than hiding them beneath a veneer of supposed impartiality and neutrality. So deeply would GNH-based education challenge conventional schooling that both the December 2009 international meeting and subsequent principals’ workshops recognized that it would change the  very structure of education to incorporate the extensive learning that happens outside classroom walls. Thus one participant suggested that schools might dedicate every Wednesday to community service, which would also break up the school week and reduce the excessive time spent sitting behind desks. A more radical suggestion was for grade 11 students to spend seven to eight months or even a full year engaged in national service, working on required countrywide infrastructural needs.

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They would learn disciplines based on scouting and camping and appreciate the dignity of all labor, including tasks that are considered menial, such as cleaning public latrines. Such community and national service also could foster students’ research skills, including statistical, historical, survey, and data analysis, to understand underlying community and national challenges and needs and to help ensure that their interventions would be skilful, practical, and useful. As an alternative example of national service, one educator suggested that in response to rapid rural–urban youth migration and consequent severe shortages of farm labor, students could spend their long winter vacations undertaking infrastructural work on local farms, such as terracing and building irrigation canals, which the aging farm population is increasingly unable to do. Such a program could help to restore students’ connection with the earth and with their communities, dignify farm labor, and create an enjoyable, communal work experience for the students.

DEMISE AND POSSIBLE RESURRECTION?

The launch of Educating for GNH in 2009–2010 was an enthusiastic and auspicious start to what had the potential to be a transformative experience for many in Bhutan and potentially beyond. The international educators had offered abundant support, materials, and expertise; the prime minister was delighted to see his long-standing dream on the verge of being translated into action; and Bhutanese educators themselves felt valued like never before—fully aware of the responsibility with which they had been entrusted. And then it all began to come apart at the seams, in part simply because the Bhutanese educational bureaucracy had a vested interest in maintenance of the status quo, and officials felt threatened by the potentially far-reaching changes proposed. Although the principals appeared to be fully on board at the workshops, the administrators only belatedly seemed to realize how radical was the change envisioned and what would be involved in rewriting texts, retraining teachers, and redesigning schools.

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And here I myself must take some responsibility for the failure. In retrospect, I should have analyzed the existing power structure, recognized its limitations, anticipated the likely resistance, and been much more patient. To that end if money and resources had been available, I should have worked with our GPI team and the foreign educators to design a gradual, carefully phased, low-risk implementation plan that focused on development of age-appropriate curricula and concrete tools for teachers to use in the classroom. The vision, goals, broad brush strokes, and provision of resources were not enough. Looking back, I see that our team also placed too much reliance on the direction, vision, and enthusiasm of the prime minister. We assumed that a head of government could make things happen! Only later did we realized that the prime minister could not micromanage all his ministries and that he relied entirely on existing bureaucratic structures to implement his goals. Having worked closely with the education ministry officials for many months to organize the various workshops and launch the Educating for GNH initiative, I actually had no illusion that they fully grasped and supported the vision. I thus recommended to the prime minister that he consider appointing a fully empowered Educating for GNH “czar” to direct the implementation. I even suggested the name of a principal who had struck me as particularly brilliant, farsighted, organized, and practical. She, I was convinced, could make it happen. What I didn’t know, through my ignorance of existing power dynamics, is that the prime minister could not bring in someone outside the existing power structure to go over the heads of the leading ministry bureaucrats to whom it now fell to implement the initiative. So long as their efforts were focused on organizing the workshops for the international educators and then for all Bhutan’s school principals, these officials did not complain. In fact, those immediate tasks were so demanding and time consuming that they understandably gave no attention to how much work it would take—whether it involved rewriting curricula or training teachers—to realize the radical new system in practice. When this realization dawned after the principals’ workshops, the line that the officials quickly took was that educating for GNH already existed in the good motivations, intentions, and practices of teachers,

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principals, schools, and bureaucrats but that it had just never previously been given that name. And so the job of implementation was now recast as simply labeling existing systems as “educating for GNH.” In the meantime, given Bhutan’s lack of resources, the future direction of Educating for GNH was in the hands of whoever held the purse strings. Officially classified as a least-developed country,16 Bhutan was entirely dependent on foreign aid that all too frequently comes with strings attached that can distort and derail national aspirations. In this case, UNICEF quickly stepped in and gave substantial sums of money for training Bhutan’s school principals and teachers to deliver the Educating for GNH dream in their own schools. The only problem was that UNICEF had its own agenda and its own version of that dream. At the urging of its Thai deputy director in Bhutan, UNICEF gave about US$100,000 to send scores of Bhutanese school principals to Thailand to be trained by Art-ong Jumsai, a former NASA scientist and Thai politician who had founded a school inspired by the Indian guru Sri Sathya Sai Baba. UNICEF had invited Art-ong to the 2009 international workshop that we had organized, and the agency insisted on his being given a leading role at the subsequent principals’ workshops that UNICEF also funded. But Art-ong taught his own meditation techniques, which were at odds with Bhutan’s millennium-old traditions, jettisoned most of Prime Minister Thinley’s societal vision in favor of his own private school’s principles,17 ignored the contributions of the outstanding educators we’d invited, and touted his own life example, style, methods, and ample funding as the model for Bhutan’s resource-poor public schools. Despite the fact that his school bore the Sathya Sai name, UNICEF seemed unaware of Art-ong’s leadership of that cult in Thailand, his claimed contact with extraterrestrials, and his prophesy of the second coming of the cult’s dead leader, the so-called divine Omnipotent Creator of the Universe, who had been accused of fraud, sexual abuse, pedophilia, and violence. By September 2014, more than 2,500 Thais, led by a Chulalongkorn University scientist, had signed a petition calling for Art-ong’s removal as chair of the committee on revising Thailand’s national curricula.18 And beyond such questionable credentials, the

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school principals I spoke to after their training at Art-ong’s school said they simply didn’t find it relevant or applicable to Bhutan. In this case it is no exaggeration to say that UNICEF hijacked the Educating for GNH initiative and played a major role in sinking it. At the very least, the UNICEF resources could have funded far more productive training and development of suitable curricular materials. It was not the only example I witnessed in my time in Bhutan of foreign aid being channeled into questionable projects and in directions that often seemed wasteful, caused more harm than good, and served foreign rather than local objectives. Despite the considerable positive benefits that some aid has certainly brought, I believe the sooner Bhutan weans itself from reliance on foreign aid (including that brought in through GPI Atlantic), the better. For all these reasons and more, Educating for GNH was never systemically implemented at a national scale, teachers never received proper GNH-based curricular materials, and it is fair to say that the initiative has made no real difference in the daily lives of the vast majority of Bhutanese schoolchildren. The resource materials that the international educators provided have not been used, and those educators have not been consulted or approached in the eleven years since their 2009 visit to Bhutan. Even the idea of starting and ending lessons and the school day with a short period of silent meditation is too often used only to enforce silence and discipline rather than to nurture the insight and understanding that true meditation can bring. Despite these letdowns, it would be unfair to characterize Educating for GNH as an abject failure, if only because the infusion of ideas in 2009–2010 provided some real inspiration that has at least led to scattered local action. Thus particular principals were inspired to introduce traditional crafts, recycling and waste reduction, vegetable gardens, and proper meditation instruction into their schools. As well, the next chapter outlines one highly innovative resurrection of these efforts—a local effort that is now in the tenth year of putting a full-fledged GNH education program into action.

12 THE GAP BETWEEN WORDS AND ACTION

P

rime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley’s determination to transform Bhutan’s entire educational system was nothing short of heroic in its vision and its willingness to take on seemingly indomitable challenges. But that was by no means his only strategy to weave GNH into the fabric of Bhutanese society, nor was it the only endeavor to run afoul of entrenched interests. From remote Bhutanese farmlands to power politics and the halls of United Nations headquarters in New York, several other major projects he asked me to take on drew me into a vortex of hope, disappointment, and tough lessons learned.

THE WORLD’S FIRST 100 PERCENT ORGANIC COUNTRY?

In Bhutan’s first democratic elections in 2008, the manifesto of the winning political party proclaimed a goal of making Bhutan the world’s first sovereign nation to become 100 percent organic in all its food production. That intent was affirmed by newly elected Prime Minister Thinley in his state of the nation address and subsequent statements. In those addresses he argued that going organic would create significant economic

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opportunities for Bhutan’s farmers and for the country, establish Bhutan as a global training center for organic agriculture, and provide a major spur to organic growing worldwide. Of particular interest is the way in which the prime minister linked this intention directly to GNH principles and to the third action phase in the evolution of GNH. Going organic was envisioned as a practical way to strengthen all four pillars of GNH. On the environmental side, it was intended to keep Bhutan’s soils healthy and fertile in perpetuity rather than degrading and depleting them through use of synthetic chemicals that would also pollute ground and surface water and poison Bhutan’s birds and animals. On the economic side, going organic was meant to create new opportunities for farmers and rural communities by adding value to what they produced, by supplying organic products to meet a rapidly growing demand in India, and by reducing the costs of farming, as farmers would no longer have to pay for expensive pesticides, fertilizers, weedicides, and other chemicals. Going organic was also intended by the newly elected government to strengthen the good governance pillar of GNH by empowering farmers and enhancing their self-reliance. Going organic would reduce farmers’ dependence on foreign farm inputs, chemicals, and imported patented seeds, and it would increase reliance on traditional farming methods and freely available local materials such as manure, biomass, and leaf compost, all of which fertilize and enrich the soil. In fact, the prime minister suggested that Bhutan also could develop its own organic fertilizers and pest control agents using natural materials based in the rich medicinal flora for which the land is renowned. In addition, going organic could strengthen the country’s culture, the government suggested. By creating economic opportunities for educated Bhutanese youth in rural areas, it could begin to stem the massive rural-urban migration that was creating such serious demographic, economic, and social stresses. That, in turn, could help keep the country’s rural communities—with their networks of social support, extended families, and mutual dependence—strong and vital. “Going organic,” declared Prime Minister Thinley in 2011, “is living GNH. It is key to putting GNH fully into practice and action in the

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Kingdom of Bhutan.”1 With such a forthright stance in direct line with the government’s stated GNH development approach, there seemed every opportunity for Bhutan to become a model for a world moving in the opposite direction—namely, toward more commercial, monocultural, chemical-intensive industrial farming dependent on genetically modified crops. The major obstacle to moving in the intended organic policy direction, the government recognized, lay not with the country’s farmers but, ironically, within its own ranks. After all, Bhutan’s isolation from the world and its mountainous terrain had spared it the onslaught of the chemical revolution until much more recently than elsewhere in the world. In the more remote areas of the country, farming was still largely organic by tradition (simply because chemicals had not yet reached or penetrated there), and even in less remote areas older farmers still remained familiar with the nonchemical farming methods they had learned from their parents. By contrast, most Ministry of Agriculture scientists, agronomists, and extension workers in Bhutan had been educated in India’s Green Revolution agriculture schools, where the new high-yield seeds that rely on massive inputs of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are considered the only effective way to raise farm productivity and income. Indeed, the Green Revolution of the 1950s and ’60s that largely replaced traditional technologies so increased agricultural production in developing countries that it is credited with saving a billion people from starvation. Not surprisingly, India still adheres strongly to this system of mechanization, irrigation, and distribution of high-yielding cereal grain seeds, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and other agrochemicals. And yet, those same “miracle” chemicals credited with feeding billions are now blamed for pollution of village water sources and for soil degradation, which then requires ever greater chemical inputs in a losing battle to maintain productivity. And the rising costs of those inputs and of the imported high-yield seeds sold by huge multinationals such as Monsanto have been blamed for the massive debt in which so many Indian farmers have landed, which in turn is blamed for an estimated 250,000 farmer suicides in India in the past two decades.2 This is an

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instance in which full-cost accounts, as described in the first part of this book, could properly reveal the longer-term economic costs of a policy that appears to yield immediate benefits in increased production. In the absence of such accounts, mounting evidence of the long-term damage caused by Green Revolution methods unfortunately remains largely sidelined in official circles, and Green Revolution theory and practice are maintained largely due to powerful industry influence over government policy. In Bhutan the resistance of ministry officials to going organic was not badly intentioned but motivated largely by the wish to become more food self-sufficient by rapidly increasing production through Green Revolution methods. Despite limited fertile land, Bhutan’s wide altitudinal, climatic, and ecological variation from subtropical to temperate to alpine zones enables it to produce ample crops of sufficient diversity to feed itself. The country is about 80 percent self-sufficient in food, but in 2018, Bhutan still imported about three times as much food as it exported, with imports including more than US$21 million of rice and US$15 million of dairy, sugar, and beverage products. That’s better than five years earlier, when food imports were nearly five times greater than exports.3 Today, as ten years earlier, officials attribute progress toward greater self-sufficiency in large part to the improved productivity of high-yield hybrid seeds. The challenge for Bhutan’s newly elected government after 2008 was therefore to persuade its own agricultural officials that it was economically and productively viable to go organic. Largely untrained in improved organic methods that are proven to boost productivity, through better animal husbandry, high-quality manure and compost, nitrogen-fixing crops and more, the officials were convinced that organic yields would always be low.4 As well, they had little information on access to markets with organic price premiums and were largely unaware of the negative long-term Green Revolution impacts on soil and water quality. So without determined ministry support, it would be difficult to shift the country to 100 percent organic production. The government had created a National Organic Programme, but lack of ministry support had kept it woefully understaffed and under-resourced. And in the field, extension officers still distributed the new high-yield seeds and the synthetic fertilizers and

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pesticides (euphemistically labeled “plant protection” chemicals) that were required to produce the promised yields of those seeds. It was this challenge that led the prime minister to ask me to organize an initial training session for ministry scientists and agronomists. Because it would take a scholar with hard evidence to convince ministry scientists of the merits of organic farming, I invited to Bhutan one of the world’s leading proponents of organic farming, Vandana Shiva, a recipient of numerous international prizes and author of twenty books and dozens of peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Shiva, whose graduate degree was in philosophy of science, had founded Navdanya, India’s largest fair-trade organic marketing network, which has trained more than 500,000 Indian farmers in sustainable and organic farming methods. She also had set up Bija Vidyapeeth in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, in northern India as an experimental farm designed to test organic methods according to rigorous scientific criteria. In 2003, Time magazine called Shiva an environmental hero, and Asia Week described her as one of Asia’s five most powerful communicators. We were, then, bringing to the remote little Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan not only an international environmental superstar but a widely published scholar who could engage Bhutan’s agronomists and agricultural scientists in an in-depth dialogue on the merits of organic farming. Shiva knew what was expected of her and came armed with copious evidence, documentation, and presentations for the planned full-day session in August 2010, which we systematically organized according to the core issues, including soil quality, productivity, agricultural inputs, and economic viability. GPI Atlantic paid the travel costs and made all meeting arrangements, including one-on-one meetings and dinners with the prime minister and the Minister of Agriculture. Shiva donated her time, and the agriculture ministry had only to invite its own people to the full-day session. Imagine our disappointment on the day of the event when hardly anyone from the ministry showed up besides the minister himself, whom the prime minister had asked to introduce our guest. The 35 attendees scattered through the largely empty auditorium were mostly interested nongovernment observers.

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It was a rude awakening, confirmed many times thereafter, to the fact that the government’s official all-organic policy had very limited support within the ministry itself. One high-ranking government official privately told me later that the government of India, which has enormous influence in Bhutan and whose agriculture policies Vandana Shiva has vigorously criticized, had discouraged participation by government officials. I have no hard evidence of that beyond the word of that official, whose word I have found to be highly reliable. The tough lesson we again learned here, in parallel with our Ministry of Education experience, was that even the most visionary leaders depend on the bureaucrats in their ministries to implement their vision. In this case the prime minister upbraided the ministry for its shockingly poor turnout and the wilful ignorance of its scientists, experts, and officials. But there was little he could do in the short term to change a bureaucratic culture that thrives on maintenance rather than change. I used to blame the Ministries of Agriculture and Education for failure to realize the noble organic and educational goals described here and in the preceding chapter. However, in sober retrospect, I must acknowledge having placed far too much hope on the power of genuine vision and evidence in their own right to effect far-reaching change without properly considering the practical strategies required to prevent those bureaucratic realities from stifling and eviscerating the intended goals. And I confess to having neither the political know-how nor the patience to engage skillfully in that strategic game. In retrospect, though, I can at least try to identify what the key obstacles to implementing the shift to organic farming were and what they were not. In my own experience, the problem lay not with the farmers. The hundreds of farmers we trained in organic methods in southeastern Bhutan, for example, seemed entirely receptive and open to what they learned, in large part for the reasons stated earlier: they had mostly grown up farming organically by tradition, as had their parents and grandparents. So what they learned about improving composting methods, biological pest controls, seed saving, terracing, and more to improve organic productivity built on and enhanced what was already familiar. I did not detect any overt or major corporate opposition to Bhutan’s announced intention to go organic, probably because Bhutan is simply

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too small a market to rouse great interest from the likes of Monsanto. It’s impossible to tell, though, what industry opposition might have been launched had the initiative really taken off and become a model for other countries. Nor did I see local politicians disputing the government’s intention. So based on my experience, I can only attribute Bhutan’s failure to go organic to entrenched bureaucratic interests, the training of ministry scientists and officials in Indian agriculture schools, and India’s own resistance to Vandana Shiva’s work that overtly challenged Indian agriculture policy. At the time it did not occur to me that inviting her to Bhutan might be strategically questionable. In hindsight, perhaps it would have helped if, prior to Vandana Shiva’s visit, our GPI team had drawn on key evidence from our Nova Scotia GPI agriculture accounts to demonstrate the long-term economic benefits of organic farming in enhancing soil quality and productivity, biodiversity, disease resistance, the vitality of rural communities, local economic multiplier effects, and more. We had accumulated such telling evidence for Canada that a brief summary for Bhutanese ministry officials might have laid useful ground for Dr. Shiva’s visit. Whatever the reasons for failure, and not for the first or last time, hope for a major paradigm shift either overall or in a given sector died on the vine. To this day a 100 percent organic Bhutan—or even a major step in that direction—remains a distant dream.

A PLACE TO LIVE AND BREATHE GNH IN ACTION?

A key component of Prime Minister Thinley’s dream to bring GNH fully into the fabric of Bhutanese society—what he called the third major phase in the development of GNH—was the creation of a living center of GNH in action, which he had described to Gwen and me when he invited us to stay in Bhutan. Again, we were captivated by and deeply shared his dream that a living model of sanity, sustainability, and well-being eventually could be upscaled to transform society. In May 2010, GPI Atlantic invited to Bhutan prize-winning U.S. architect Paul Murdoch, who designed the Pennsylvania memorial to

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the 9/11 victims, along with some key sustainable building experts, to consider designing the proposed center. Led by the prime minister, agriculture minister, and other key officials, we set off to Bumthang in central Bhutan to investigate the potential of the piece of land that the prime minister had chosen. A few hours into the nine-hour road trip, the prime minister told his driver to pull over and get into the back seat, told me to get into the front passenger seat he’d occupied, and—delighted for once not to be chauffeured everywhere—took the wheel and drove us the rest of the way to Bumthang. The proposed site for the GNH Centre was breathtaking: forty-six acres of wooded land on the edge of a rushing river at the southern entrance of Wangchuck Centennial National Park. The location was in Bumthang’s sacred Chhoekhor valley in the nation’s spiritual heartland in central Bhutan. There was immediate consensus in the group that the site was outstanding. As we walked through the woods, I was awed at the prime minister’s knowledge of the plants we passed, including their medicinal qualities. This was the traditional knowledge, so in danger of demise, that had to be included in Bhutan’s new GNH curricula. As originally envisioned, the proposed GNH center was intended to embody and model GNH principles in its design, functioning, activity, and human interaction. It was to include a meditation hall, pavilions with flexible-capacity classrooms and small group meeting rooms, living and working spaces, an organic farm, and landscaped gardens, trails, and bridges linking the center with the national park across the river. With space for approximately three hundred participants to practice simple and sustainable living, the center, we hoped, would draw Bhutanese from all walks of life to experience GNH values and practices and to learn how to bring those ideals into their daily lives, workplaces, and communities. The center, then, was intended to model GNH in action and to be applicable to, and potentially replicable in, other parts of the country and beyond. By 2011, we had developed a detailed program and learning structure for the proposed center, with the intent that it would be a sparkplug for bringing GNH into the very fabric of society and into daily life in the most practical ways. Each program—whether on farming, education,

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waste management, family or business practice, or other subject—would begin with a brief overview of how the GNH vision and practice differ from the current conventional system. It would then plunge into practice and method, including an exploration of existing best practices, and the challenges participants were likely to face applying those practices in their own communities. Participants would leave the program with a plan for change in their own communities and workplaces, and staff would be available for follow-up phone calls and even site visits. One proposed program description read, The GNH Centre is not intended to be a bubble of GNH living and good practice isolated from surrounding realities, or any kind of GNH “utopia.” On the contrary, every programme offered is intended as an agent of concrete and practical change aimed at building GNH families, communities, schools, workplaces, societies, and nations, which in turn can transform the world in which we live.5

It was agreed that prior to construction, GNH Centre programs would be offered in different locations in the country to give a flavor of what the center would accomplish when built. We anticipated that this initial phase of operation, launched in 2012, would also rouse support, enthusiasm, and (we hoped) funding for the proposed physical center in Bumthang. With that intention, we undertook an international search for a GNH Centre program director. In 2012, we hired Dr. Havinh Tho, director of training for the International Red Cross in Geneva, whose qualifications were outstanding and whose own values and understanding seemed directly in line with GNH principles. Due to funding challenges, the original architectural designs were not used, and a sharply scaled-down version of the Bumthang Centre, with a meditation hall, conference hall, administrative block, dining hall, kitchen, and staff quarters, was built in 2014–15 and officially inaugurated on October 18, 2015. Sadly, though, the programming to date bears little resemblance to the original design and vision, which were community oriented, practically relevant, and geared to Bhutanese from all walks of life. Instead, episodic week-long programs held at expensive tourist resorts cater

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to foreign visitors, have only token Bhutanese participation, and support the center’s operations through high fees. Typical of current GNH Center offerings is this July 2016 program at a tourist resort, geared as usual to wealthy foreigners: Join us for a powerful journey of transformation for executives, CEOs, community leaders, and entrepreneurs seeking insight, wisdom, and skillful action in their lives and work. Together, we will explore the idea of life as pilgrimage—a sacred journey of discovery and growth.

At the end of 2013, I resigned from the GNH Centre’s Board of Directors when I saw that the center was going in a direction completely different than intended. Former Prime Minister Thinley has since also resigned. And here I learned another tough lesson that has plagued not only our GPI and GNH work but also other noble endeavors I’ve observed. In this case the top three GNH Centre staff, including the program director, all had their own agendas, networks, ambitions, and ways of doing things, including commitments to ventures and presentations in the United States, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the GNH Centre’s intended domestic emphasis to model GNH in action in Bhutan was neglected.6 In other cases I’ve seen scholars, politicians, tour operators, foreign aid agencies, and others co-opt GNH as a slogan to suit their own agendas and interests with little heed to the holistic philosophy on which it is based and the paradigm shift it implies.

FROM VISION TO SLOGAN

These letdowns with education, organic farming, and the GNH Centre are symptomatic of an overall systematic weakening of Bhutan’s commitment to the GNH principles described in chapter 9. Despite significant early impacts of the philosophy, particularly in environmental policy, mention of GNH today tends to raise eyebrows rather than enthusiasm among ordinary Bhutanese, who appear increasingly cynical about the yawning gap between philosophy and action in the policy arena.

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Another example of failure to implement GNH can be found in Bhutan’s mining policy. In April 2011, the country’s Anti-Corruption Commissioner wrote a strong letter to the Ministry of Economic Affairs questioning “whether a pro-active mining policy, with all its known ecological and health impacts, is compatible with the country’s deepest held values and principles.”7 In August 2012, the government’s draft mining policy went to the GNH Commission, where it failed to pass the GNH screening test.8 Four years later a 2016 report on Bhutan’s mining industry by the Anti-Corruption Commission detailed the severe health, environmental, cultural, economic, and corruption costs of mining in Bhutan.9 And yet nearly seventy mines and quarries operate today in Bhutan, many without adequate controls.10 And the country’s May 2017 Mineral Development Policy, which was designed to promote and develop the country’s mining industry, was not subjected to GNH screening.11 I can only speculate that recent failures to use the GNH screening tool, especially when policies have previously failed or are likely to fail its criteria, also reflect the gradual shift away from GNH principles. Beyond a specific industry such as mining looms the larger question of what broad kinds of development are most consistent with GNH principles. In 2008, Bhutan’s National Environment Commission noted: [T]he concept of large-scale industrial development is in direct conflict with the country’s policy of environmentally sustainable development especially when bearing in mind the country’s fragile mountain ecosystem and limited usable land. The key environmental problems arising from industries are air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste generation, and land degradation.  .  .  . The potential for future industrial development in the country lies in the development of a network of small-scale and cottage industries based on sustainable management of cultural and natural endowments, especially focusing on niche products such as hand-woven textiles using natural dye and organically produced food and medicinal products.12

Yet there is no evidence that Bhutan’s development is following that clear recommendation. By far the fastest-growing economic sector in Bhutan is hydropower plant construction, which is not only driving

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rapid economic growth (6.4 percent in 2016) but, as noted in chapter 9, is also plunging the country into ever deeper debt ($US2.3 billion).13 Again, there has been no systematic analysis of the sector through use of the GNH screening tool, which might reveal longer-term concerns and other priorities. Thus, Bhutan’s previous finance secretary, Lam Dorji, has warned that climate change and reduced winter snowfall are having such an adverse effect on the flow of Bhutan’s glacier-fed rivers that they imperil the future of hydropower: The country, he said, should be prepared for the possibility that future water flow “would be reduced to an extent that we may not be able to make use of it.”14 In my own observation over many years, the failure to translate GNH into policies that would move the country significantly in the direction envisioned by the four GNH pillars also has political roots. In conversations and at briefings, I was continually struck by the reality that most of Prime Minister Thinley’s own close colleagues, including senior Cabinet ministers, seemed to have no real understanding of or commitment to GNH in action. Many ministers and politicians certainly had mastered the rhetoric and paid lip service to GNH in their statements and speeches. But most showed little interest in turning GNH into meaningful action, let alone challenging the existing economic paradigm, with its conventional economic growth dogma. As a result of the conspicuous gap between words and action, it is very common for cynics in Bhutan today to label GNH as no more than a promotional tourism slogan. Though I’ve focused here on domestic impediments to action, we’ll see in the next chapter that the difficulties Bhutan has faced in actualizing GNH at home are due in large part to issues far beyond its own control— challenges Bhutan tried to address by going global with its vision.

AND SO, TO A REMOTE VILLAGE IN SOUTHEAST BHUTAN

Though efforts at the national level became increasingly frustrating, my experience at the local level was very different. Just as with the

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community GPI work in Nova Scotia, I discovered in Bhutan almost no barrier to community-level constructive action that genuinely joins social, economic, and environmental objectives. Proceeding below the radar, local actions to use the GPI or put GNH into action pose much less threat to authority, are largely free of political and bureaucratic constraints, and can translate evidence, recommendations, and good intentions into practical benefit with seeming ease. More than that, as noted earlier, work to improve well-being resonates most strongly at the local level because that is where quality of life is ultimately experienced and where actions can be most effectively tailored to local needs and conditions. And so, after thirteen years of GPI Atlantic involvement in Bhutan, the work that has shown the greatest success, continuity, and promise in weaving GNH principles, values, and practices into the fabric of the wider society is what is known as the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative (SJI). In that regional initiative, organic farming, waste reduction, youth outreach, health promotion, and other key facets of GNH continue to deepen and expand, spreading gradually to more communities and districts and penetrating the consciousness of villagers. The initiative started in March 2010, when I was invited to a small meeting of leading citizens of Samdrup Jongkhar, a remote area of southeastern Bhutan near the border of Assam. The meeting was convened by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, the renowned Bhutanese meditation master, author, and filmmaker who heads the Chokyi Gyatso Institute for Buddhist Studies (CGI) in the small town of Dewathang, Samdrup Jongkhar. Rinpoche was determined that his institute should bring some tangible benefit to the surrounding community, particularly in fostering ecologically friendly and economically viable development. The region, dominated by subsistence farming—the source of livelihood for an estimated 85 percent of the population there—has remained underdeveloped, in part because that district had so long been the epicenter of the Assamese separatist insurgency, the one that had been on the queen’s mind during our first meeting in early 2004. That long-term instability and insecurity had discouraged investment and development in the region. Industry, services, mechanization, communications, and

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infrastructure all lagged far behind other regions, and local government authorities had neither the resources nor the initiative to turn things around. Now that peace had come to the area, Rinpoche told the small group, it was time to improve the lot of the local citizenry, but in a way that protected the natural environment and strengthened local communities and the social fabric. Rinpoche then came right to the point. He asked the group to establish what he dubbed the “Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative,” emphasizing the word “initiative.” Crucial in attempting to graft a new democracy onto a traditional hierarchical society, Rinpoche said, would be to develop the very notion of bottom-up citizen initiative, a key challenge for Bhutan. In the top-down benevolent monarchy of the past, citizens expected all benefit to come from government, and they were unaccustomed to the idea of citizens taking responsibility for their own well-being and future. Democracy, he noted, meant more than just voting once every few years but required active participation of citizens in creating their own future. Underlying particular development actions, therefore, was the longer-term goal of building civil society and fostering citizen self-reliance. Our group quickly determined that a necessary first step in such an endeavor was to become well informed about the region and its needs. Over the succeeding six months, GPI Atlantic took responsibility for fundraising efforts, and I crafted a funding proposal to the International Development Research Centre in Canada. After several expert reviews and revisions of the proposal, three-year funding of about $300,000 was approved in November 2010 and later extended to March 2015. Thus, in December 2010, SJI was born as the first major development project in Bhutan initiated and organized within Bhutan’s civil society sector. SJI (www.sji.bt) publicly declared its aims, which are to • • • • •

raise living standards in harmony with nature; establish food security and self-sufficiency through organic farming; protect the natural environment; strengthen communities; encourage local participation in decision making;

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• •

promote culture and traditional knowledge; stem the rural–urban migration tide by providing opportunities for youth; and • foster a cooperative, productive, entrepreneurial, and self-reliant spirit.

The initiative was publicly launched on December 18–20, 2010, at the Chokyi Gyatso Institute, with participation of more than 500 officials, local representatives, and residents. Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley made the two-day overland journey to Samdrup Jongkhar to deliver the keynote address, and the event was well covered by the national press in Bhutan, including live television and radio broadcasts by the Bhutan Broadcasting Service. It was an auspicious, enthusiastic beginning to the project. To demonstrate our determination to move swiftly from good intentions to action, two top organic farmer trainers from Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya organic network spent five days after the launch ceremonies teaching 250 local farmers improved methods of composting, controlling biological pests, conserving soil, terracing, and boosting productivity. Since then SJI has trained hundreds more farmers and local agriculture officers in the best organic methods, with a current focus on saving and storing seeds and preserving local knowledge. SJI also supports local buying through a weekly organic produce market, formation of farmer groups and cooperatives, and awareness campaigns. Local shopkeepers no longer sell synthetic fertilizer. All this is starting to reverse trends that had prevailed prior to the SJI launch, in which local farmers were increasingly relying on hybrid seeds and chemicals and residents on imported conventional produce from Assam. As elsewhere in Bhutan, rural regions also had no proper waste disposal facilities to deal with the rapid influx of plastics into the country. SJI’s zero-waste initiatives have sharply reduced waste in the local area; Dewathang stores no longer give out plastic bags; and waste segregation stations have been installed. SJI has produced zero-waste training manuals, piloted zero-waste villages, started a highly successful zerowaste crafts cooperative, and dramatically reduced waste at village festivals, religious ceremonies, and other events at which SJI staff give out compostable banana leaf plates and bamboo cups.

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Such practices have started to spread simply through example. Samdrup Jongkhar municipality has now adopted key elements of the SJI waste management strategy. Several monasteries elsewhere in Bhutan have followed the Samdrup Jongkhar example by no longer allowing packaged or plastic-wrapped food offerings and by serving ritual feasts on banana leaves.15 A key SJI achievement to date is the creation of the Centre for Appropriate Technology at the local engineering college, which has designed solar dryers that use solar energy to dry vegetables and fruits hygienically, systems for rainwater harvesting, stations for waste segregation, and a micro-irrigation project. SJI has installed 125 solar dryers in remote villages, which enable villagers to extend their own consumption of home-grown produce far beyond the growing season and to add value to their farm products by producing dried fruits and vegetables to sell in the local market. SJI has trained villagers in solar technology and maintenance and repair of the dryers, and it installed waste segregation stations and rainwater harvesting systems at local schools; the latter vastly improve school sanitation, especially during the water shortages of the dry winter. SJI has reached out to youth through the creation of arts and writing camps, workshops, internships, reading stations, training programs, discussion groups, and more. It also has worked with local villagers to improve health, nutrition, sanitation, and housing; reduce high rates of alcoholism; and improve morale through participation in community activities. In close collaboration with Vandana Shiva, SJI also arranged for twenty-three Samdrup Jongkhar farmers and government agriculture officers to take a three-week organic study trip to India to see what works and what doesn’t. They got intensive training at the Navdanya organic farm in Dehradun and visited organic cooperatives that successfully market organic pickles, honey, produce, natural fruit preserves, and other foods as well as hand-knitted woolens. They also visited self-help groups that were restoring degraded local environments, planting trees, improving water supplies, and training local youth in masonry, carpentry, and as “barefoot engineers.” And in the Punjab, the Bhutanese farmers observed the effects of intensive chemical farming in degraded soil quality and

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reduced productivity, and they met families of farmers who had committed suicide due to rising debt from purchase of high-yield seeds and the increasingly heavy chemical inputs on which those seeds rely. Returning home, the Samdrup Jongkhar farmers talked of how inspired they were to see and learn how ordinary villagers in Uttarakhand had taken such initiative themselves to improve their environment and lives, and how local village youth had taken on interesting and meaningful work that gave them little temptation to migrate to the cities. And they could not get the despair of the Punjabi farmers out of their minds, swearing never to go down that deadly chemical road or to let their country do so. In organizing that organic India study tour, and in sending six illiterate village women for a six-month training course as “solar engineers” at the Barefoot College in Rajasthan, SJI broke new ground in another way. For Bhutanese, training abroad is a privilege usually reserved for civil servants—an opportunity no common farmer ever expects to have. Before their study visit to India, none of these Samdrup Jongkhar villagers had been on a train before, and most had never even been to their own country’s capital city, let alone to a huge city like Delhi, through which they passed. Now the villagers were proud to be their country’s ambassadors abroad and proud of their traditional farming methods. Karma Tenzin, age forty-four, from Phuntshothang, said: “This training gave me lots of encouragement to work as a farmer, and now I am really and truly proud to be a farmer.” In subtle ways SJI is thus also breaking down class barriers and promoting the dignity of rural labor. At the regional level the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative continues to move forward effectively not only in organic farming, zero waste, appropriate technology, and youth outreach initiatives but also with innovative GNH-based education and youth programs. Our GPI Atlantic team designed a five-lesson classroom science curricular unit on composting that brought together scientific analysis with traditional culture, organic farming, ecological literacy, and deep respect for all life forms. That unit was successfully pilot tested in some local schools, turned into a radio play, and broadcast nationwide by the Bhutan Broadcasting Service.

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In 2011, Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative founder Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche introduced a GNH-based educational program into his Chokyi Gyatso Institute and designated sixty of his students, age nine to fourteen, as the guinea pigs for that experiment. An experienced Canadian curriculum designer and a Bhutanese educator with a PhD in Transformative Education from the University of Massachusetts, both of whom deeply share the GNH vision, designed a grade 4–5 GNH curriculum based on the principles described in the previous chapter. That curriculum is now being implemented and taught by three experienced Bhutanese teachers, and a grade 6 curriculum is being developed. So the first phase of a full-fledged GNH education is happening after all, albeit at a limited local level in a remote corner of Bhutan. In that far-flung corner of the country, our teachers are bringing nature into the grade 4–6 classrooms and also are bringing the classroom into nature by teaching some core science classes in neighboring farmers’ fields, where students can study local plants and animals and learn where the rains come from, and how vegetables grow. We try to gear our learning units to the world in which our students live, so that learning is always interesting, practical, and relevant to their daily lived experience. Sample themes to date include the following, • Identity and community—who lives in the students’ local communities; what is their history; what are the local flora, fauna, and environments; what are local living conditions; and how do they relate to global conditions? As always, a core focus is compassion and interdependence, which are central to Bhutan`s ancient Buddhist wisdom. • Air—where it comes from, what’s in it, what it does. As part of this unit students built a weather station, barometer, and rain gauge; learned some basics about climate change; and did art projects on wind and air issues, pollution, flight, and breathing. • The human body—including basic anatomy, nutrition, health, and hygiene. With guidance from local elders (sometimes the students’ grandmothers), we take students out to identify traditional medicinal and healing plants and herbs.

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•

•

The food we eat—where it comes from, how we grow it, what people of other cultures eat, organic and chemical farming, what used to grow here and no longer does, what our grandparents can teach us about it. The students cultivate their own organic garden, growing fifteen plots of vegetables with local donated seeds and compost. They have built a seed bank that serves local farmers. Waste—different kinds (air, water, land) and their local and global impacts, and how we can reduce and reuse waste materials. Our students have taken the lead in local communities as exemplars of zerowaste practices. They will look strangely at you if they see you eating a bag of chips. If you ask, they proudly tell you they don’t buy plasticwrapped things.

Community service is already built into all we do there, and our students recently participated in a major local dump site cleanup to prevent polluting leachate from reaching the local river and water sources. These activities combine their service with learning some ecological science. We do not rely on the high-stakes academic testing that so often causes immense stress and feelings of failure. Instead, we assess our students individually, with testing used only as a measure of understanding and never a cause for failure. Every student is good at something, so we encourage the particular strengths and talents of individual students— whether written, musical, mechanical, poetic, mathematical, artistic, or in some other area. And those with a scholarly bent who want to pursue more advanced studies are encouraged, trained, and equipped to do so without suggesting that they are in any way superior to their classmates. In a world where indigenous languages and cultures are dying, we encourage the use of Sharchokpa, the region’s local language, which is predominant in eastern Bhutan but which is not used in government schools. There Dzongkha—the national language colloquially spoken in the west of the country—is prescribed. We also have focused on raising students’ English language skills, as these are crucial in today’s world, essential for any midlevel and higher studies, and necessary for any government work where English is on a par with the national language.

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Above all, we try to make learning fun and enjoyable, and we create opportunities for students to develop their creativity, artistic talent, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. This local initiative is being generously funded by the Alerce Trust, a small Scottish family foundation that shares our vision and also has supported our GPI work in Nova Scotia, the national Educating for GNH initiative, and, indeed, the writing of this book. Without such assistance in the future, and with only limited resources, this Samdrup Jongkhar educational initiative will have a long way to go in expanding the curriculum to higher grades, hiring and training teachers, and more before it can claim to be implementing and manifesting the GNH dream. But we’re at least moving in the right direction, and the current curriculum design effort and classes are creating a laboratory for developing GNH education prototypes at a modest local level. Within two years we expect to be far enough along to offer excellent, class-tested, multifaceted GNH-based curricular units and lesson plans to the Ministry of Education and schools nationwide. Already our local efforts have aroused the interest of many Samdrup Jongkhar teachers and school principals, with whom we meet and communicate regularly,  and we have offered six successful mindfulness workshops—each well attended by about fifty educators from around the country. Based on past experience, however, I expect no real response from the Ministry of Education, which would need to endorse the units and require their inclusion in existing curricula before formally being adopted by schools. But based on positive feedback to date and good relations with local educators, there’s a possibility that individual teachers and even principals in the Samdrup Jongkhar district may informally use some of our materials to enhance their existing classes. In all these ways—from agriculture to waste reduction to education— progress at the local level has struck me as remarkable, especially considering that nationally, prevailing trends are largely in the opposite direction—away from rather than toward GNH in action. I have already noted the national retreats from the 100 percent organic goal, from the Educating for GNH initiative, and from applying the GNH screening tool. Thimphu, the fastest-growing city in south Asia (though still

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relatively small as cities go), now produces more than thirty metric tons of waste a day; its sewage treatment plant and landfill are overwhelmed; and leaking toxins flow into the Thimphu River.16 Thimphu’s population mushroomed from an estimated 27,000 in 1990 to 80,000 in 2005 and 115,000 in 2017, and it continues to grow at 7–10 percent a year.17 Youth unemployment, drug addiction, and crime are growing problems— partly the outcomes of rapid rural–urban migration, which in turn has led to the breakdown of traditional social networks, extended families, and family ties. A recent study found that Bhutan’s incidence of “type 2 diabetes mellitus is very high and increasing at alarming rates. Bhutan has a notably high proportion of over-weight and obese population.”18 Such challenges have been fueled by more sedentary lifestyles as the rural population declines; desk jobs proliferate; and more people drive rather than walk. Additional factors are poor diet and lack of health awareness. And though life expectancy and average incomes increase, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow. In sum, several troubling national trends cast a long shadow over efforts to build a GNH society in practice. In that larger context, the positive forward momentum of the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative in building GNH locally is even more noteworthy.

AND NOW?

Despite the ongoing local success of the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative, hard experience has made me lower my gaze a lot in the last few years. I no longer have the illusion that these small local steps are going to be implemented anytime soon on the grand, national scale envisioned when Bhutan launched its 100 percent organic and Educating for GNH initiatives a decade ago. We are doing our best to counter the trends toward greater urbanization and depopulation of rural areas in Samdrup Jongkhar by providing good rural opportunities, but I have no illusion that we will turn back the long-term national rural-to-urban shift that seems to characterize development worldwide. And though our

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successes in organic farmer training, appropriate technologies such as solar dryers, and waste reduction are highly relevant to rural areas with large remaining farming populations and without waste disposal facilities, they are not necessarily applicable to cities even in Bhutan. For that one would have to look elsewhere. Nevertheless, as existing national and global systems increasingly falter, it is possible that grassroots local initiatives like ours and exemplary models worldwide may gradually become catalysts for significant change at higher levels. A local and regional initiative to put GNH into action, as SJI attempts to do, may not be as high profile or glamorous as larger-scale national programs, but of all the work I have undertaken in Bhutan, SJI still seems to have the greatest potential to act as a working model for wider application, at least in rural areas. It remains true to its original purpose and intention so far, and its on-the-ground achievements continue to exceed all our expectations. Whereas changes in government at the national level are able to derail many major initiatives undertaken by previous governments, local endeavors such as SJI can move forward along their chosen pathways without interference. British economist E. F. Schumacher had a point when he asserted that small is beautiful. In my past two decades of work trying to integrate social, economic, and environmental objectives in practice, SJI is where I have derived the greatest satisfaction. Local and remote though it is, the SJI initiative also seems far from parochial and has shown remarkable capacity to spread by simple example. If we can demonstrate the viability and success of GNH in action and of genuinely integrated development that enhances economic prosperity while at the same time fully protecting the natural environment and strengthening communities and local culture, then Samdrup Jongkhar could potentially be a showcase for a wider world in which these values are generally seen as trade-offs and choices. Such a statement might sound like hyperbole. After all, organic farming is also expanding rapidly in the West in response to growing demand, so why should a remote corner of southeast Bhutan going organic be anything special? There’s actually a big difference. In the West decisions to go organic are almost always personal decisions taken by individual

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farmers. It is extremely rare for a whole district or region to go organic as a matter of policy or collective decision. We have not yet systematically tracked the extent, progress and impact of a shift to organic farming in Samdrup Jongkhar. But if we could do so, especially using our full-cost accounting methods, we might demonstrate its longer-term viability in terms of productivity and market access as well as impacts on soil and water quality and on communities—especially in comparison with regions moving in exactly the opposite direction by embracing chemical fertilizer–dependent high-yield seeds. Such documentation might potentially have a powerful impact well beyond the region. The best analogy to our organic Samdrup Jongkhar goal is Sikkim, which, at the end of 2016, became India’s first fully organic state after a gradual thirteen-year conversion of 75,000 hectares of agricultural land. The same year, Sikkim was pronounced India’s cleanest state with the best-educated population.19 The big difference is that the Sikkim experiment was a government initiative supported by legislation and heavy penalties for use of chemicals, whereas the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative effort is entirely a voluntary civil society initiative over a much smaller area. But the Sikkim example also carries tough lessons. Although the produce grown by Sikkim’s 66,000 farmers is free of all chemicals or genetic modification, it is also smaller, less colorful, and more expensive than the nonorganic produce imported from Siliguri in neighboring West Bengal, and local consumers are hesitant to pay the higher prices.20 Families living on the edge and struggling to feed themselves cannot easily be persuaded that the long-term costs of degraded soil quality, polluted groundwater, seed dependence, and farmer debt in neighboring West Bengal outweigh their own short-term gains in buying chemically produced produce at lower prices. Bordering on Assam, with its cheap chemical-intensive agriculture, organic farmers and consumers in Samdrup Jongkhar face the same challenge, which may possibly be met only by targeting the burgeoning export markets for organic produce, particularly among India’s growing urban middle classes. At the same time, such a focus on exports rather than local supply itself undermines the SJI goal of a local self-reliant economy. In our globalized consumer-driven world, there are no easy answers.

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That conundrum well illustrates the experience described earlier in GPI Atlantic’s community work in Nova Scotia—namely, that communities have little, if any, control over national and global policies that directly affect their lives and that frustratingly limit the impact of local work. Nothing Sikkim or we in Samdrup Jongkhar can do will protect local organic growers from the cross-border flow of cheap, chemical-intensive produce; stop climate change impacts such as glacial melting; prevent the inflow of plastic waste; or change public school curricula. The same is true on the positive side. We cannot attribute the SJI success to date entirely to our own local efforts. Samdrup Jongkhar residents have benefited from nationwide improvements in economic prosperity over the last two decades. That in turn has certainly helped to increase their receptivity to our local SJI efforts, as those are not seen as undermining improvements in living standards attributable to external circumstances. Such challenges—though they must be addressed—do not mean we should give up or abandon our local efforts. On the contrary, as the next chapter illustrates, they only mean that we cannot abandon simultaneous higher-level efforts to move toward the new economic paradigm the world now needs. All the lessons of the chemical-intensive Green Revolution, with its impacts on soil quality, water contamination, and farmer debt, as well as hard global evidence of climate change, resource depletion, waste pollution, species extinction, and more, indicate that we must forge new pathways—including effective local experimentation. At the very least, SJI seems to be moving in the right direction with considerable success. Eleven years into the project, it remains too early to tell whether SJI will eventually trickle up to higher levels or remain a marginalized local effort. Aside from the few isolated examples I’ve mentioned of some SJI zero-waste initiatives being replicated elsewhere, so far there is no evidence of any such systematic trickling up to higher levels. Receptivity at the national level and beyond depends not just on the ground-level effectiveness and success of this community-based initiative but also on domestic and international political, economic, and cultural influences and interests far beyond SJI’s control. In the meantime, one thing has

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become clear to me: SJI can stand its ground, strengthen its community ties, and move forward with relatively little of the obstruction, opposition, and resistance I have witnessed at higher levels of governance.

TO DEWATHANG AND BACK

Because of my discouragement with some of the national work and the encouraging work at the community level, I made a commitment in late 2011 to devote increasing time, resources, and effort in Bhutan to the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative. I packed up my apartment in Bhutan’s capital city, Thimphu, crammed my tiny car full of my belongings, and set out cross country to move to the little village of Dewathang in Samdrup Jongkhar. I kept the front seat open for local Bhutanese hitchhikers, whom I picked up along the three-day, ten-hours-a-day drive across seven mountain ranges to reach Samdrup Jongkhar. Some of the roads and mountain passes were treacherously narrow, with steep drop-offs to the side and no guard rails, and sometimes with no space for two cars to pass each other. Despite breathtaking views, I kept my eyes firmly on the road. The last two hours of the third day, driving after dark in thick mist on a gravel road peppered with deep potholes along the mountain edge were particularly hair-raising. I arrived in Dewathang on a Monday night in early December 2011. Exhausted but immensely grateful to have arrived alive, I happily started unpacking my bags in the small room set aside for me at the Chokyi Gyatso Institute. The following morning, my cell phone rang. It was Prime Minister Thinley on the line. Could I return to Thimphu as quickly as possible? An urgent task had arisen on which he needed help.

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D

uring that Tuesday morning phone call in December 2011 asking me to return to the capital, the prime minister explained that Bhutan had, several months earlier, undertaken to host a meeting on April 2, 2012, at United Nations headquarters in New York. The subject: a new sustainable, global economic paradigm that balances social, economic, and environmental objectives. Unfortunately, he said, the renowned economist and UN adviser who had undertaken to organize this major event less than four months hence had so far failed to take action. Could I urgently coordinate and direct this effort instead? Bhutan’s international credibility was at stake, the prime minister went on, and going global in this way had the potential to be the fruition of  our shared dreams. After all, both the Fourth King’s and his own vision of Gross National Happiness was never that it was simply a good model for Bhutan alone; it could benefit the world. More than that, as the prime minister was acutely aware, Bhutan was not isolated from the global economic system and therefore could not easily implement its holistic development vision in isolation from the rest of the world. How could any country, much less tiny Bhutan, become a fully GNH country in a globalized economy driven by short-term material advantage? This quandary goes beyond immediate national policy to the physical reality of life on the planet today. Even if Bhutan

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remained a net carbon sink in perpetuity, absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits—as it had vowed to do at the Copenhagen Climate Summit two years previously—the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions in Chicago, Beijing, Sydney, London, Delhi, and elsewhere would still melt glaciers, burst glacial lake banks, and cause grievous flooding that would destroy towns and drown villagers in Bhutan. There was no way Bhutan could go it alone and create a fully GNH society based on the GDP-based global economy to which it was inextricably linked. So long as it was tied to the global energy-intensive growth imperative; dependent on foreign investment, trade, cheap imports, and cheap labor; and bound by a global accounting system that sidelines environmental and social costs as externalities, Bhutan would have only limited opportunities to bring GNH principles to fruition within its own borders. The gap between Bhutanese words and action described in the previous chapter is attributable in large part to this reality. Going global with its vision, said Prime Minister Thinley, was Bhutan’s only hope for itself and, in the bigger picture, for the world at large. One nation state, however small, willing to take the lead in adopting a new economic paradigm could certainly have a potentially powerful impact globally. I had two weeks of prearranged commitments in Dewathang, such as a ten-day organic farmer training session led by Navdanya’s chief soil scientist, Vinod Bhatt. Also on the docket was a scheduled visit with the head and top staff of the Ministry of Agriculture’s National Post-Harvest Centre to test our just-built prototype solar dryer—the first product of our newly created Centre for Appropriate Technology. But I could leave for the capital after that, I said. Just before Christmas I packed my car again and headed back to Thimphu. The drive was even scarier than the trip I had recently made in the opposite direction—for entirely different reasons. I had to go by way of Assam and West Bengal because Bhutan’s mountain passes were then covered by snow and ice and impassable. Anyone who has driven on India’s chaotic roads will immediately understand what it’s like to navigate honking high-speed trucks, buses, cars, and scooters, along with bicycles, pedestrians, children, goats, cows, and chickens, all

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of which seem to come from every direction at once. As well, Assam and West Bengal are two of India’s most strike-prone and troubled states, with roads frequently closed due to strikes, and money regularly and often illegally extorted on the Assam-West Bengal border in the name of various taxes by officials of several government and nongovernment groups.1 Road signage was largely nonexistent, and I had only the vaguest of directions. I was so anxious I hardly slept the night before. Reaching Assam the next day, I made a wrong turn and drove three hours out of my way in the wrong direction. A recurrent experience was swank new stretches of highway inviting 100 km/hour travel, abruptly ending with no advance warning until the car went sailing off the edge of the pavement into pothole-riddled gravel stretches of road works. But—to my surprise— I loved driving in India, the anarchic chaos a liberating relief from the rule-bound world to which I was accustomed. Maybe it was also sober preparation for the anarchic world of international politics, bound by no enforceable rules, into which I was about to set foot.

FROM THIMPHU TO THE UNITED NATIONS

Back in Thimphu, the prime minister made it clear that the new economic paradigm he wished Bhutan to promote globally at the UN meeting should follow the intent and logic of Bhutan’s November 2011 submission to the Rio  +  20 Summit.2 That gathering of world leaders would be held a few months later, in June 2012, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and to assess progress since that landmark event. Bhutan’s submission to Rio  +  20, widely regarded as the most radical and far reaching of all national submissions, called for “a new Bretton Woods.” That was a reference to the 730 delegates from the forty-four Allied nations gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 to create a new global monetary and financial system and new institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank deemed suitable for the postwar world.

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Those delegates, Bhutan noted, did not have our modern scientific knowledge on climate change, resource depletion, and the impact of human activity on the natural world. What was needed now was a new global sustainability-based economic paradigm based on respect for nature, equity, fair distribution, and full-cost national accounts, and replacing the current economic growth imperative with a broader quest for well-being. It’s unusual for a country and head of government to go out on a limb to the extent of challenging the most widely accepted conventional economic dogma and institutions and the very foundations of the existing economic system. Indeed, Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley had asked me about six months earlier to assist in researching and drafting that submission to Rio + 20. Of course I said yes. I was amazed and delighted that a leader had the courage to demand such radical transformation at a global level. In the light of subsequent events, maybe he went too far. But in December 2011, when the prime minister firmly assured me that what he wanted to present to the UN in April 2012 was the same as recently submitted for the Rio + 20 conference, I was hooked and threw every ounce of energy I had into the planning. The prime minister also emphasized that he wanted this to be a “high-level meeting” that would bring together top representatives of government and international organizations, leading economists and scholars, and religious and civil society leaders, among others. He gave me a dedicated assistant, two part-time helpers from the Foreign Ministry, and an office around the corner from his own. Our tiny team had just over three months to go from nothing to a meeting in which failure was not an option. For the first month we focused almost all our efforts on sending individually crafted letters of invitation to several hundred invitees. Each letter identified the particular expertise the person could contribute, and each was signed by the prime minister. I then invited a top-notch international team headed by economist Robert Costanza to come to Bhutan to help us prepare documentation, draft a tentative program, and outline intended follow-up steps to ensure that the meeting would have the best chance of leading to real action. We sought funding assistance for the event

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and tended to a host of logistical issues, including travel, venue, accommodation, and meals. Our tiny team, with volunteer partners we found in New York, even tried to ensure that the meeting itself would adhere to the principles we were trying to promote: minimizing use of plastic and sourcing local and sustainably grown produce for the day’s lunch. It all seemed an impossible feat, but amazingly, it worked! On April 2, 2012, at UN headquarters in New York, a remarkable, perhaps historic event took place. At the invitation of the Royal Government of Bhutan, 800 distinguished delegates gathered to lay the ground for a new economic system designed to nurture the well-being of all life on Earth based on a healthy balance among natural, human, social, cultural, and built assets. Ecological sustainability and the fair distribution and efficient use of resources would be key conditions for the new model. Participants included the president of Costa Rica, UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon, the presidents of the UN General Assembly and Economic and Social Council, the head of the UN Development Program and former New Zealand prime minister, the former president of Chile, government cabinet ministers from many countries and ambassadors to the United Nations, leading economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Lord Richard Layard, noted scholars and scientists such as Richard Davidson and Jonathan Patz, and prominent civil society, business, and spiritual leaders. Prince Charles addressed the gathering on video and praised Bhutan’s initiative. According to the Bhutan Mission to the United Nations, various delegates later remarked that they had never seen anything like it in the history of the UN. The wide diversity of delegates from dozens of countries, backgrounds, and professions—from staid diplomats and respected scholars to radical activists—ensured an equally wide diversity of views and agendas. Government ministers; delegation heads and representatives from India, China, Japan, the European Union, Australia, the United Kingdom, Thailand and many other countries, as well as heads of UN agencies, predictably touted their own countries’ and organizations’ progressive policies and actions. Religious heads cited their own faiths’ rejection of consumerist materialism and alignment with Bhutan’s humanist

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and spiritual vision. Psychologists such as Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, expressed a more individualist approach to realizing human happiness, and activists and environmentalists including Vandana Shiva and ecological economists such as Robert Costanza focused on issues of sustainability and social equity.3 Despite such widely disparate approaches and understandings, remarkable agreement was expressed among the 800 delegates about the flaws of the existing economic paradigm, the basic principles of a much-needed new system, and broad support for Bhutan’s initiative. The atmosphere for the full day was dynamic, lively, and collaborative. Bhutan’s prime minister pulled no punches in his opening statement to the meeting: The GDP-led development model that compels boundless growth on a planet with limited resources no longer makes economic sense. . . . Having far outlived its usefulness, our fundamentally flawed economic arrangement has itself become the cause of all problems. Within its framework, there lies no solution to the economic, ecological, social, and security crises that plague the world today and threaten to consume humanity. . . . We desperately need an economy that serves and nurtures the wellbeing of all sentient beings on earth and human happiness that comes from living life in harmony with the natural world, with our communities, and with our inner selves. We need an economy that will serve humanity, not enslave it. It must prevent the imminent reversal of civilization and flourish within the natural bounds of our planet while ensuring the sustainable, equitable and meaningful use of precious resources. Business as usual cannot go on, and tinkering with the existing system will not do. We need a fundamental transformation.  .  .  . Our goal today is to launch the initiative for such a transition. To that ambitious end, concrete outcomes and action steps are what must come out of this meeting.4

To convince participants that this vision was no mere conceptual pie in the sky dream and to ensure that the day’s discussions would go beyond

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vague and high-sounding philosophy, Bhutan had sent participants a ream of advance documentation, on which I’d worked with Prime Minister Thinley, Robert Costanza and his team, and other scholars, detailing what concrete features, characteristics, and policy outcomes a sustainable and equitable new economy might have.5 (See chapter 15 for examples.) In his opening remarks, HRH the Prince of Wales immediately made the case for full-cost accounting: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis [and] . . . the time for us to act is rapidly running out. . . . We must have better information about the value of the Earth’s ecosystems to the economy and society as a whole, as well as the social, environmental and economic costs of what we do.”6 Laura Chinchilla, president of Costa Rica, which has some of the greenest policies in the world and regularly ranks first in the Happy Planet Index, then remarked that well-being can be nourished only through the interaction of economic, social, cultural, environmental, and spiritual factors. UN Under Secretary-General and former President of Chile7 Michelle Bachelet cited statistics on global poverty, deprivation, lack of sanitation, and more. She argued, “We need a new paradigm that places fair distribution at its heart.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gave a detailed analysis of the failures of GDP as a measure of economic health and wellbeing and summarized the main findings and recommendations of his commission to produce better measures of progress.8 Economist Jeffrey Sachs cited studies showing that greater income and affluence do not lead to greater life satisfaction, and Mathis Wackernagel, cocreator of the Ecological Footprint, warned that humanity is now in serious “ecological overshoot.” He stated that people are using 60 percent more resources than can be renewed, a number that has now alarmingly risen to 70 percent. And Vandana Shiva noted that this UN session was “timely and urgent” and needed to create a “new paradigm that shifts the economy back to its roots in natural, social, and cultural wealth.” Enrico Giovannini, economics professor, president of the Italian Statistical Institute, former Italian labour minister and OECD chief statistician, said “fair distribution” in the new economic paradigm must address both “intra-generational” and “inter-generational” inequality.

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Thailand’s vice-minister of foreign affairs and special envoy of the Thai prime minister, spoke of his country’s “sufficiency economy” based on moderation rather than greed and limitless consumption as a “concept that will anchor sustainability.” China’s ambassador to the UN said that the existing development model must be replaced by one that balances “economic and social development and environmental protection.” And other country delegates seemed to compete with each other in praising Bhutan for triggering a movement that urgently needed to be actualized. These remarks give some sense of the expressed support for and potential momentum toward a new economic paradigm based on ecological sustainability, fair distribution, and efficient resource use to replace the present GDP-based system focused on economic growth. Finally, it seemed, a sovereign nation state was putting into words and action what had long been in the hearts and minds of so many. The big question, of course, was whether all of these fine sentiments and the vision they expressed would be followed by concrete action. Not surprisingly, the statements of diplomats in particular were notably devoid of concrete or far-reaching commitments. But—perhaps aided by the grand environs of UN headquarters—the atmosphere among the overflow gathering of more than 800 delegates was one of hope and possibility. The April 2 UN meeting captured the imagination of participants, and hopes for real and concrete action to transform the world’s economy were high. Addressing the buoyant mood in the assembly, Bhutan’s prime minister closed the proceedings with a sober caution that it was too early to celebrate. Celebration, he said, would wait until concrete global measures were instituted to implement such a new economic paradigm in practice.

FLESHING OUT A NEW ECONOMY

To chart next steps and craft practical follow-up actions, participants were invited to stay for two more days. Amazingly, more than two hundred of them did so. They divided into smaller groups and met again

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on the evening of April 4, with Bhutan’s prime minister in the chair, to share their recommendations. There was widespread agreement that the next step must be the convening of an expert commission to flesh out and elaborate the dimensions and details of the proposed new economic paradigm to help ensure that the new economy would be realized in practice. An initial proposal, it was hoped, would be presented at the fall 2012 meeting of the UN General Assembly. The prime minister was asked, and agreed, to coordinate these tasks and also to initiate concrete steps that nations could take without delay to move toward a sustainable and equitable new economy based in part on recommendations emerging from the three days of UN meetings. Once we were back in Bhutan, intensive correspondence and phone calls with key participants resulted in our assembling an initial list of renowned economists and other experts and scholars who might be invited to join the proposed “new economic paradigm expert commission.” We also carefully reviewed all the follow-up recommendations of the April 3–4 working groups and identified twelve practical actions that could begin to move the world quickly in the direction of a new economy. The prime minister wrote to all the world’s heads of state encouraging them to take immediate action to remove perverse subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuels, agrochemical inputs, junk food advertising, and other harmful activities. He urged them to reinvest those subsidies in green technologies, renewable energy, energy efficiency, poverty alleviation, health promotion, public transit, watershed protection, and other beneficial actions. He asked high-income countries to transfer green technologies and information to low-income nations so the latter could shift rapidly to sustainable production methods without loss of competitive advantage. He urged governments to adopt new progress measures, full-cost accounts, payments for ecosystem services, and ecological tax reforms and to procure supplies from local, organic, and fair-trade sources. He proposed a number of measures to reduce systemic inequalities such as work-sharing programs, equitable access to credit, taxation on unearned income such as land and currency speculation, and increased tax progressivity. He promised to convene the expert commission within three months and an international conference within three years to fine tune and officially adopt a concrete plan to implement

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the new economic paradigm. That formal gathering was to be the new Bretton Woods to which Bhutan’s Rio + 20 submission referred. Such a letter to powerful heads of state from a tiny least-developed country might seem more than presumptuous, and not surprisingly, it was largely ignored. Those few governments that responded simply noted the good things they were already doing but did not undertake to implement any of the prime minister’s specific recommendations. Still, Prime Minister Thinley was determined to maintain the momentum and press forward on what would clearly be a long, uphill battle to replace the deeply entrenched global economic system. He remained convinced that the future of the planet depended on it, and he was prepared to do all he could to make that happen. And, indeed, there was reason to feel encouraged. In the months that followed the remarkable gathering in New York, its energy and language reverberated widely. As cited earlier, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who had addressed the April 2 meeting, six weeks later told attendees at a U.N State of the World Economy meeting unequivocally: “The old model is broken. We need to create a new one. . . . In this time of global challenge, even crisis, business as usual will not do.” He urged “a shared vision for the future” and “a revolution in our thinking” toward “a new paradigm” in which “human capital and natural capital are every bit as important as financial capital.”9 In June 2012, two months after the UN meeting in New York, I joined the prime minister and other Bhutan government delegates to carry the message to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development—the Rio + 20 Summit that brought together 192 countries, including 88 heads of state and government, to shape global environmental policy. Prime Minister Thinley’s words at the summit were possibly the strongest of any leader. He noted frankly that far from making progress since the landmark 1992 Rio Earth Summit, humankind had accelerated its destructive trajectory: Society is crumbling, climate is changing, ecosystems are collapsing, resources are depleting, and civilization is clearly headed backward. . . . As species die in quick succession, mankind’s own extinction draws nearer. . . . Sustainable development is not a choice. It is an absolute necessity.10

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Within that stark context, Thinley went on to describe the world’s abysmal record since the initial 1992 Rio conference, the urgent need for a new economy, and the results of the April 2 meeting at UN headquarters. After the prime minister returned to his seat, Bolivian President Eva Morales, seated next to Bhutan in the UN alphabetical seating system, leaned over and said to him, “That’s the first speech I’ve applauded this whole conference.”11 Bhutan’s daring efforts, as expressed by the prime minister, were a momentary bright spot in a summit widely seen as an “epic failure,”12 full of hot air and devoid of accomplishment—a view I certainly shared from all I observed. The three-day 2012 meeting produced so few specifics, targets, or tangible decisions that people started calling it “Rio minus 20.” Even the Rio + 20 secretary-general, Sha Zukang of China, called the final fifty-eight-page conference document “an outcome that makes nobody happy,” and the Greenpeace director called it “the longest suicide note in history.”13 Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson put it succinctly: “This possibility of a once in a generation moment passed us by and we will regret it.” She went on: “The leaders gathered here came without an intergenerational vision and they failed to rise to the challenge; they did not break their ties with the old ways of doing things— ways that are proved to be unsustainable and inequitable.”14 Aside from drafting and delivering speeches and meeting other leaders, our Bhutan delegation had another agenda at Rio. Prime Minister Thinley and I took full advantage of the opportunity to talk with many of the top experts gathered there, who in turn recommended other top scholars around the world to complete our roster of the members of what we called the International Expert Working Group that Bhutan had been tasked in April with assembling to elaborate the characteristics of a new economic paradigm. Invitations to potential working group participants were sent in the following weeks, selections were made, and on July 28, 2012, the King of Bhutan issued a royal edict to formally convene the group. The International Expert Working Group, consisting of more than seventy international economists, scientists, and scholars, would prepare detailed documentation that included literature reviews and examinations of existing best

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practices on what they proposed the actual workings of the new model should be. It had taken a full three months to assemble the expert group, and there was no way it could present findings to the upcoming fall UN General Assembly, as expressed at the April 2 UN meeting. But through intensive collaborative work over the coming year, the experts expected to have provisional conclusions and recommendations to present to the following year’s (2013) session of the General Assembly. Bhutan’s April 2 UN meeting had spelled out consensus principles for the desired new economy. Its overriding purpose was to enhance human happiness and the well-being of all life; it should function within the finite capacity of the Earth to support life without degrading nature or depleting the world’s precious resources; and it should be set up to ensure that resources were not only used efficiently but also distributed fairly and equitably. These basic principles are elaborated in chapter 15 and point to the potential structure and mechanisms of a new economic paradigm. The job of the new working group was to explore what a viable system designed to achieve those goals might look like. Which policies, structures, and institutions would be needed to make such a system work in practice? What kinds of measurement and accounting systems and governance, resource, investment, financial, trade, and regulatory mechanisms would be required? Work began in earnest that July, even before the group was formally convened by the king. Prime Minister Thinley, members of Bhutan’s UN delegation, and I met members of the group in October on the fringes of the 2012 General Assembly meeting in New York to agree on the working group’s objectives, structure, and operating principles; to create a work plan and timeline; and to assign research tasks. Those experts who were unable to come to New York joined the discussions by Skype. The International Expert Working Group did not intend to reinvent the wheel or to create something entirely new. Rather, our goal was to build on the best models, examples, and practices that already existed in incipient form in different parts of the world. Leading economists, ecologists, and other scientists had already crafted key elements of a new paradigm, though they had never worked together and in concert in the way

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that was now intended. Perhaps the unique element of what was happening was simply that the effort was now being spearheaded by a sovereign nation state, albeit a small one, and member of the United Nations.

THE UNRAVELLING

And then the entire process of the previous year gradually started to unravel. If Prime Minister Thinley, the expert working group members, and I hadn’t been carried away by our own wave of enthusiasm, passion, and hope, we would have seen the warning signs long before we did. Perhaps precisely because Bhutan was so blunt in its critique of the current economic system, and because Bhutan’s initiative held such promise and spoke so clearly to widespread and deeply held aspirations in the worlds of science, economics, and civil society, it also aroused concomitant opposition from powerful sources with vested interests in the status quo. Not long after Bhutan publicly submitted its Rio + 20 statement in November 2011 calling for a new economic paradigm, three senior World Bank representatives arrived on the doorstep of the prime minister’s office and insisted that all references to a “new Bretton Woods” be expunged from the documentation. In its Rio submission, Bhutan invited all UN member states to a new Bretton Woods to be hosted by Bhutan in 2014 to devise a new economic order based on sustainability principles. Bhutan’s Rio submission noted, When the Bretton Woods conference of 1944  .  .  . created institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to regulate the present global economic system, economists did not consider that nature’s capacity to support human economic activity might have limits. . . . [J]ust as Bretton Woods 1944 established the World Bank and IMF to manage the old growth-based economic paradigm, so the new Bretton Woods will require us to re-design and refashion these global institutions to manage and regulate the new system.15

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Not surprisingly, the World Bank strongly objected to an initiative calling for its replacement or redesign to meet sustainability rather than growth criteria. Was Bhutan, an aid-dependent nation still officially classified as one of the “least developed” in the world, really in a position to take on the global economic order? It was too late to retract Bhutan’s Rio submission, which the UN had already publicly posted. But Bhutan was a recipient of World Bank aid, and it quickly dropped from all subsequent documents any references both to Bretton Woods and to Bhutan’s intention to host a new Bretton Woods conference. And then, as Bhutan’s UN initiative began to gain traction in the second half of 2012 and the experts launched into their work, the government of India, Bhutan’s powerful neighbor to the south, weighed in. So long as insignificant little Bhutan only made harmless and nonthreatening noises about happiness, India had looked on benignly. But Bhutan’s global grandstanding at the United Nations and in Rio, and the expressed support for Bhutan’s new economic paradigm initiative from the UN secretary-general and numerous respected diplomats, economists, scholars, and religious leaders in both venues and in our International Expert Working Group, were not only easing Bhutan out of the sphere of India’s hitherto unchallenged suzerainty16 but also challenging the foundation of India’s own economic structure. In the fall of 2012, India’s Foreign Ministry sent the Bhutan government a detailed and highly critical analysis of its core new paradigm proposals and made clear that it did not support many of them, particularly those, such as weaning economic development away from reliance on fossil fuels, that could undermine its own growth. Bhutan’s complete economic and strategic dependence on India made the government highly susceptible to India’s influence, and it could not ignore the Indian Foreign Ministry memorandum. Not only did India have a strong political and strategic presence in Bhutan as India’s buffer state and bulwark against China, but 70 percent of Bhutan’s foreign aid, virtually its entire five-year plan, and much of its road building were funded by India. These were not the only forces challenged by Bhutan’s new economic proposal. Bhutan’s Foreign Ministry began to get cold feet as it became increasingly concerned about potentially alienating the country’s friends,

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allies, and donors, including European nations, the Asian Development Bank, and others still wedded to the conventional system. Step by step, the bold plans set at the April 2 meeting; the intentions, direction, and mandate of the working group; and even the language being used were watered down and compromised. The first step was a decision by Prime Minister Thinley, under advice and urging from the Foreign Ministry, to change the language from “new economic paradigm,” which was seen as too threatening to existing institutions, to “new development paradigm.” Then, in late 2012 and early 2013, the carefully considered new economy framework, with its principles of sustainability, fair distribution, and efficient resource use, was gradually dismantled and then abandoned. The expert working group’s mandate was watered down, its timeline vaguely extended, its work on sensitive issues shelved, and the premises of the April 2 UN meeting steadily eroded. These moves, taken together, should have been enough to mark the end of Bhutan’s new economic paradigm initiative, but it took many more nails in the coffin before it finally was put to rest. To understand how all this happened, it’s necessary to note that unlike expert working groups in some other situations, ours was not independent and able simply to do its work and issue its report. It remained under the close direction and control of the government of Bhutan. In addition to appointing the International Expert Working Group consisting of mostly foreign experts and scholars, the King of Bhutan also officially appointed a steering committee to direct the whole endeavor. That group was made up of the prime minister, the foreign secretary, three other senior Bhutanese officials, and myself. In addition, a secretariat was appointed to administer the project—of which I was also a member. Wearing a third hat, I was also designated the research director overseeing the working group’s research. The gradual demise of Bhutan’s new economic paradigm initiative played out in the increasingly shaky and tense relations among these three groups. In the late fall of 2012, distinguished international members of the expert working group were increasingly and unjustly accused by key members of the steering committee and Foreign Ministry and by other government officials of using Bhutan to further their own agendas, of

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subverting Bhutan’s interests and of misusing Bhutan’s unique GNH philosophy for their own purposes. These scholars were people who cared deeply about the future of the planet and of humanity and who were delighted to find their concern shared by the head of a sovereign nation state willing to take the lead in creating a better future for humankind. The accusations, I felt, stemmed instead from intense external pressure combined with a deep conservatism and fear of taking the leap into a future that would throw up challenge after challenge to existing ideas, lifestyles, and economic and social structures. Whatever the underlying motivations, by late 2012, an unpleasant atmosphere of distrust had overtaken the initiative, and Bhutan’s relations with working group members had frayed. Consensus was quickly growing among Bhutan’s elite and upper reaches of the bureaucracy that the country should return to the safe confines within which GNH had previously been defined. The new development paradigm, they said, should focus firmly on happiness as the goal, and its framework should be the nine domains of GNH measured in Bhutan’s GNH survey rather than foreign concepts such as living within planetary limits, fair distribution, and efficient resource use that were not “Bhutanese.” Having played a key role in assembling the members of the working group, I found my position in the middle increasingly untenable. In vain I tried to defend the integrity of the experts and argued that GNH was a much bigger and wider concept than particular categories such as those nine domains: standard of living, health, education, culture, time use, psychological well-being, community well-being, and ecological diversity. In any case those were not particularly Bhutanese but simply convenient measurement baskets I’d largely borrowed from the Canadian Index of Wellbeing. On the surface, efforts were made to keep going as planned, especially as Bhutan had so publicly made resounding commitments in the international arena about its future direction that could not easily be retracted, at least not publicly. But beneath the surface, the new economic paradigm initiative was being subverted and undermined. The prime minister tried to navigate the increasingly stormy waters, but his larger vision was not shared even by many close colleagues. He came

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under tremendous pressure to shift the direction of the initiative back to a more Bhutan-centric focus on happiness, emphasizing its psychological rather than economic, environmental, and social dimensions. Fortunately, the Working Group experts remained committed: none pulled out even as their work remained stalled through the waning months of 2012. As we’ll see, many continue to collaborate to this day, albeit without Bhutan, to advance the work on which we embarked in 2012. The conflicts came to a head at a week-long January 2013 meeting of the International Expert Working Group held in Thimphu. Steering Committee and Secretariat members made strenuous efforts to focus discussions entirely on the happiness dimension and to short-circuit work on the sustainability, equity, and resource-use dimensions of the new paradigm; their priority was on the subjective and psychological rather than economic and environmental issues. Having been aware of this intention prior to the meeting, I had expressed grave concern in Secretariat and Steering Committee meetings that most International Expert Working Group members were being invited to the meeting under false pretences—on the assumption that they had a mandate to proceed with their work as previously defined, when in fact there was a hidden agenda to stop that work in its tracks. At the meeting itself I tried to steer discussions back to the original mandate but to no avail. Halfway through the gathering, as several economists and environmentalists expressed growing concern and frustration at the apparent evisceration of the larger vision, the endeavor seemed on the verge of collapse. The day was temporarily saved and severe embarrassment avoided largely through the consummate diplomatic skill of International Expert Working Group member Enrico Giovannini, former OECD chief statistician. Outside the meeting hall, Enrico drew a complex flow chart in a patch of dark soil, brilliantly linking the original working group mandate with Bhutan’s original GNH formulation, with its four pillars and nine domains, so that everyone would be happy! It is no coincidence that Giovannini played a similar role in saving the famous Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, appointed by French President Sarkozy to recommend new progress measures, from collapse over substantive divisions among its members. His critical role taught me that

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aside from experts, a good team has to include at least a few members who are highly skilled in the arts of diplomacy, good listening, and negotiation. Later the same day, Bhutan’s king and queen charmed our working group guests at an upbeat reception, and the meeting ended warmly. But the divisions had been only momentarily papered over, and the flicker of hope Enrico had sparked quickly died. The prime minister himself continued to be buffeted by intense pressures from all sides. I  quickly found my own position quite impossible. On the one hand, I’d played a major role in recruiting the working group members; on the other hand, as a Steering Committee and Secretariat member, I represented the government of Bhutan as the main liaison with these experts. But unable to tell the international experts frankly that various Bhutanese officials were suspicions of their motives, I was simply no longer able to communicate with them openly, freely, and in a spirit of getting the best possible job done. I found myself caught in the middle of a web of deception, eager to see the work proceed as originally intended but unable to override the brakes being applied by Bhutanese officials. By early 2013, it had become apparent that we could not fulfill the mandate on which we’d agreed and that any report presented to the United Nations would be vapid rather than substantive. I found myself increasingly at odds especially with my Bhutanese work colleagues in the Secretariat and Steering Committee who ever more insistently accused working group members of using Bhutan for their own ends. That, I knew, was patently untrue. These were highly intelligent and distinguished scholars and thinkers such as Enrico Giovannini, Richard Wilkinson, Herman Daly, Ernst von Weizsaecker, Jacqueline McGlade, Ashok Khosla, Frances Moore Lappe, Tim Jackson, David Suzuki, Gus Speth, Robert Costanza, Juliet Schor, William Rees, Mathis Wackernagel, Richard Heinberg, and Jonathan Patz. All were deeply concerned for the future of humanity, sharing Bhutan’s philosophy of integrating the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of reality, and grateful for Bhutan’s example and initial courage in bringing the issues to the international arena. Though it was not said openly at this stage, I suppose that as a foreigner, I was seen as far too sympathetic with our foreign experts and

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insufficiently loyal to Bhutan’s interests. But a few months later, having defended the integrity of the working group members in the face of efforts by some officials to disparage their motives, and having questioned the Foreign Ministry’s undercutting of Bhutan’s bold initiative by bowing to external pressures, I was accused by two Secretariat colleagues of disloyalty to Bhutan. Of course, having put in nine years of voluntary service to the country, I vigorously rejected that label and bluntly told these colleagues that true loyalty to any vision, country, leader, or national interest requires intelligent critique and courage. In the heated exchange, I argued that blind obedience to misguided and cowardly bureaucratic pressure could subvert a country’s best interests and had far more to do with political correctness than loyalty. The whole period is still distressing to recall. By the time of the January 2013 International Expert Working Group meeting in Thimphu, the writing was already on the wall. And so, shortly after that meeting, I asked the prime minister to be relieved of my responsibilities as research director for the working group and requested his consent to resign from the Secretariat and Steering Committee that were overseeing the new development paradigm initiative as a whole. Given the circumstances, I could not do the job he’d asked me to do, I said, and I did not want to add to the evident growing disharmony. The prime minister refused to accept my resignation, insisted he needed me to continue, and told me I was representing him in those groups. I did my best and stuttered on, trying to keep good relations with everyone, listen and respond as best I could, and come up with language and documents that would make everyone happy. But it was painful to play that bureaucratic game, bite my tongue continuously, and see a noble and urgent vision dissipate. In the end, Bhutan saved face by maintaining the appearance of the mandate that it had set at the UN conference on April 2, 2012, but the substance was gone. The entire project was torpedoed by the July 2013 elections in Bhutan that saw the prime minister (whose initiative this was) soundly defeated, in large part due to India’s intervention. The government of India had become increasingly discomfited by Prime Minister Thinley’s pursuit of an independent foreign policy and expansion of Bhutan’s diplomatic ties.

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India also objected strongly to Thinley’s meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the sidelines of the Rio  +  20 Conference in 2012, and wanted a more compliant leadership in Bhutan. And so, a few days before the election, India removed its subsidies on kerosene and cooking gas, sending a strong message of displeasure with the Thinley government. Prices on these basic commodities doubled and tripled, and the opposition seized on the issue with a promise to restore good relations with India and thereby, implicitly, to restore the subsidies and lower prices. The election was influenced by other economic factors as well, such as a major outflow of Indian rupees, which dampened capital investment and led to restrictions on auto and industry imports. The opposition had promised to stimulate the economy, solve the rupee crisis, resume imports, produce jobs, and focus on local economic priorities rather than the existing government’s more global agenda. Although these factors and India’s intervention influenced the election’s outcome more than any overt unpopularity, the result still signaled the death knell of many of Prime Minister Thinley’s dreams and goals. In the new government, GNH took a back seat, and Bhutan overtly embraced a more conventional economic growth-based development path. The final new development paradigm document that Bhutan submitted to the United Nations in December 2013 settled largely for vague generalities and contained no concrete proposals for the types of governance, resource, investment, financial, trade, and regulatory policies and mechanisms that were—and still are—needed to change the structure and direction of the world’s economies. The April 2 UN meeting outcomes and policy recommendations were gone. But because a document was submitted, Bhutan could say it had fulfilled its commitment. After being launched with trumpets blaring nearly two years earlier, the whole initiative faded with barely a whimper and no publicity. Perhaps the final blow has been the erasure of any memory of the initiative. The Bhutan government website for the April 2, 2012 United Nations meeting (www.2apr.gov.bt) was quickly deleted and its extensive treasure trove of original materials prepared for the UN meeting by both participants and the Government of Bhutan itself has been irretrievably lost. The subsequent (and much tamer) new development

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paradigm website also vanished. Bhutan’s radical official submission to the Rio + 20 Conference—the one calling for “a new Bretton Woods”— can no longer be found on any government or United Nations website. Bhutan’s new economic paradigm initiative has been disappeared. History has been effectively rewritten. Deeply disappointed, I finally resigned in December 2013 from the project’s Steering Committee and Secretariat. With both a heavy heart and considerable relief, I moved back to Samdrup Jongkhar in remote southeastern Bhutan. It was exhilarating to return to an environment that by comparison felt so untainted, earthy, simple, and straightforward. It was as if a fresh breeze had swept away an intolerable personal burden. I resumed my work with the community-based Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative, which moved forward in accord with its original mandate to realize GNH in practice on the ground, seemingly oblivious to the dramatic changes at the national level.

14 CAN GENUINE PROGRESS REALLY HAPPEN?

M

uch as I’m addicted to happy endings, it’s clear that this twenty-year journey from Nova Scotia to New Zealand to Bhutan in search of a new economy has seen disappointments as deep as hopes have been high. In the course of that journey, I have learned at least as much from our failures as from our achievements. On the scale of failures, the demise of Bhutan’s new economic paradigm initiative ranks close to the top of the scale. So what can we learn? At the upper levels of operation—provincial, national, and especially international—I’ve found that four things consistently seem to happen. First, proposals get mired in bureaucracies that, by their nature, are threatened by change, typically function to maintain the status quo, and fend off anything that rocks the boat. In the International Expert Working Group case, it was Bhutan’s Foreign Ministry. In other Bhutan initiatives described in the preceding chapters, it was the Agriculture and Education Ministries. In Nova Scotia, when we introduced work-sharing solutions, it was the province’s Department of Human Resources. In the case of the Bhutanese Foreign Ministry, maintaining the status quo consisted largely in not imperiling existing relations with India, donor agencies, and other countries, all of which had a stake in the existing economic system and could potentially threaten key Bhutanese revenue streams. For Agriculture Ministry scientists and officials schooled in

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the chemical-intensive view and methods of India’s Green Revolution, status quo maintenance meant resisting the changes required for Bhutan to become the world’s first 100 percent organic nation state. For Education Ministry officials, rewriting the entire curriculum, producing new texts, and radically retraining teachers was, understandably, too daunting a task. In Nova Scotia overall, as we saw, maintenance of the status quo meant sticking to the conventional GDP-based measures of progress used universally rather than adopting a Genuine Progress Index that would sharply shift policy priorities. In the work sharing initiative described in chapter 5, it meant that human resources bureaucrats preferred the simplicity of massive layoffs as a strategy to reduce the government deficit rather than retooling their staff and salary database and changing their books to incorporate voluntary work-time reductions that could have avoided layoffs. Witnessing these bureaucratic realities close up has taught me something about the limits of political power, even of a government head with a strong parliamentary majority. In my experience Prime Minister Thinley was an exceptional leader with remarkable intelligence and genuine vision and concern for the world. But he could not transform the government’s orientation on his own. Already, he once confessed to me, he was seen as being too much of a micromanager, with ministries subtly rebelling against his interventions on matters of detail. Without the bureaucracy fully on his side, he simply could not get his ministries to carry out the major changes he wanted to initiate. On numerous occasions I observed officials, having mastered the art of telling the prime minister what they knew he wanted to hear in line with his vision, quietly acting otherwise in their daily work. Too often, I saw, the prime minister believed and accepted what he was being told as reality when in fact many of his directives were being stalled and sidelined. Of course, the problem was not just the bureaucracy. The prime minister could not easily imbue even his Cabinet colleagues, advisers, and political party with his own vision and farsightedness. At the same time, personal loyalty to long-time colleagues and associates stopped him from replacing some of them with those who were more sympathetic

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to his aspirations. Beyond that, he had no strong and active social base, continued to be seen as a member of Bhutan’s privileged aristocracy, and could not easily dent the materialist aspirations of some of his country folk. Nor did his government’s major achievements in extending health care, education, electricity, safe drinking water, and mobile phone access to all citizens overcome the cynicism of those who saw a gap between GNH vision and philosophy on the one hand and action on the other. Although Educating for GNH, the intent to go organic, the development of a vibrant GNH Centre true to his vision, the new GNH measures and accounts, and other initiatives were generally well reported by the media, those endeavors never seemed to capture the imagination of the population at large. Today Bhutan is no further along the road to modeling a new approach to education than it is to becoming 100 percent organic in its agriculture or demonstrating a new economic paradigm in action. Occasional lip service continues to be paid to GNH, as it must be, considering that it is enshrined in Article 9 of Bhutan’s constitution.1 The concept also has a certain cachet to it, of which any government would seek to take advantage. But too often I have witnessed (and been party to) a sad failure to turn noble ideas and speeches into action. The reliance of GNH actions on the prime minister alone, which initially seemed so promising in having a head of government believe and expound a vision that was elsewhere on the fringe, proved to be a fatal weakness. A second, and perhaps almost self-evident, observation is that proposed social and economic changes of significance inevitably come up against powerful vested interests that have a large stake in business as usual and will insist on its maintenance. The two examples mentioned in the preceding chapter of such powerful actors in the Bhutan case— the World Bank and the government of India—were by no means the only ones. And in Nova Scotia we saw how threatened the forest industry was by GPI Atlantic’s appraisal of the degraded state of the province’s forests due to existing clear-cutting methods. To this day unsustainable harvest practices continue as before, and the province’s Department of Natural Resources remains firmly hand in glove with the industry. Later in this

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chapter, we’ll look at the toughest vested interest of all—the nature and structure of capitalism itself. Third—and perhaps most insidious and hardest to detect, expose, and thwart—noble initiatives may be co-opted and thereby eviscerated and watered down. As I noted in chapter 10, this has happened with the happiness movement and the World Happiness Report, which was born at Bhutan’s April 2, 2012, UN meeting but failed to include a single environmental dimension. And it happened at the April 2 UN meeting itself with the many ambassadors and cabinet ministers from different countries who recognized the popularity of Bhutan’s initiative. Perhaps they felt they had no choice but to ride its wave and make the right noises about the need for change, the importance of environment, and the inadequacy of GDP. But their remarks at the microphone that day betrayed their lack of commitment and understanding. Co-optation goes beyond such lack of commitment. It involves, for example, the mainstreaming of radical initiatives so that they conveniently fit existing parameters and assumptions and allow business as usual and untrammeled growth to continue under the guise of high-sounding labels such as “sustainable development,” “care for the environment,” and “inclusion.” So on April 2, a number of Indian, Chinese, European, and other diplomats donned the mantle of the new economic paradigm with no intention of forsaking their growth agendas or reducing unrestrained consumption. (The USA ignored the entire initiative.) Co-optation of noble intention has happened time and again through misuse of the word “sustainability.” The Irving Company in eastern Canada called itself the “sustainable forest company” and trumpeted its “investment in a sustainable future” even as it continued to clear-cut forests at an increasing rate. Its narrow definition of “sustainability” meant replacing as much fiber as it extracted, even when it was replacing an old, diverse, multiage, multispecies forest with a single-age, single-species monoculture plantation. “Greenwashing” is another name for this strategy, and it has become a subspecialty of the advertising industry. Knowing of consumers’ growing ecological concerns, oil companies that have spilled oil into wildlife

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refuges show employees protecting cute animals; the nuclear industry promotes clean energy while its reactors spill radioactive materials; and the bottled water and egg industries show images of rugged mountains, pristine lakes, and green farmlands while they create massive waste and cram hens into overcrowded cages. Even though they know that plastic recycling isn’t economically viable and that eighty percent of plastics don’t get recycled, the plastics industry, chemical companies and retailers promote recycling in order to sell more plastic and divert public attention from their sale of toxic products.2 Co-opting principled initiatives also can happen much more subtly. Subversion of the intent of Bhutan’s UN initiative was manifested in expressed support for a new economic paradigm, sustainability, and poverty alleviation while at the same time dodging equity issues and failing to challenge the dominant growth syndrome or the excess consumption of the rich. That position skilfully uses progressive language to avoid touching any politically sensitive hot potato. Such co-optation, of course, is not confined to Bhutan’s new economic paradigm. Based on the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party’s later actions, for example, one could say that it co-opted GPI language as a convenient political tool while in opposition, only to quickly abandon it as soon as it came to power in 2009. Bits and pieces of the GPI have been adopted at various times to further particular agendas, but the GPI as a whole speaks too many inconvenient truths to be swallowed whole. At the January 2020 World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, seventeen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg dissected the subtle ways in which world political and business leaders have created the pretence of action on climate change through “cheating and fiddling around with numbers” and through talk of “net zero emissions,” “carbon neutrality,” a “low-carbon economy,” and “offsetting emissions.” “Empty words and promises which give the impression that sufficient action is being taken,” she said, are “worse than silence.”3 Such co-optation is often more difficult to overcome than straightforward opposition from vested interests because it is more difficult to spot. When noble ideas are co-opted, subtly watered down, or adopted only in part, the language sounds right, the appearance and intention

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seem worthy, and the real danger comes in the guise of a friend and ally. I don’t know that there is one solution to this conundrum that fits all cases; my own inclination is to speak up about such co-optation and evisceration when it’s identified, but that may risk alienating potential allies and leaving one isolated. A fourth trap lurks in the grand-sounding, often well-meaning speeches and fanfare that so often accompany governmental and highlevel initiatives, conferences, and consultations. Drafting speeches and statements, I’ve often been party to this. But could it create more harm than good to raise expectations and then disappoint them rather than not raise hopes at all? Raising hopes and disappointing them time and again eventually leads people to give up hope, if not anger them, and to stop believing that requests for participation and advice are genuine. At GPI Atlantic we fell into this trap more than once. In Nova Scotia, for example, we partnered with the Atlantic Canada Sustainability Initiative (ACSI), which was designed to establish the four Atlantic provinces of Canada as a model and exemplar of sustainable initiatives from which other jurisdictions would learn. It began with great fanfare and an impressive array of partners, including Halifax Regional Municipality and various high-profile businesses, which signed impressive commitments of various kinds to adopt sustainable practices. We had training by outside experts flown in from The Natural Step. But workshops, trainings, meetings, and promises are the easy part. Putting something into practice is another story. In less than two years, due in part to poor coordination and in part to the ever-present gap between words and actions, ACSI quietly disappeared. The problem with initiatives such as this that end in disappointment—as we learned over and over again from Nova Scotia to Bhutan—is that they may breed cynicism, dampen future efforts, and discourage future investments of time and resources. Good intentions and brief expressions of vocal support alone don’t “cut the mustard” unless accompanied by a masterful implementation strategy, skilful means, deep commitment, and real perseverance and staying power. It’s been said that genuine pursuit of the truth requires only two key ingredients: it must not be afraid of its own conclusions, and it must not fear conflict with the powers that be.4 The sad outcome of Bhutan’s

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incredible 2012 initiative at the United Nations was a hurried retreat both from its own conclusions and from conflict with powerful forces at home and abroad. The conclusions were just too radical—considerably more than originally conceived by most—and the powers that be just too powerful. Once Bhutanese officials realized what they had subscribed to, it is perhaps not surprising that they pulled back. One cannot blame little aid-dependent Bhutan with its 760,000 people, sandwiched as it is between the two most populous giants on the planet. With its daring UN initiative, Bhutan went much further than other countries to date in its propagation of a sane vision for the future, in stark contrast to the cowardly and myopic stance of far larger countries with more robust resources and means. And the obstacles and challenges that Bhutan came to face were more daunting than anyone expected in the rush and enthusiasm of the initial venture. The setbacks and frustrations I experienced in thirteen years of work in Bhutan have not diminished my confidence in the capacity of that little country to be a living model of the new paradigm that the world needs to survive. It is still true that Bhutan keeps more than 70 percent of its land area under forest cover and more than 50 percent under full environmental protection with viable wildlife corridors, that it remains a net carbon sink, and that its ancient wisdom traditions still vibrate just beneath the surface. Whether this capacity will translate into wider action, leadership, and example, though, remains to be seen.

MOVING FORWARD

So, what, in retrospect, can we learn from this and other major endeavors described in this chronicle? And moving forward, what might be done differently in the future to avoid and overcome the obstacles we faced? Or are there insuperable obstacles that will likely derail future efforts to create a new economic paradigm? I’ve already pointed to some lessons learned and some strategies for more effective future action. As noted in chapter 6, for example, due to very limited resources, GPI Atlantic put all its efforts into developing

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sound measures of progress and full-cost accounts that were rigorous, credible, and copiously referenced; that made assumptions fully transparent; that were based on the best available data sources and methods; and that were fully open to improvements in all areas. Twenty-four years later, I can confidently say with some pride that we passed that test and even survived close and intense scrutiny. Where we fell short was in marketing and selling the “product.” Having now satisfied the experts, our future efforts must give far more attention to public relations at the levels of policy making and ongoing public commentary. We have to learn from the advertising industry to keep the GPI perspective effectively in the news through creative imagery, branding, and sheer repetition until it seeps fully into the public consciousness and policy reflexes. In this regard we experienced some of our best successes in engaging citizens at the local, participatory level. By its sheer staying power; its ongoing daily work in community development, organic farming, zero waste, youth outreach, and more; and its visible presence and warm, helpful interactions with the local community, the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative has become a respected community pillar and part of the local landscape in southeastern Bhutan. It has penetrated the social fabric, shifted attitudes, and become an example of positive civic action. Neither GPI Atlantic nor Bhutan nor full-cost accounting per se has yet to achieve any semblance of such penetration at the provincial, national or international levels. I also learned the hard way that it is naive to believe that vision, hard evidence, and telling the truth will necessarily triumph in their own right. As I remarked early in this book, my Nova Scotia colleagues and I never doubted that our new measures would necessarily influence policy. The deeply troubling trend lines and the urgency of the need for change were already apparent from reliable and rapidly accumulating scientific evidence. The problem, we were convinced, was simply that the policy and economic arenas were still ruled and deceived by GDPbased economic growth measures, which miss environmental and social realities and thus have failed to provide policy makers with the information they need to make good policy. All that was needed, therefore, were better and more comprehensive progress measures and accounts that

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figure the true costs of economic policy, and then policy makers would necessarily have to pay attention. More than that, how could they not want to replace crude, outdated gross national accounting methods with accurate net measures that have proven predictive power, as illustrated earlier in the capacity of income-debt and income-expense accounts to help predict the 2008–2009 financial crash and the mounting threats to farm economic viability? Or so we believed. We—and the many esteemed scientists who have issued increasingly urgent warnings on climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, species extinction, and more—were patently wrong in thinking that governments would necessarily heed robust and well-documented evidence! Policy makers, economists, and whole societies continue to believe in the economic growth dogma, carry on business as usual, and—increasingly willfully—ignore the seemingly inescapable hard facts and figures. Scholars are no less culpable. I am appalled still to hear one presenter after another at academic and international conferences talk of their new progress measures and methods as if they will necessarily influence policy, with barely a single one acknowledging the stark realities of the last decade. A rare exception is Rutger Hoekstra, whose recent book, Replacing GDP by 2030, frankly acknowledges the failure of the plethora of alternative beyond-GDP measures to dent the ongoing dominance of GDP. Based on my experience with enterprises such as the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, I am less sanguine than Hoekstra about the possibility of overcoming existing divisions to create an institutionalized science-based well-being/sustainability community with “a clear goal, a coherent structure, a common language.”5 Even at the highest political level, I have witnessed the limits of power of a government leader without sufficient internal and public support for his vision, the formidable clout of vested economic interests, and the resistance of bureaucracies to change that upsets their existing operating assumptions and procedures. Therefore, I suggest below a different way forward based on a new emerging alliance. In retrospect, I’ve come to acknowledge my own often simple-minded idealism, impatience, and delusion that change would happen much

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faster and at a larger scale in both Canada and Bhutan than was possible given the conditions, circumstances, fixed mindsets, and attachments to existing privilege that we faced. It was my own failure to see clearly the strength of these obstacles that led to unrealistic expectations. Rather than explore skilful ways to chip away at and weaken that resistance, I continued to crunch numbers and believe in the power of evidence and truth alone to cut resolutely through the resistance. I believe that any future effort must pay much more attention than I did to identify the levers of power and centers of resistance and to work strategically and skillfully to muster crucial allies and apply influence at key political and economic pressure points. I can no longer pretend that it’s possible to remain above the political fray if a measure such as the GPI is really to be adopted and used by governments to make policy. I’d now have no hesitation in bringing on board someone who has those skills, in sober recognition of the reality that diplomacy is at least as important as research and facts in embedding new ideas in the political arena. This is a delicate balance. A research institute such as GPI Atlantic must, on the one hand, maintain full nonpartisan impartiality in presenting evidence on society-wide progress measures and, on the other hand, forge alliances that will create the necessary public and political clamor for the adoption of both the measures and the recommendations that the evidence produces. I’ve also learned that another key strategy for the future is the building of alliances outside the particular jurisdiction in which we are working. And here I’ve found considerable reason for hope and encouragement, simply because we are not alone in our endeavor. Despite this book’s focus on my experiences in Canada, New Zealand, and Bhutan, the search for a new economic paradigm that includes genuine measures of social progress is increasingly widely shared. Especially in light of the growing failures of the existing economic paradigm, the new work has come from the fringe to the mainstream, and I continue to be inspired by the brilliant, heartfelt, and ground-breaking work of colleagues from around the world. The fact that they have not given up in the face of disappointments as great as those described in these pages also strengthens my own resolve and that of my workmates.

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These shared aspirations go far beyond scholarly circles. In his book Blessed Unrest, as noted in chapter 7, Paul Hawken describes the global, powerful, and highly diverse civil society movement that—despite remaining virtually unrecognized by politicians and the media—is ever more rapidly and effectively mobilizing in the interests of the natural world, equity, and many aspects of a new economic paradigm.6 At the time of writing, Greta Thunberg was making global headlines with her Davos and United Nations speeches, leading seven million strikers for climate change around the world, and being named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for being “the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet.” Time Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal wrote, For sounding the alarm about humanity’s predatory relationship with the only home we have, for bringing to a fragmented world a voice that transcends backgrounds and borders, for showing us all what it might look like when a new generation leads, Greta Thunberg is TIME’s 2019 Person of the Year.7

At Davos Thunberg told world economic leaders, “I want you to panic. . . . I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is!” At the United Nations she told world political leaders, “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” And she has explicitly recognized the need for a complete paradigm shift remarkably along the lines suggested in the previous and next chapters: [T]here are no solutions within our current systems. We need a whole new way of thinking. The political system that you have created is all about competition. . . . That must come to an end. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way.8

Science and economics, in other words, are only one part—albeit an essential one—of the required change. Facts and figures, including scientific evidence, comprehensive progress measures, and full-cost

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accounts, provide the necessary credibility to the actual agents of change who will bring the new economic paradigm into being. But for more than thirty years the most robust scientific findings have been ignored in the halls of power, as have our new progress and accounting measures. In a January 2020 New York Times article, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman similarly concluded that “scientific persuasion is running into sharply diminishing returns. Very few of the people still denying the reality of climate change or at least opposing doing anything about it will be moved by further accumulation of evidence, or even by a proliferation of new disasters,” confirming and predicted by prior scientific evidence.9 So we can no longer fool ourselves, as we did twenty years ago, that providing rigorous evidence and telling the truth alone will convince policy makers to act in sane and informed ways to improve the well-being of citizens and protect their increasingly precarious habitat. Maybe we were too polite and scholarly as we gently and carefully presented our well-documented graphs, tables, conclusions, and recommendations. Whatever the reasons, it has come to the Greta Thunbergs of the world to cut through the veils of decades of wilful ignorance and thunder the truth to the faces of those in power: “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away!” Thunberg bellowed to world leaders at the United Nations. “I don’t want you to listen to me,” she told the U.S. Congress. “I want you to listen to the scientists. I want you to unite behind the science. And then I want you to take action.”10 This may be the new alliance that will finally move us forward. Perhaps we number crunchers and measurement folk, together with esteemed meteorologists, biologists, and other scientists, were mistaken in focusing on policy makers and government leaders as our key audience. Perhaps Greta and her ilk are our most receptive audience and the most effective carriers of the evidence we present. In fact, the extraordinary global social movement that this previously unknown teenager has spurred seemingly overnight by the simple solo action of refusing to carry on business as usual at her school, has communication and mobilization tools like social media at its disposal that were unavailable to previous generations.

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Indeed, there are signals, such as famed veteran naturalist Sir David Attenborough joining forces with Greta, that this new alliance is rapidly forming. Having flagged the urgent need for major political, economic, and lifestyle changes two decades ago, Attenborough humbly acknowledges that “no-one took a blind bit of notice.” Greta, he notes, “achieved things that many of us who have been working on it for 20-odd years have failed to achieve.”11 We’ve knocked too long and too fruitlessly at the doors of the policy makers at whom we’ve aimed our evidence. These youth, willing and eager recipients of our evidence, are our new allies, ready to turn our numbers into effective action. And so it is now within that larger context that scientists and economists need to keep developing and refining methods, data sources, and results to ensure that those genuine twenty-first-century change agents always stand on authoritative ground and will not be discredited. There also has been remarkable progress in other spheres. In the midst of my despair and upset over the collapse of Bhutan’s new economic paradigm initiative, I was amazed and heartened to find that the International Expert Working Group we had painstakingly set up for that endeavor had not collapsed at all despite Bhutan’s abandonment of the initiative. Key members of that group have continued to work together, to research and publish collaboratively on the subject, and above all to set up a powerful Wellbeing Economy Alliance, which has brought together scholars as well as government and nongovernment groups from around the world.12 Some of the alliance’s initiatives are now being implemented at the national level. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance recently brought together the finance ministers of Scotland, New Zealand, Sweden, Costa Rica, and Slovenia in a joint initiative to move from a GDP-based economy to a new economy directed at improving well-being. In May 2019, as noted in chapter 8, New Zealand became the first Western country to design its entire budget around well-being priorities to ensure that all its policies improve well-being—a goal now also officially embraced by Scotland and Iceland. In 2018, Scotland published a new National Performance Framework focusing on social and environmental indicators, and in August 2019, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon noted

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that “the goal of economic policy should be collective wellbeing.” In December 2019, Iceland Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir announced that Iceland will now include new social and environmental indicators in its budget planning.13 In short, I’ve discovered to my surprise and delight that when seeds are planted, one cannot be certain where, when, or how they might sprout. The last few years have taught me not to judge overt results too quickly or impatiently. And they have given me the confidence to keep moving forward as best we can regardless of immediate outcomes and to celebrate compatible initiatives wherever they manifest. As well, in both Canada and Bhutan, as noted in chapters 5 and 12, I’ve witnessed the power and value of community-level work in proceeding below the radar to plant new seeds, implement innovative programs with minimal interference from entrenched bureaucracies and vested interests, and create potential models of the new measures, economic paradigm, and education system that can potentially be upscaled when the time is right. I also have seen the power of those initiatives to spread or sometimes even trickle up to somewhat higher levels, the way the Sustainable Seattle model was adopted by more than half of 170 surveyed sustainability projects worldwide or in the interest that local schools in Bhutan have shown in our Samdrup Jongkhar education initiatives. More broadly, we’ve seen isolated local organic farming initiatives mushroom into the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, with double-digit global annual growth rates. At the very least, when the existing growth-based paradigm loses its luster, these local models of resilience will be in place to stave off despair and serve as effective, earthy examples of how to move forward. At the same time, relying solely on such local initiatives can be a fantasy or even a smug cop-out if not accompanied by strenuous efforts at the national and global levels. Climate change, resource depletion, species extinctions, community disintegration, social unrest, political insecurity, and other threats are proceeding so rapidly and dramatically that local initiatives alone may be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of global crises. That may not become evident in any sudden catastrophe but, rather, in a gradual unraveling and dissolution in which degraded

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environmental and social conditions become a new and accepted pattern. Already, climate extremes have become the new norm,14 and residents of Delhi have become accustomed to pollution levels so high that they are off the charts, to widespread respiratory ailments, and to blue skies being a distant memory. Challenges of this magnitude are not solved by local initiatives alone no matter how noble and effective they are at the grassroots level. The troubling state of the world simply doesn’t allow a retreat into parochialism, however momentarily comforting and satisfying that might be. Thus, moving forward, we have to aim high and low at the same time—joining bottom-up regional actions with continued top-down work at the state, national, and international levels on issues that are outside the purview of local authorities. Work at both ends of the scale remains essential, creating local models that show the way forward and at the same time slowing and even reversing catastrophic disintegration at higher levels. Beyond such initiatives at various levels of government, my work of the past two decades convinces me that if we are to batter away at the ramparts of ossified conventional thinking with any effectiveness, both a real shift in awareness and understanding and a strong social base are essential for the required transformation that the world needs to occur. And for that, education is key; working at the policy level alone is not enough. One unexpected discovery our research team made is that education is often the most stubborn and deeply entrenched bulwark of the old ways and that actions to transform it are critical if real change is to occur. In short, we need to work at all levels simultaneously—local, national, and global—while always furthering the required change in consciousness. As an important component of all these efforts, I am still just as convinced as I was two decades ago that the Genuine Progress Index is a timely, relevant, and useful tool that can eventually help to generate the positive, evidence-based policy we so badly need. Through its holistic approach, which integrates the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of reality, I believe it also can help to spawn the change of consciousness that we equally need. And it carries a language that

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can communicate non-dogmatically with the world of conventional economics. More broadly, I am confident that the principles behind Bhutan’s 2012 initiatives at the United Nations and at Rio + 20 remain more relevant than ever, and that the economic paradigm shift from our current growth-based model to one based on sustainability, equity, and efficient resource use elucidated there and summarized in the next chapter remains more urgently needed than ever.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

But first we need to pose a troubling question that has nagged at me throughout these past twenty-four years and which may present the most fundamental challenge and barrier to the adoption of new progress measures and a new economic paradigm at this moment in history. I’ve seen this question provocatively bandied about in some alternative press and social media, but it’s rarely systematically explored at the depth required to reach a clear conclusion: Is capitalism compatible with sustainability? The question points to some fundamental issues, such as whether limitless growth (and hence ever-expanding resource and energy consumption) is a capitalist imperative. Can a capitalist enterprise survive by marking time, stabilizing production levels, and contenting itself with a given revenue stream? Or will it thereby cede market share to enterprises that continue to expand and improve their competitive advantage through growing economies of scale? And if such ongoing growth is necessary for the survival of enterprises in a capitalist economy, what are the implications for climate change and the survival of much of the living world? The troubling questions go on. Given that economic competitiveness requires limiting production costs, can enterprises afford to invest in stringent and costly measures to safeguard the environment, or will they move to places with looser environmental regulations? Similarly, is it possible to conceive of fair distribution as a pillar of the new economic paradigm when enterprises reduce production costs and market their products more competitively by relying on cheap labor and moving their

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factories to where labor is cheapest? Have we not simply exported dirty industries, waste, deadly pollution, resource depletion, and cheap labor from London and Los Angeles to Delhi, Jing-Jin-Ji, and Dhaka? Conversely, therefore, the question must be asked: does not a new economic paradigm based on ecological sustainability, fair distribution, and efficient resource use challenge the very foundations of the capitalist system itself? And if so, how will the necessary transition happen? Can powerful business interests be persuaded to cooperate, and what kind of system and what forms of ownership, production, and distribution could replace current structures? This book is a chronicle of my journey trying to plant new progress measures, accounting methods, and the seeds of a new economic paradigm within existing economic and political frameworks—and that means within a capitalist economic system and its often-concomitant representative democracies. Might the grave limitations and major disappointments described in this account simply be symptomatic of the inherent incapacity of those existing structures to incorporate recommendations that may threaten the survival of those structures? Often, it seems in retrospect, our evidence and results were met with nodding heads and agreement with what seemed on the surface to be very practical and common-sense conclusions and policy options. But as we moved toward actual adoption and implementation, whether in Nova Scotia, New Zealand, or Bhutan, almost invisible resistances pushed back, grew stronger, and thwarted real action. From the perspective presented here, this growing resistance likely points to existing structures digging in their heels to protect their survival. Why are these questions so extraordinarily urgent to consider as a next step in this journey? Simply because the change that is coming, though initiated and still exacerbated by human actions such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, and habitat destruction, is now determined more by nature than by human agency. And so the required change is now inevitable, and the only real choice is to prepare wisely to give it a soft landing that minimizes hardship or to experience a very hard landing accompanied by mayhem, violence, disorder, ecological collapse, and extreme suffering.

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And this is why we can no longer avoid the big questions that must now become the focus of sustained research and investigation. If the answer to the questions raised and partially elaborated above is “Yes. Capitalism can be compatible with sustainability,” then the next question is how existing structures must be adjusted to ensure sustainable outcomes through, for example, full-cost accounts that internalize social and environmental costs and thus enhance production efficiency. And if the answer is “No. Capitalism is not compatible with sustainability,” then the next step in this journey requires a clear and reasoned analysis of what system should replace capitalism as the structure of the new economic paradigm and how that change can be equitably implemented to minimize hardship and suffering. Of the two sides of this compatibility question, only one side can change—namely, the structure of the economic system—because nature is sufficiently uncompromising to allow us any room for maneuvering on the sustainability side of the equation. Among the few analysts who are willing to ask these tough questions is Naomi Klein, whose book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate argues that our only hope of overcoming the effects of global warming is a revolution in the entire economic system.15 Another is ecological footprint co-designer William Rees of the University of British Columbia, who also answers the question of whether capitalism is compatible with sustainability with a resounding “No!” In a 2020 Ecological Economics article, Rees debunks “green growth” strategies and examines “the fundamental conflict” between the current economic system and ecological integrity and “the absurdity of perpetual material growth and accumulation (the hallmarks of capitalism) on a finite planet.” He calls on ecological economists “to look biophysical data in the eye and . . . ask and seek to answer difficult questions that may not even occur to the mainstream.” That includes the design of an entirely new “steadystate” economy that reduces “planet-depleting economic activities” and engenders “efficient policies to regenerate key ecosystems and maintain essential life-support functions, including a predictably stable livable climate.” In sober tones Rees recognizes that the mainstream will see his proposed actions as “impossibly radical.” Anything less, however, is a certain pathway to humanity’s doom, and so he puts the onus on

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“governments and corporate interests who reject this framework . . . to explain why adherence to growth-through-technology does not risk fatal catastrophe.”16 Perhaps one reason for the resistance to questioning capitalism and the existing economic paradigm is that people think the only alternative is communism, which in turn is mistakenly equated with the authoritarian systems of the former Soviet Union or China. But although Marx taught us a lot about how capitalism works and the power dynamics between rich and poor, he did not know or write about finite planetary limits. How could he know, for example, that human activity could change the climate of the planet or drive countless species to extinction? Such science and knowledge simply were not available in the mid-nineteenth century. What will replace capitalism as we know it? It must be an economic system based on the necessity to live within the boundaries of what nature provides and to ensure that resources are efficiently used and fairly distributed. The good news is that the new system can draw on the tremendous knowledge and expertise we already have in renewable energy, sustainable farming, appropriate technologies, and a wealth of excellent practices that have been tried, tested, and proved, and on now well-developed fields of study and practice such as ecological economics.

15 FORGING A NEW ECONOMY

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hen I began this work in the mid-1990s, I spent the better part of two years just looking at statistics, prevailing trends, data sources, and methodologies. The statistical evidence pointed to an extremely limited window of opportunity to turn things around before certain trends such as global warming and resource depletion became irreversible and passed the point of no return in threatening our reliance on the natural world we once knew. A key purpose of the GPI is to report such trends accurately and comprehensively and thereby to send early-warning signals that can trigger timely remedial action. That evidence, together with the robust tools, methods and working models brilliantly and painstakingly developed by the pioneers of the past, point directly to actions that can avoid the worst outcomes and lead to more sustainable, just, and efficient solutions. The choice, therefore, is between an economic paradigm that embodies such actions and solutions and thereby enables sane adjustment to new global conditions on the one hand and catastrophic uncontrolled change on the other, as indicated by any of the troubling trends observed in the 1990s—all of which are far more alarming today. Can we make the necessary choice? The jury is still out. William Rees notes, “Humans are certainly prone to short-sighted self-delusion but are also capable of high intelligence, reason, introspection, compassion and

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even collective action toward a common goal.”1 If we are capable of action as drastic as shutting down whole economies and investing trillions to combat the coronavirus pandemic, we can certainly muster the collective will and action to handle the far more serious, long-lasting and entirely predictable crises that await us. More than that, the practical reality today is that we have never had greater global capacity, understanding, material abundance, and opportunities to achieve the objective of building a sane, sustainable, and equitable world. This capacity includes both scientific and indigenous knowledge, resources, advanced communications and technology, productive potential, and the ability to feed everyone on Earth. We have many inspiring and successful examples of legislation, initiatives, and best practices at multiple scales on which we can build. In forging deep, systemic change, the world has seen its share of brutal and bloody upheavals that have brought untold distress. It has also witnessed Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution; Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, which ended up dismantling the Soviet Union; and a revolutionary shift from apartheid to multiracial democratic elections in South Africa. Changes of this enormity can happen violently or peacefully. Over and over again, the hard evidence and reasoned analyses of scientists, economists, and other scholars—some of it repeated in this chronicle— tell us that whether talking about fossil fuel consumption and pollution or habitat loss and massive inequality, business as usual is no longer an option. Changing that trajectory radically and peacefully requires a new economic paradigm based on principles of ecological sustainability, fair distribution, and efficient resource use, with new progress and accounting measures as one of its core foundations. Stasis, withdrawal, inaction, and despair are not options, and there is simply no time to delay. What will such a sustainable and equitable new economy look like, and how, practically, will it function? It would be presumptuous to presuppose the fine details of such a new economic paradigm that will emerge from strenuous negotiations among economists, political leaders, and civil society actors. Still, without at least pointing to such potential practicalities, the very notion of a new economy will remain abstract, conceptual, and vague. What follows, therefore, is drawn from work I did with the Royal Government of Bhutan and with cofounder

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of ecological economics Robert Costanza and his team in preparation for the meeting that Bhutan hosted at the United Nations in 2012 (see chapter 13). Here are, first, suggested basic principles for a new economic paradigm, and then the types of specific structures and policies that are required to put those principles into practice. First and foremost, the new economy must recognize our human interdependence with nature and with one another. That will require a healthy balance among thriving natural, human, social, cultural, and built assets, which overlap and interact in complex ways to produce all benefits.2 All these assets depend on the natural world, whose functions generally can’t be replaced by human activity. Sustainability therefore requires that we not deplete the natural capital—including the climate, water, air, soil, forests, fisheries, and other assets—on which our livelihoods, well-being, and very survival depend. Balancing and investing in all those dimensions of our wealth requires that (a) we live sustainably within the capacity of our finite planet to provide the resources needed for this and all future generations; (b) these resources are distributed fairly within this generation, between generations, and between humans and other species; and (c) we use these resources as efficiently and effectively as possible, minimizing excess and waste. Diverse and innovative functioning models, expertise, appropriate technologies, and action plans that are capable of meeting these criteria have been developed at the community, regional, farm, and forest levels; in businesses and universities; and in a wide range of other settings, and they are readily available for wider application. However, that is no longer enough. The issues today are global in scale, and this book has given several examples of the huge obstacles facing jurisdictions that try to go it alone—including the incapacity of local communities to deal with major issues outside their authority, the impact of greenhouse gas emissions in Chicago and Sydney on glacial lakes in Bhutan and flooding in Bangladesh, powerful external pressures like those that stymied Bhutan’s new economic paradigm initiative, and even Canada’s rollback of provincial efforts to raise tobacco prices. These few examples and many more indicate that the required shift to a new economic paradigm now has to be on a world scale.

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But time is running out, and the political will to adopt such a new economic paradigm is lacking. So to move with the necessary urgency, we must first acknowledge that business as usual threatens the survival of humans and other species and is therefore no longer an option. We must recognize that human society is moving in a destructive direction at an increasing rate, with excess global greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions continuing unabated, resources being used much faster than nature can regenerate them, biodiversity diminishing rapidly, global ecosystem services rapidly declining, and increasingly unacceptable levels of inequality. If last year’s choking, uncontrolled fires in Australia, the U.S. west coast and other regions are symptoms of just 1°C global warming to date, we can visualize the devastation we will leave our children at 2°C and our grandchildren at 3°C warming. We also must recognize that on a finite planet, excessive consumption by the rich leaves less for others, puts the poor at growing risk, and threatens to increase social unrest that will not be contained within any borders. Conflicts and disasters are already producing more refugees than at any time since World War II. Above all, we must acknowledge that these dangerous trends are primarily the result of our current unsustainable, growth-based economic paradigm that was institutionalized at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which established a new international monetary and financial order for the postwar world. That, of course, was prior to widespread understanding of finite global resource limits and scientific knowledge about climate change. And it produced a system that remains propped up by flawed measures of progress that largely ignore the value of natural and social capital and the distribution of wealth and income, as well as misleadingly counting natural capital depletion and many human and social costs as economic gain. A new economic paradigm therefore also needs new progress and accounting measures. Indeed, we need a new Bretton Woods. Until we openly and forthrightly acknowledge these current realities, we are unlikely to muster the political and social will to change the current economic paradigm. Moving onto a sustainable and beneficial path will therefore require a fundamental change of worldview to one that recognizes that we live on a finite planet. It means replacing the current pursuit of limitless growth and increasing consumption with goals of material sufficiency, equitable distribution, and sustainable well-being. It requires a complete redesign

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of the world economy to preserve natural systems that are essential to life and well-being, to balance natural, social, human, and built assets, and to drastically reduce waste and excess. It means reclaiming the broad definition and goal of economics as the science, management, and well-being of our global household. Here are some examples of the types of structures, regulatory mechanisms, incentives, and policies that can help to establish and maintain a viable new economic paradigm. As noted, they rest on three fundamental pillars of the new economy: sustainability, equity, and efficient resource use. (a)

Ecological sustainability

•

Establish a system for effective and equitable governance and management of the natural commons, including the atmosphere, oceans, freshwater systems, and biodiversity. • Invest in sustainable infrastructure, such as renewable clean energy, energy efficiency, public transit, watershed protection measures, green public spaces, clean technology, and support for green businesses. • Create mechanisms such as taxes, cap and auction systems, and common asset trusts to reduce resource depletion, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions and to stay within basic planetary boundaries and resource limits. • Dismantle incentives toward excessive materialist consumption by, for example, banning advertising to children and instead educating for sustainability. • Move toward organic and sustainable agriculture to feed the Earth’s population without destroying its biodiversity. • Develop linked policies to bring population and consumption into line with the Earth’s natural, social, and economic capacity.

(b) •

Fair distribution Reduce systemic inequalities, both internationally and within nations, by improving the living standards of the poor, providing adequate social safety nets, limiting excess consumption and unearned income, and preventing private capture of the common wealth.

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• • •

•

•

(c) •

•

• •

•

Support, promote, and provide incentives for local economies and systems of cooperative ownership and management of enterprises. Institute fair-trade systems that promote sustainable production methods and fair returns to producers. Transfer appropriate technologies to enable lower-income nations to shift rapidly to sustainable production methods and suffer no loss of competitive advantage as they transition to a sustainable economy. Establish a system for effective and equitable governance and management of the social commons, including cultural inheritance, financial systems, and information systems. Create fulfilling employment for all, which contributes to the common good, achieves better work–life balance, and nurtures healthy workplace relations. Efficient use of resources Use full-cost accounting measures to internalize externalities, value non-market assets and services, reform national accounting systems, and ensure that prices reflect actual social and environmental costs of production and distribution; Institute fiscal reforms that reward equitable, sustainable, and well-being-enhancing actions and penalize unsustainable behaviors that diminish collective well-being. Examples include elimination of perverse subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, incentives for renewable energy, and ecological tax reforms with compensating mechanisms that avoid additional burdens on low-income groups. Implement systems of cooperative investment in stewardship and payment for ecosystem services. Increase financial and fiscal prudence by reducing speculation, ensuring equitable access to and responsible use of credit, and requiring that financial instruments and practices contribute to the public good. Ensure access to and sharing of the information required to move to a sustainable economy.

Needless to say, such a preliminary list is only illustrative and certainly not comprehensive. For example, Paul Hawken’s 2017 book Drawdown

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has dozens more proposals to reverse climate change.3 Such lists are also only first steps. Each of the suggested structures, regulatory mechanisms, and policies proposed requires proper analysis to ensure that each is implemented effectively. That, in fact, was the assigned mandate of our International Expert Working Group of seventy economists, scientists, and other scholars that was constituted after our 2012 United Nations meeting on the new economic paradigm. All new structures also require full-cost accounting and budgeting in relation to existing systems that now generate unacceptable social costs and inequities and promote ecosystem depletion and degradation. What is not in doubt is that we have the expertise and knowledge required for such rigorous and well-documented analyses of the requisites of a sustainable and equitable new economy. More than that—as noted earlier—we have the resources, capacity, and working models required to make such structural and policy shifts happen in practice. And we have actually witnessed major, dramatic shifts even at the societal level that demonstrate unequivocally the capacity of human beings to respond rapidly and systemically to urgent needs. In chapter 7 we saw a serious waste disposal crisis transformed almost overnight into perhaps the most sustainable regionwide composting and sustainable waste management system in all North America, accompanied by a societal shift in citizens’ attitudes and awareness. In the 1980s, faced with an unacceptably high level of senior citizen poverty, Canada took decisive nationwide measures to cut elderly poverty rates in half. And the speed with which we witnessed Allied mobilization during World War II, the rapid transformations of the Soviet behemoth and apartheid South Africa should give us confidence that with forthright recognition of our planetary emergency and strong willpower, we have all the capacity and means to take effective and resolute action quickly. During this coronavirus pandemic, we’ve even witnessed a willingness, albeit painful, drastically to cut production and travel, which dramatically albeit temporarily cut GHG emissions and improved air quality. Climate change impacts are certainly no less of a crisis and emergency. So, in fact, the question is not “can we do what is needed?”, to which the answer is a certain “Yes!” The only question is whether we will muster

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the will to do it. It sometimes does not take much—just a tiny twist on the ship’s wheel—to change the direction of a huge ocean liner to avoid a deadly iceberg. We can steer toward a more positive future. All our work over the years, major obstacles notwithstanding, convinces me that such a change of direction to ensure human survival not only must happen but is eminently possible to accomplish. Of course, that seemingly obvious required change remains a choice, and it is equally a choice to keep heading straight for the iceberg until it is too late to alter the course of catastrophe. In 2017, Ida Kubiszewski, Robert Costanza, and their colleagues graphically depicted that choice by comparing four potential development scenarios in stark economic terms. The value of global ecosystem services could decline by $51 trillion/ year by 2050—equivalent to two-thirds of current global GDP—under a business-as-usual scenario but could increase by $30 trillion/year with limits to conventional GDP growth and more focus on environmental and social well-being and sustainability.4 Ultimately the spark that keeps me and colleagues near and far going is very simply the confidence that in the end, the truth will win out. Humanity’s choice is simply whether to embrace that truth in order to transform our world gently, willingly, and gracefully, or to have that truth and that change shoved forcefully down our throats by ecological, social, and economic collapse. Greta Thunberg put that choice bluntly to world economic and political leaders at Davos in January 2020: I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing a climate chaos that you knowingly brought upon them? . . . Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fuelling the flames by the hour. And we are telling you to act as if you loved your children above all else.5

This entire book is based on the premise that there’s value, power, and utility simply in telling the truth, as Greta continues to do. By always pointing to the inseparability of social, economic, and environmental factors, the Genuine Progress Index, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness,

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and the philosophy underpinning them both constantly point to the integrated nature of reality. That, too, is the simple truth and a powerful antidote to the prevalent tendency to see the economy as a closed box standing on its own. In fact, the GPI is nothing other than an effort to report what the numbers say in as comprehensive, accurate, and cohesive way as possible and thereby to describe important dimensions of our lives, our nation, and our world honestly and with integrity. With that knowledge, informed choices can then be made in the light of hard evidence to benefit life on Earth. That truly would be genuine progress. All the disappointments of the last twenty-four years cannot squelch the necessity or dampen my own determination to keep moving forward on all the fronts discussed here. In fact, looking back at the prologue to this book, and more than half a century after dropping out of Economics 101, I must confess to maintaining the same suspicions of and discomfort with conventional economics as at that time, and I continue to have the same aspiration to see a world that lives in harmony with nature and alleviates the evident suffering of its inhabitants. Both the pain and the dream are still there, and it may be the residue of that youthful impetuousness that today makes me cry when I see seventeen-year-old Greta talk. But one thing has changed a lot: the restless search of the last half century and the twenty-four-year, three-continent odyssey described in this book have brought me together with a remarkable world of brilliant, good-hearted people—including spiritual, indigenous, and political leaders as well as scientists, scholars, statisticians, youth and ordinary citizens. Those individuals not only share a common dream but are doing remarkable work to realize it in practice. I was asked to tell this tale as a first-person narrative. But it actually has nothing to do with me. In the midst of a palpably darkening world that is troubled by accelerating ecological catastrophe, brutally ignorant leadership, and growing division and conflict—a world in denial—there also is a burgeoning bright new consciousness and a rising surge of determination to create a better world for our children and for all living beings. I hope this little saga can be a small cog in the wheel of this swelling movement of ordinary people who know this is humanity’s last chance to turn things around and bring some real light to this world.

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The challenges facing future generations will dwarf anything described in this book. And the solutions required will shake the very foundations of our most deeply held values and lifestyles and of the familiar structures and systems that have long propped up habits that have now proved to be devastatingly destructive. If we believe that a saner, sustainable, and just world is possible—as many of us still do—then we must do what we can to establish the firm groundwork for that world in whatever way is possible. For some that might be through supporting ecological farming and forestry and locally run energy projects. For others it might mean boycotting plastics, airfreighted food, and excess flying, driving, and shopping. For all of us it may mean turning our acquisitive greed into genuine care of and generosity to others and, for some, even promoting better progress measures, as this book advocates. There are now excellent publications devoted to describing the fundamental bases of a viable and sustainable new economy and society, and there are proven working models and practical actions that groups and individuals can take to make it happen.6 There is no one prescription that fits all, but this is the time to sow and nurture the seeds of the awakening new society that the world so desperately needs. Whatever we do as individuals, we can together strengthen our collective will, resolve, and action to seize this last opportunity to give our children and all humanity a real future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his book and, indeed, all my work of the last two decades owe their existence to the innovations of great masters and scholars of both the ancient and more recent past. The underlying interdependence of social, economic, and ecological realities, which is the fundamental premise of the new economic paradigm described in this book and of the Genuine Progress Index, was first expounded by such ancient sages as Buddha. In more modern times many great scholars, economists, scientists, and statisticians have labored to assess truthfully humanity’s progress and prosperity, or lack thereof, from luminaries such as former World Bank chief Nicholas Stern and senior economist Herman Daly, to hundreds of other thinkers and number crunchers (some of whom are noted in chapter 2) in universities, research institutes and statistical agencies worldwide. The invaluable personal contribution of Robert Costanza and other scholars to the work described in this book is acknowledged in the text itself. To recognize all the dedicated researchers who worked so hard to produce the 108 detailed reports that comprise our Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index (GPI) would take many pages. At the risk of offending many other colleagues to whom I am hugely grateful, I must, though, particularly thank our two longest-term GPI Atlantic researchers, Linda Pannozzo and Karen Hayward, who persevered

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stalwartly in this work over more than a decade and conducted superb and painstaking research. At GPI Atlantic we owe a special debt of gratitude to Hans Messinger, former director of Industry Measures and Analysis at Statistics Canada, who was responsible for putting out Canada’s quarterly GDP statistics and who served for fifteen years on GPI Atlantic’s Board of Directors from our inception. His expert advice on data sources and methods has been critical to the integrity and credibility of our work. GPI Atlantic’s bond with New Zealand was nurtured through long association with Professor Marilyn Waring, whose seminal critique of the GDP-based U.N. System of National Accounts and pioneering research valuing unpaid work had informed our own GPI efforts.1 Going to New Zealand was also an excuse for me and my family to renew our friendship with Marilyn, who kindly hosted us at her house and joined us for lovely nature walks. It would take pages more to list all the donors and supporters of our GPI work over the years. So I name only one here: David Gait in Scotland, who has unflaggingly supported our GPI work, who understands it deeply, and who suggested and has fully supported the writing of this book. Thank you, David! The many great pioneers, researchers, and supporters who also should be named here are cited in the acknowledgments, bibliographies, footnotes, and title pages of the many GPI reports (see www.gpiatlantic. org). And some, like our dedicated accountant and bookkeeper, Sara Winchell, and loyal board members remain invisible even there. In short, this book might appear to have a lone author, but it is entirely due to dedicated teamwork. This book could not have come to fruition without the first-rate editing work of Jonathan Cobb and Bridget Flannery-McCoy, formerly of Columbia University Press, whose detailed suggestions, comments, and edits have been invaluable and who I regard as real partners in seeing this across the finish line. And that appreciation extends to the whole Columbia University Press team, led by editor Caelyn Cobb, without whom this book could not have come to fruition. My deepest gratitude also goes to Bhutan’s former prime minister, Jigmi Y. Thinley, who—aside from the inspired leadership described

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS289

in this book—kindly read through the manuscript twice, meticulously corrected several factual errors, and also gave very helpful substantive advice. In particular he urged me to leave readers not with a sense of the disappointment and despair I often felt but with encouragement to continue the pursuit of the sustainable and equitable global economy that the world needs more than ever. For all errors and misinterpretations in the text I take full responsibility and stand open to correction. Based on a reviewer’s recommendation, Columbia University Press had suggested I rewrite the original, more academic manuscript from a narrative, experiential perspective. That has necessarily made this story personal and subjective. And that, in turn, comes with certain hazards, such as mistaken projections through the lens of my own habitual values and expectations and the unintended appearance of inflating an insignificant role. So, for the record, I need to say here that I certainly don’t want this narrative approach to overstate my own or GPI Atlantic’s very minor role in this much larger saga, and am well aware that others may see and describe the same events quite differently. I ask readers please to keep in mind that I’m simply describing things as I experienced them and as they appeared to me—nothing more. Finally, I can’t find the words to thank Gwen and Hasta Colman, who not only understand the GPI at its core and are its eloquent exponents but who generously tolerated my neglect of family responsibilities when I stretched hours at the keyboard way beyond reasonable limits. Gwen and Hasta both saw long before I did that the true audience for this GPI work is the youth whose future we’ve stolen and who have the greatest stake in creating the new economy the world needs. They continue their stalwart GPI Youth work to this day. In the end, neither our GPI work in Nova Scotia nor this book would have happened without the inspiration of two great mentors. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1940–1987) proclaimed not only the necessity but the feasibility of creating enlightened society on this earth. “You can do it!” he used to say to his students. That exhortation launched me on this path. And more recently, it has been the kindness, wisdom, and encouragement of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche that kept me going from one page to the next in this endeavor. This book is dedicated to them both.

NOTES

A NOTE TO READERS 1.

2.

3.

4.

See, for example, Henry Kissinger, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order,” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the -coronavirus-pandemic-will-forever-alter-the-world-order-11585953005; Yuval Noah Harari, “The World After Coronavirus,” Financial Times, March 20, 2020, https://www .ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75; Kishore Mahbubani, “The World After Covid-19: Kishore Mahbubani on the Dawn of the Asian Century,” April 20, 2020, The Economist, https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2020/04/20/kishore-mahbubani -on-the-dawn-of-the-asian-century; Deloitte and Salesforce, The World Remade by COVID-19: Scenarios for Resilient Leaders, April 6, 2020, https://www2.deloitte .com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/COVID-19/Thrive -scenarios-for-resilient-leaders.pdf. Lauri Myllyvirta, “Quantifying the Economic Costs of Air Pollution from Fossil Fuels,” Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, February 2020, https://energyandcleanair. org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Cost-of-fossil-fuels-briefing.pdf; World Health Organisation, “Mortality and Burden of Disease from Ambient Air Pollution,” https:// www.who.int/gho/phe/outdoor_air_pollution/burden/en/. Government of the United Kingdom, HM Treasury, Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Final Report, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100407172811 /http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/stern_review_report.htm. Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, “11,000 Air Pollution-Related Deaths Avoided in Europe as Coal, Oil Consumption Plummet,” April 30, 2020, https://energyandcleanair.org/air-pollution-deaths-avoided-in-europe-as-coal -oil-plummet/; Jacinta Bowler, “New Evidence Shows How COVID-19 Has Affected Global Air Pollution,” March 17, 2020, https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what

292A NOTE TO REA DER S

5.

6.

7.

-covid-19-is-doing-to-our-pollution-levels; and Jeff McMahon, “Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Likely Saved 77,000 Lives in China Just by Reducing Pollution,” Forbes, March 16, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/03/16/coronavirus -lockdown-may-have-saved-77000-lives-in-china-just-from-pollution-reduction /#25af9f9234fe. Xiao Wu et al., “COVID 19 PM2.5, a National Study on Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution and COVID-19 Mortality in the United States,” April 24, 2020, https:// projects.iq.harvard.edu/covid-pm. Summary results at Beth Gardiner, “Pollution Made COVID-19 Worse. Now, Lockdowns Are Clearing the Air,” National Geographic, April 8, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/pollution-made -the-pandemic-worse-but-lockdowns-clean-the-sky/. International Energy Agency, Global Energy Review 2020: The Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis on Global Energy Demand and CO2 Emissions, April 30, 2020, https://www.iea .org/reports/global-energy-review-2020. Matthew Taylor and Sandra Laville, “City Leaders Aim to Shape Green Recovery from Coronavirus Crisis,” Guardian, May 1, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com /environment/2020/may/01/city-leaders-aim-to-shape-green-recovery-from -coronavirus-crisis. The city’s actions are being coordinated through the C40 network of cities committed to action on climate change. See www.c40.org. On 28 September 2020, 64 countries launched a Leaders’ Pledge to put the climate and nature at the heart of post-pandemic recovery plans. But without the support of the USA, China, Brazil, Russia, India, Australia and others who refused to sign, it is unclear whether and how the pledge will translate into effective action.

PROLOGUE 1. 2.

3. 4.

Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966). Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe, “If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?,” Atlantic Monthly (October 1995), https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs /politics/ecbig/gdp.htm; and “To Stitch the World Back Together Again,” interview with Hazel Henderson, Whole Earth Review, no. 87 (Fall 1995); https://hazelhenderson .com/1995/10/01/whole-earth-review-to-stitch-the-world-back-together-again-issue -87-fall-1995/. Available for download at https://www.nfb.ca/film/whos_counting/. See the home page of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, http://www.vtpi.org/.

1. THE MAGIC NUMBER 1.

Philipp LePenies, The Power of a Single Number: A Political History of GDP, trans. Jeremy Gaines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). On the continued dominance of GDP, see also Rutger Hoekstra, Replacing GDP by 2030: Towards a Common

1. TH E M AGIC NU M BE R 293

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

Language for the Well-Being and Sustainability Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 242. Roger Wohlner, “Economic Indicators: Gross Domestic Product,” https://www .investopedia.com/university/releases/gdp.asp; and Jeff Fox, CNBC, September 7, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/how-trump-has-set-economic-growth-on-fire .html?&qsearchterm=set%20growth%20on%20fire. The World Bank, “Households and NPISHs final consumption expenditure,” https:// data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.PRVT.ZS. NPISH is an abbreviation for “nonprofit institutions serving households,” which include entities such as trade unions, professional societies, political parties, churches, charities and sports clubs. The World Bank has recently substituted this “household and NPISH” category for what it previously listed as “private expenditure.” In the text here, for ease of communication, I have simply used the words “personal expenditure.” Most recent available data listed here are from 2018 (U.S. and China) and 2019 (Germany and India). OECD, “Household Savings,” https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-savings.htm. LePenies, The Power of a Single Number, 153–54. Robert H. Wade, endorsing LePenies, The Power of a Single Number. Simon Kuznets, Report to the U.S. Congress, 1934, cited in OECD, “Beyond GDP,” https://www.oecd.org/site/worldforum06/38433373.pdf. According to Kuznets, “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income. . . . Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.” At the 2016 Davos Economic Forum, the distortion of GDP use was noted by MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Director Erik Brynjolfsson, in “The Future of Growth: Technology Driven, Human-Centred,” https://www.weforum.org/events /world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2016/sessions/the-future-of-growth -technology-driven-human-centred; Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in “How to Reboot the Global Economy,” https://www.weforum.org/events/world -economic-forum-annual-meeting-2016/sessions/how-to-reboot-the-global -economy; and International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde in “The Global Economic Outlook,” https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual -meeting-2016/sessions/the-global-economic-outlook-1d2286ef-25a9-47cf-bba6 -56fc8ef98004. Andrew Yarrow, Measuring America: How Economic Growth Came to Define American Greatness in the Late Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). Matthias Schmelzer, The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). George H. W. Bush, United States, August 18, 1988; Justin Trudeau, Canada, Common Ground, 2014; David Cameron, UK, November 25, 2010; Xi Jinping, China, September 22, 2015. In October 2008, in response to the subprime mortgage crisis, the Bush administration allocated $700 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), to bail out the financial sector by buying toxic assets, especially mortgage-backed

29 41. TH E M AGIC NUMB ER

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

securities, from financial institutions, and to supply cash directly to banks. See “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008. In February 2009, the Obama administration approved a $787 billion (later revised up to $831 billion) stimulus package. See “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009. Lorenzo Fioramonti, Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World’s Most Powerful Number (London: Zed Books, 2013), argues that the powerful interests that maintain GDP’s dominance have their roots in the capitalist theory of value that views market transactions as the only drivers of development. That basic view clearly transcends party divisions. Although other analyses, such as from David Pilling, The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations (New York: Tim Duggan, 2018), describe the misguided dominance of GDP, they avoid tracing that supremacy to the structure of the economic system itself. Ronald Colman, Full Cost Accounting of Highways: Infrastructure Deficit Accounting in Highway Investment Analysis, GPI Atlantic, October 15, 1988, http://www.gpiatlantic .org/pdf/highways/highways.pdf. Robert Kennedy, “Recapturing America’s Moral Vision,” March 18, 1968, in RFK: Collected Speeches (New York: Viking, 1993). Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Real Median Household Income in the United States,” data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, https://fred .stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=XH6. See also “Average (Median) Household Income in the United States from 1990 to 2018 (in U.S. dollars),” https://www.statista.com /statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/. The Conference Board of Canada, “Canadian Income Inequality,” http://www .conferenceboard.ca/hcp/hot-topics/caninequality.aspx. Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Real Gross Domestic Product” (i.e., adjusted for inflation), data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Total increase is calculated by the author based on 2001 first-quarter GDP of $12.6 trillion and 2007 last-quarter GDP of $15 trillion (figures in 2009 dollars). When the GDP in the United States was analyzed, it was found that in both 2001 and 2002, growth in the GDP was largely due to mortgage equity withdrawals (MEW)— whereby consumers borrow money against the real value of their homes. According to a report by financial analyst John Mauldin, based on data collected by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve (1987–2006), “without U.S. homeowners using their homes as an ATM, the economy would have been very sluggish indeed, averaging much less than 1 percent for the six years of the Bush presidency. . . . Without MEWs, the period from 2001–2007 would have seen GDP growth of less than 1 percent.” Mauldin, “Thoughts from the Front Line: The Economic Blue Screen of Death,” Mauldin Economics, October 17, 2008, http://www.mauldineconomics.com /frontlinethoughts/the-economic-blue-screen-of-death-mwo101708. International Monetary Fund, “New Data on World Debt: A Dive Into Country Numbers,” December 17, 2019, https://blogs.imf.org/2019/12/17/new-data-on-world -debt-a-dive-into-country-numbers/; for the IMF warning, see “Transcript of the

2. COUNTING WHAT MATTERS295

20.

Press Conference on the Release of the April 2018 Fiscal Monitor,” April 18, 2018, http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2018/04/18/sm18-tr041818-transcript-of-the -press-conference-on-the-release-of-the-april-2018-fiscal-monitor. Interview on McAlvaneyWeekly Commentary, “Diane Coyle on GDP: Rethinking the Uncountable,” August 31, 2016, https://mcalvanyweeklycommentary.com/august-31 -2016-diane-coyle-gdp-rethinking-uncountable/. See also Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

2. COUNTING WHAT MATTERS 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Joseph Stiglitz, “It’s Time to Retire Metrics Like GDP. They Don’t Measure Everything That Matters,” Guardian, November 24, 2019, https://www.theguardian .com/commentisfree/2019/nov/24/metrics-gdp-economic-performance-social -progress?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. See for example, Raphael Neukom et al., “No Evidence for Globally Coherent Warm and Cold Periods Over the Preindustrial Common Era,” Nature, 571 (July 24, 2019), https:// www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2. For reconstructions of earlier temperatures in prior centuries and millennia based on climate proxies, see the summary of evidence from tree rings, ice cores, and geological formations at “Global Temperature Record,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#Proxies:_tree_rings.2C_ice_cores :_the_last_2000_years. See also Michael Mann et al., “Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations Over the Past Two Millennia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105, no. 36 (September 9, 2008): 13252–257, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0805721105. U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index,” https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST .txt. Reliable records have been kept since 1880 at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). See also the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate reports, which are accessible at https://public.wmo.int/en /our-mandate/climate/wmo-statement-state-of-global-climate. P. L. Svendsen, O. B. Andersen, and A. A. Nielsen, “Acceleration of the Greenland Ice Sheet Mass Loss as Observed by GRACE: Confidence and Sensitivity,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 364 (February 15, 2013)” 24–29, http://www.sciencedirect .com/science/article/pii/S0012821X12006966. UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Changes in Sea Level,” https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/TAR-11.pdf and “Synthesis Report,” http://ar5-syr.ipcc.ch/topic_summary.php. See also NOAA, “Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States,” January 2017, https://tidesandcurrents.noaa .gov/publications/techrpt83_Global_and_Regional_SLR_Scenarios_for_the_US_final .pdf; National Geographic, “Sea Level Rise, Explained” http://www.nationalgeographic .com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/; and Jon Gertner, “The Secrets in Greenland’s Ice Sheet,” New York Times Magazine, November 12, 2015, https://www .nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/the-secrets-in-greenlands-ice-sheets.html.

29 6 2. CO U NTING W H AT MATTER S

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

See, for example, Thorsten Mauritsen and Robert Pincus, “Committed Warming Inferred from Observations,” Nature Climate Change 7 (July 31, 2017): 652–55, https:// www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n9/full/nclimate3357.html: “Due to the lifetime of CO2, the thermal inertia of the oceans, and the temporary impact of short-lived aerosols and reactive greenhouse gases,” the authors conclude, the Earth will continue to warm by 2oC by 2100 even if we suddenly stop burning fossil fuels now. If emissions continue at their present rate for fifteen more years, temperatures will increase by 3oC. See also Adrian Raftery et al., “Less Than 2oC warming by 2100 Unlikely,” Nature Climate Change 7 (July 31, 2017): 637–43, http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038 /nclimate3352, which concludes with a statistical probability of 95 percent: “The likely range of global temperature increase is 2.0–4.9oC with median 3.2oC” by 2100. The statistical model used in that study accounts for the effect of existing emission mitigation policies and shows a statistical probability of only 5 percent that the temperature rise will not exceed 2oC and only a 1 percent chance that it won’t exceed 1.5oC. “Bangkok ‘Could Be Submerged in 15 Years,’ ” Bangkok Post, July 23, 2015, https://www .bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-news/632520/bangkok-could-be-submerged -in-15-years, and “Bangkok Is Sinking Fast,” Asean Post, December 31, 2019, https:// theaseanpost.com/article/bangkok-sinking-fast. S. Sherwood et al., 22 July 2020, “An Assessment of Earth’s Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence,” Reviews of Geophysics, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley .com/doi/full/10.1029/2019RG000678 and https://climateextremes.org.au/wp-content /uploads/2020/07/WCRP_ECS_Final_manuscript_2019RG000678R_FINAL_200720 .pdf. Science magazine has a good summary at https://www.sciencemag.org/news /2020/07/after-40-years-researchers-finally-see-earths-climate-destiny-more -clearly#. Jurriann De Voss et al., “Estimating the Normal Background Rate of Species Extinction,” Conservation Biology 29 (2015): 452–62, https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com /doi/abs/10.1111/cobi.12380. Center for Biological Diversity, “Halting the Extinction Crisis,” http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity /extinction_crisis/. The most recent Global Diversity Outlook 5 report, published by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and released on 15 September 2020, warns that we stand on the brink of a catastrophic biodiversity collapse that not only threatens to wipe out countless species and invaluable genetic diversity, but endangers humanity’s food supply, health and security. https://www.cbd.int/gbo/gbo5/publication/gbo-5-en.pdf. World Health Organization, “9 out of 10 People Worldwide Breathe Polluted Air, but More Countries Are Taking Action,” May 2, 2018, https://www.who.int/news-room /detail/02-05-2018-9-out-of-10-people-worldwide-breathe-polluted-air-but-more -countries-are-taking-action. See also: Lauri Myllyvirta, “Quantifying the Economic Costs of Air Pollution from Fossil Fuels,” Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, February 2020, https://energyandcleanair.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/02 /Cost-of-fossil-fuels-briefing.pdf; and World Health Organisation, “Mortality and Burden of Disease from Ambient Air Pollution,” https://www.who.int/gho/phe/outdoor _air_pollution/burden/en/.

2. CO U NTING W H AT M ATTER S297

11.

12.

13.

14.

W. F. Laurance, “Reflections on the Tropical Deforestation Crisis,” Biological Conservation 91: 109–117,http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320799000889; and editors William Laurance and Richard Bierregaard, Jr., in their preface to Tropical Forest Remnants: Ecology, Management and Conservation of Fragmented Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xi. R. B. Primack, “Habitat Destruction,” In Essentials of Conservation Biology (5th ed. 2010) (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates): 177–88, cited in “Habitat Destruction,” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction. See also World Resources Institute (WRI), State of the World’s Forests, January 8, 2009, http://www.wri.org/resource/state-worlds -forests; and David Allan, “Global Deforestation,” (lecture, global change program, University of Michigan, April 1, 2010), https://web.archive.org/web/20110615044847/http:// www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html. World Inequality Database, World Inequality Report 2018, https://wir2018.wid.world/; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2019/ and https://www .unhcr.org/5ee200e37.pdf; “Transcript of the Press Conference on the Release of the April 2018 Fiscal Monitor,” April 18, 2018, http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles /2018/04/18/sm18-tr041818-transcript-of-the-press-conference-on-the-release-of-the -april-2018-fiscal-monitor. See also UNHCR, “Global Forced Displacement Hits Record High,” June 29, 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2016/6/5763b65a4 /global-forced-displacement-hits-record-high.html. The aforementioned UNHCR global trends report shows that 1 in every 113 people were forced from their homes by war or persecution in 2015, the highest number since UNHRC records began. “On average 24 people were forced to flee each minute in 2015, four times more than a decade earlier, when six people fled every 60 seconds.” For example, a forty-year update of the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth report found that reliable data from the United Nations, U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and other sources confirmed predicted trends that business as usual in the economy would likely lead to environmental and economic collapse before 2070. Graham Turner, “Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data,” MSSI Research Paper No. 4 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, August 2014), https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2763500/MSSI -ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf; and Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander, “Limits to Growth Was Right: New Research Shows We’re Nearing Collapse,” Guardian, September 2, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02 /limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse#. On climate change causes and impacts, see, for example, John Cook et al., “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature,” Environmental Research Letters 8 (2013), http://iopscience.iop.org/article /10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024/pdf. The authors found that among studies expressing a position on the causes of climate change, “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” And the more than 2,000 scientists

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15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

from 154 countries of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree that flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification, and other impacts will likely overwhelm the resilience of many of the world’s ecosystems in this century. IPCC Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report, section 3.3.1, “Impacts on Systems and Sectors,” “Ecosystems,”https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4_syr_full _report.pdf. The IPCC Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report warned that continued emissions will likely produce “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.” See https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/? United Nations Secretary-General, “Secretary-General’s Remarks to High-Level Thematic Debate on ‘The State of the World Economy and Finance and Its Impact on Development,” May 17, 2012, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2012 -05-17/secretary-generals-remarks-high-level-thematic-debate-state-world. Kenneth E. Boulding, Evolutionary Economics (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1981). Herman E. Daly, ed. Toward a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973); and Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, definitions and materials, http://www.steadystate.org/. R. Costanza “The Early History of Ecological Economics and the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE),” Internet Encyclopaedia of Ecological Economics, April 2003,http://isecoeco.org/pdf/costanza.pdf. In Robert Costanza (ed.), Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vi. Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 12. For detailed descriptions of the different categories of ecosystem services, see Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis, (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), http://www.millenniumassessment.org /documents/document.356.aspx.pdf; Gretchen Daily (ed.), Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997); and Gretchen Daily and Katherine Ellison, The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Nature Profitable (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002). The World Bank and World Wildlife Fund Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use, Running Pure: The Importance of Forest Protected Areas to Drinking Water, August 2003, https://wwf.panda.org/?8443/Running-Pure-The-importance-of-forest -protected-areas-to-drinking-water. This system has worked to produce what is called “the champagne of drinking waters” to 8.4 million New Yorkers in the country’s largest municipal water system. City, state, and local governments and nature conservancies own 40 percent of the more than one-million-acre Catskill/Delaware watershed, which extends 125 miles north of the city. The rest is privately owned, with development regulated to prevent pollutants getting into the water supply. “We’re treating things at the source, as opposed to at the end of the pipe,” says Paul V. Rush, deputy commissioner of New York City’s Bureau of Water Supply. As a result, the federal Environmental Protection Agency exempts water from this watershed from its usual filtration requirements.

2. CO U NTING W H AT M ATTER S299

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“How New York Gets its Water,” New York Times, May 30, 2016, https://www.nytimes .com/interactive/2016/03/24/nyregion/how-nyc-gets-its-water-new-york-101.html. As this book is not a technical manual, space does not allow a detailed description of the many methods used in full-cost accounts. To give one small example, practitioners may try to replace fixed by variable costs related to use. For instance, fixed annual payments for car registration and insurance ignore unsustainable behaviors and the benefits of vehicles and transport modes that are more fuel efficient and less polluting. So, if registration and insurance payments were to vary by type of vehicle, fuel efficiency, and number of kilometers driven annually, they would reflect a far more accurate picture of the actual social, economic, and environmental impacts of driving. For WRI publications in these and other areas, see http://www.wri.org/publication. See also Janice C. Wright, “Natural Resource Accounting—a Technique for Improving Planning in New Zealand?” June 1989, (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b92f /1d56fad2f5c3fe603ff1a32f558443afd117.pdf), citing R. Repetto, “Review Report on Natural Resource Accounting” (Victoria, Australia: Ministry for Planning and Environment, 1987), 12p; and R. Repetto, “Natural Resource Accounting for Countries with Natural Resource-Based Economies” (Victoria, Australia: Ministry for Planning and Environment, 1986), 46p. Norway, France, and the Netherlands have been global leaders in natural resource accounting. See, for example, Knut Alfsen et al., Natural Resource Accounting and Analysis: The Norwegian Experience: 1978–1986, Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway, https://www.ssb.no/a/histstat/sos/sos_065.pdf; T. Friend, “Review of International Experience Resource Accounting,” United Nations Environment UNEP/W.G.85/INF.3, cited in William S. Prudham and Steve Lonergan. “Natural Resource Accounting (1): A Review of Existing Frameworks,” Canadian Journal of Regional Science XVI, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 363–86, http://cjrs-rcsr.org/archives/16-3 /Prudham-Lonergan.pdf; and J.-L. Weber, “The French Natural Patrimony Accounts,” Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commision for Europe 1, no. 4 (September 1, 1983): 419–44, http://content.iospress.com/articles/statistical-journal -of-the-united-nations-economic-commission-for-europe/sju1-4-03; and R. Hueting, “Economic Aspects of Environmental Accounting,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 2, no. 1 (April 1, 1987): 55–71, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177 /02601079X8700200105. In 1997, for example, Statistics Canada released its Canadian System of Environmental and Resource Accounts, consisting of natural resource accounts to be incorporated into Canada’s national balance sheets; resource and waste flow data to bring into the input-output tables; and pollution and environmental protection expenditures to assess the actual costs of production of a wide range of goods. See Econnections: Linking the Environment and the Economy. Concepts, Sources and Methods of the Canadian System of Environmental and Resource Accounts, Cat. No. 16-505-GPE. For recent data and method updates, see, for example, the links to the latest natural resource accounts, released in January 2018, http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function =getSurvey&SDDS=5114; and the Methodological Guide, released in April 2016,

3 0 0 2. CO U NTING W H AT MATTER S

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/16-509-X and https://www150.statcan .gc.ca/n1/pub/16-509-x/16-509-x2016001-eng.htm. Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1996, 1998). For current footprint work, see Global Footprint Network, founded by Mathis Wackernagel in 2003, at http://www.footprintnetwork.org/. See GPI Atlantic, Population Health Publications, www.gpiatlantic.org/publications /health.htm, for numerous references to this literature. Illustrative of historical development in this field is Andrew Juren et al., “Commonplace to Condemned: The Discovery That Tobacco Kills, and How Richard Doll Shaped Modern Smoking Cessation Practices,” BC Medical Journal 54, no. 4 (May 2012): 183–88, https://www.bcmj.org/articles /commonplace-condemned-discovery-tobacco-kills-and-how-richard-doll-shaped -modern-smoking. Illustrative of those improvements since the late 1970s are more accurate obesity assessments through direct measurement of height and weight that overcome distortions in self-reported data. See, for example, Michael Tjepkema, “Measured Obesity: Adult Obesity in Canada—Measured Height and Weight,” Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 82-620-MWE2005001, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-620-m/2005001/pdf /4224906-eng.pdf. William Nordhaus and James Tobin, “Is Growth Obsolete?” Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect, vol. 5: Economic Growth, (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1972), www.nber.org/chapters/c7620.pdf. Herman Daly and John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Between 1994 and 2001, the U.S. ISEW was replicated for the UK, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Chile, and British Columbia. Redefining Progress, “Genuine Progress Indicator.” For a short summary, see https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_progress_indicator. Clifford Cobb, Tel Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe, “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?”, Atlantic, October 1995, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/ecbig/gdp.htm. Ida Kubiszewski et al., “Beyond GDP: Measuring and Achieving Global Genuine Progress,” Ecological Economics 93 (2013): 57–68, http://www.bioline.org.br/pdf?nd13075. This article provides both global and national results for all seventeen countries, graphing GDP against GPI and other measures. Redefining Progress annual GPI reports and updates were undertaken from 1995 to 2006. See John Talberth, Clifford Cobb, and Noah Slattery, The Genuine Progress Indicator 2006, Redefining Progress, February 2007, https://www.academia.edu/2130339/The_genuine_progress_indicator. A survey of more than 170 municipal and community-level sustainability projects worldwide found that more than 90 used Sustainable Seattle as their model. See Meg Holden, “Sustainable Seattle: The Case of the Prototype Sustainability Indicators Project,” in Community Quality of Life Indicators, vol. 28, Social Indicators Research Series, 177–201, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4020-4625-4_7#page-1.

3. A NOVA SCOTIA START301

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

See also https://www.facebook.com/pg/Sustainseattle/about/?ref=page_internal. Despite its success at the time, Sustainable Seattle has not continued producing indicator reports, and its most recent is for 2010. Ronald Colman, Measuring Sustainable Development: The Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index: Framework, Indicators and Methodologies, January 1998, http://www.gpiatlantic .org/pdf/general/framework.pdf. Paul Allin and David J. Hand, The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive and Measurement (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), give a comprehensive overview of major national and international initiatives to build measures of national well-being that include sustainability, progress, quality of life, economic performance, and environmental quality. Ronald Colman, The Economic Value of Civic and Voluntary Work in Nova Scotia: 2003 Update, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/volunteer/volunteerupdate03.pdf. Joshua Hill, “US Still Subsidizing Fossil Fuels to Tune of $27 Billion,” CleanTechnica, June 6, 2018, https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/06/us-still-subsidizing-fossil -fuels-to-tune-of-27-billion/. Bent Sorensen, Renewable Energy: Physics, Engineering, Environmental Impacts, Economics and Planning, 4th edition (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 2010). In the early development of wind power, the Danish government provided 30 percent of initial capital costs.

3. A NOVA SCOTIA START 1.

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Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society, 1998). For current footprint work, see Global Footprint Network, founded by Mathis Wackernagel in 2003, at http://www.footprintnetwork.org/. For calculations on planets required to support the U.S. and Canadian lifestyles worldwide, see Global Footprint Network, “Earth Overshoot Day,” https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/press-release-june-2019 -english/ and https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/. Messinger’s original critique was an unpublished internal Statistics Canada paper prepared for Canada’s chief statistician, which Messinger had kindly made available to me. He later publicly presented a version of that paper together with his GPI replication for Canada: Hans Messinger, Statistics Canada, “Measuring Sustainable Economic Welfare: Looking Beyond GDP” (presented at the annual meetings of the Canadian Economics Association, St. John’s, Newfoundland, June 1997), http://www.csls.ca/misc /cea9731.pdf. Although this paper is still officially labeled a “preliminary draft” not for citation or quotation, at the time Messinger did give GPI Atlantic permission to cite it and also permitted the Centre for the Study of Living Standards in Ottawa to release it publicly. On the original U.S. GPI and its updates, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Genuine_progress_indicator#; Clifford Cobb, Tel Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe, “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?”, Atlantic, October 1995, https://www .theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/ecbig/gdp.htm.

3023. A NOVA S COTIA STA RT

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The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) was created in 1983 in response to a call by the United Nations General Assembly “to propose longterm environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond” by means of major international cooperation. It released its report, Our Common Future, often known as the Brundtland Report, in October 1987, http://www .un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf. For example, Nova Scotia Legislature, An Act to Reform the Environmental Laws of the Province and to Encourage and Promote the Protection, Enhancement and Prudent Use of the Environment, 1994–95, pt. 1, sec. 2(b)(ii), https://nslegislature.ca/sites/default /files/legc/statutes/environment.pdf. See also Province of Nova Scotia, A Guide to the Environment Act, February 2006, http://www.novascotia.ca/nse/ea/docs/EAActGuide .pdf. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992, https://www.un.org/en /development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A _CONF.151_26_Vol.I_Declaration.pdf and http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/environmental .development.rio.declaration.1992/portrait.a4.pdf. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992, http://unfccc.int /cop3/fccc/climate/conv.htm. See the subsequent Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1997, https://unfccc.int/resource/docs /convkp/kpeng.pdf. Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Official Journal of the European Union, Title 20, Article 191, paragraph 2, page 132,http://eur-lex .europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:41f89a28-1fc6-4c92-b1c8-03327d1b1ecc.0007.02 /DOC_1&format=PDF. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report: Summary for Policy Makers, p. 8, http://www .ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf. Though the IPCC has released special reports since that time—such as on methodology (2019) and impacts of climate change on land (2019), oceans (2019), and at 1.5°C (2018)—this 2014 Fifth Assessment Report is the most recent comprehensive assessment available at the time of writing. Prior full assessment reports were released in 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007. The Sixth IPCC Assessment Report will be finalized in 2021 and released in the first half of 2022. Carl-Friedrich Schleussner et al., “Differential Climate Impacts for Policy-Relevant Limits to Global Warming: The Case of 1.5°C and 2°C”, Earth System Dynamics 7, no. 2 (2016): 327–51, https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/7/327/2016/esd-7-327-2016 -discussion.html; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report. Global Warming of 1.5°C, 2018, https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf. Justin Gillis, “U.N. Panel Issues Its Starkest Warning Yet on Global Warming,” New York Times, November 2, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/world/europe /global-warming-un-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change.html?_r=0. It has been estimated that it can take up to 4,000 years for a tropical rainforest truly to regain its native identity after it has been cleared. Dieter Liebsch, Marcia Marques, and Renato Goldenberg, “How Long Does the Atlantic Rain Forest Take to Recover After a Disturbance? Changes in Species Composition and Ecological Features During

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Secondary Succession,” Biological Conservation 141, no. 6 (June 2008): 1717–25, http:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320708001456?via%3Dihub. Zeke Hausfather, “Common Climate Misconceptions: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Yale Climate Connections (December 2010), https://www.yaleclimateconnections .org/2010/12/common-climate-misconceptions-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/. Natural Resources Conservation Services, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Summary Report, 2007 Natural Resources Inventory, December 2009, 97, https://www.nrcs.usda .gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1041379.pdf. Jim Yardley, “Clothing Brands Sidestep Blame for Safety Lapses,” New York Times, December 30, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/world/asia/garment-makers -stumble-on-call-for-accountability.html. Leslie Allen, “Will Tuvalu Disappear Beneath the Sea? Global Warming Threatens to Swamp a Small Island Nation,” Smithsonian Magazine (August 2004), https://www .smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/will-tuvalu-disappear-beneath-the-sea-180940704/. Martin Luther King, Sermon to the Congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia. Transcript available at: https://onbeing.org/blog/martin-luther-kings -last-christmas-sermon/. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, World Development Indicators 2008, fig. 1j, Washington, D.C. Despite considerable effort, it was not possible for the author to update these World Bank data through more recent World Bank indicator and consumption databases and other sources. It is disturbing that such basic (albeit politically sensitive) numbers are not easily and readily available on a regular basis. Maude Barlow, “Water as Commodity: The Wrong Prescription,” Food First Backgrounder, 7, no. 3 (Summer 2001), https://foodfirst.org/publication/water-as-commodity -the-wrong-prescription/#. Timothy Gore, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2, 2015, https://www.oxfam .org/en/research/extreme-carbon-inequality. See also Charlotte McDonald, “How Many Earths Do We Need?” BBC News, June 16, 2015, Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712 (calculations based on Global Footprint Network data). Global Footprint Network, “Ecological Footprint,” https://www.footprintnetwork.org /our-work/ecological-footprint/. Richard Wilkinson and Michael Marmot (eds.), Social Determinants of Health: The Solid Facts, 2nd ed. (World Health Organization, 2003), 10, http://www.euro.who .int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/98438/e81384.pdf. World Health Organization, “10 Facts on Health Inequities and Their Causes,” April 2017, also reports: “Children from the poorest 20 percent of households are nearly twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday as children in the richest 20 percent,” http://www.who.int/features/factfiles /health_inequities/en/. Robert Almer and Donald Eddins, “Cross-Sectional analysis: Precursors of Premature Death in the United States,” in Closing the Gap: The Burden of Unnecessary Illness, ed. Robert Almer and Bruce Hull (New York: Oxford University Press,1987), Table 1, 183.

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Cited in Ronald Colman, The Cost of Chronic Disease in Nova Scotia (Halifax, Canada: GPI Atlantic, 2002), 53, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/chronic.pdf. American Academy of Pediatrics, Council on Community Pediatrics, “Poverty and Child Health in the United States,” Pediatrics 137, no. 4 (April 2016): e20160339, http:// pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/03/07/peds.2016-0339.full-text.pdf. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, “Income Inequality and Health: A Causal Review,” Social Science and Medicine, 128 (March 2015): 316–26, http://www.sciencedirect.com /science/article/pii/S0277953614008399; Bruce P. Kennedy, Ichiro Kawachi, Roberta Glass, and Deborah Prothrow-Stith, “Income Distribution, Socioeconomic Status, and Self-Rated Health: A US Multi-Level Analysis,” British Medical Journal 317 (October 3, 1998): 917–21, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=28675; Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, “Child Wellbeing and Income Inequality in Rich Societies: Ecological Cross-Sectional Study,” British Medical Journal 335 (2007): 1080, https://www.bmj.com/content/335/7629/1080; Charles Leadbeater, The Weightless Society: Living in the New Economy Bubble (London: Texere, 2000); Donald Savoie, Rethinking Canada’s Regional Development Policy: An Atlantic Perspective (Moncton, Canada: Canadian Institute for Research on Regional Development, 1997); Lars Osberg (ed.), The Economic Implications of Social Cohesion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Lars Osberg, “The Equity/Efficiency Tradeoff in Retrospect,” Canadian Business Economics 3, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 5–20; Andrew Sharpe, Opening address to IRPP-CSLS Conference on the Linkages Between Economic Growth and Inequality, Ottawa, January 2001; Lars Osberg, “Reality Check: Economic Inequality in Canada.” Why Inequality Matters, in 1,000 Words or Less Series (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, December 2007): 25–27. Ernest Barker (ed. and trans.), The Politics of Aristotle, book 4, ch. XI (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

4. THE NEW MEASURES IN ACTION 1. 2.

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The total of the two grants was equivalent to about US$90,700 at 1998 exchange rates. Steven Bornais, “Measuring Economic Growth: Former SMU Prof Tries to Find a Better Way,” Sunday Daily News, November 16, 1997, http://www.gpiatlantic.org /clippings/mc_gpi_growth.htm. Statistics Canada, Households’ Unpaid Work: Measurement and Valuation, Studies in National Accounting, System of National Accounts, catalogue no. 13-603E, #3, December 1995. Not available online but can be ordered from http://www.publications .gc.ca/site/eng/57066/publication.html. Statistics Canada, Initial Data Release from the 1992 General Social Survey on Time Use, catalogue no. 11–612, #30. Microdata files kindly supplied to the author by Statistics Canada. A user’s guide to the data was published by Statistics Canada in August 1993 and used by the author in compiling data for the GPI Atlantic reports, but that Statistics Canada guide can no longer be readily found online.

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

Ronald Colman, The Economic Value of Civic and Voluntary Work in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, 1998), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/volunteer/volunteer.pdf. Monetary estimates are in 1997 Canadian dollars, with voluntary hours adjusted for 1997 population estimates. “Nova Scotia Leads Effort to Improve Ways to Measure Economy,” Ottawa Citizen, July 29, 1998, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/clippings/mc_gpi_nseffort.htm. Nova Scotia Department of Economic Development and Tourism, “Nova Scotians Volunteer $1.9 Billion,” press release, July 15, 1998, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/clippings /mc_volunteer9.htm. Some of these groups also use our methods to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of supporting their full-time paid staff, who coordinate the more sporadic contributions of volunteers and whose every paid hour leverages considerably more volunteer time. Job estimates are based on forty-eight weeks and a forty-hour work week. Ronald Colman, The Economic Value of Unpaid Housework and Childcare in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, November 1998), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/housework/housework .pdf. Numbers cited here were updated based on Statistics Canada’s 2005 General Social Survey, cited in Linda Pannozzo et al., The 2008 Nova Scotia GPI Accounts: Indicators of Genuine Progress (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, April 2009), 33, http://www.gpiatlantic.org /pdf/integrated/gpi2008.pdf. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Statistics Canada has recognized that measuring unpaid work is essential in overcoming gender discrimination through undervaluation of women’s economic and social contribution: “Since women do most of the unpaid household and volunteer work, their significant contribution to overall production and economic welfare is grossly understated in the major economic aggregates.” Statistics Canada, Households’ Unpaid Work: Measurement and Valuation, System of National Accounts, catalogue no. 13-603E, no. 3, (1995): 3. A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1932), cited in Statistics Canada, Households’ Unpaid Work: Measurement and Valuation, Studies in National Accounting, System of National Accounts, catalogue no. 13-603E, #3 (December 1995), 3. This is not available online but can be ordered from http://www .publications.gc.ca/site/eng/57066/publication.html. For a sixty-year analysis of this historical trend, see Statistics Canada, “The Surge of Women in the Workforce,” especially chart 1: “Labour force participation rates of men and women aged 25 to 54, 1953 to 2014,” http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-630-x/11-630 -x2015009-eng.htm. Statistics Canada, Households’ Unpaid Work, 45. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic, 1992), 87. Historical studies cited by Schor are in footnotes 5 and 6, page 200. See also Statistics Canada, General Social Surveys, Time Use Surveys and related analytical reports, cited and referenced in Linda Pannozzo and Ronald Colman, Working Time and the Future of Work in Canada: A Nova Scotia GPI Case Study (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, April 2004), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/workhours/workhours.pdf;

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15.

16.

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Pannozzo et al., The 2008 Nova Scotia GPI Accounts; Andrew Harvey and Ronald Colman, The Value of Free Time in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, September 2008), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/timeuse/freetime.pdf; and Colman, The Economic Value of Unpaid Housework and Childcare in Nova Scotia. Median weekly earnings for women in the United States in 2016 were just 82 percent of those for men. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Women’s Median Earnings 82 Percent of Men’s in 2016,” Economics Daily March 8, 2017, https://www.bls.gov/opub /ted/2017/womens-median-earnings-82-percent-of-mens-in-2016.htm. A rigorous Statistics Canada analysis of the gender wage gap in Canada examined all factors that might explain it, including different work experience, education, job tenure, industry, occupation, union status, and more. The agency concluded that half the gender wage gap is “unexplained” and must therefore be attributed to “gender-based labour market discrimination.” See also Marie Drolet, The Persistent Gap; New Evidence on the Canadian Gender Wage Gap, Income Statistics Division, Statistics Canada, catalogue no. 75F0002MIE-99008, November 1999, 13, http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/nfortin/econ351 /drolet.pdf. See Table 3 of this study for the fourteen factors examined and for the fraction of the gender wage gap explained by each factor. Statistics Canada, Canadian Social Trends, Autumn 1991, catalogue no. 11-008-XPE, 14; Judith Frederick, As Time Goes By . . . Time Use of Canadians, Statistics Canada, catalogue no. 89-544E, 25; Colman. The Economic Value of Unpaid Housework and Childcare in Nova Scotia, citing Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey time use data and Statistics Canada, Women in the Workplace, catalogue no. 71–534, 55. For estimates of “time poverty,” see Andrew Harvey and Arun K. Mukhopadhyay, “When Twenty-Four Hours Is Not Enough: Time Poverty of Working Parents,” Social Indicators Research, 82, no. 1 (May 2007). Statistics Canada time use data show that lone-parent mothers working full time spend an hour and a half less per day caring for their children than those who are not employed. Full-time employed lone-parent mothers spend only an hour a day in total, or 7 hours a week, on primary child care. Harvey and Mukhopadhyay have estimated that more than half of all Canadian single parents—overwhelmingly women— suffer time poverty, which may be defined as less than the minimum necessary time to accomplish basic household tasks, and that 88 percent of full-time employed single parents with one child and 98 percent of those with two children are time poor. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2015 and 2016, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, table 4: “Families in Poverty by Type of Family: 2014 and 2015,” https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-256.html. Also using statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) shows the poverty rate for “female-headed households with children” in the United States in 2015 as 36.5 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for “families with children headed by married couples.” The overall poverty rate for black and Native American women is 23 percent, but it is 40 percent and 48 percent, respectively, for black and Native American female-headed families. Jasmine Tucker and Caitlin Lowell, National Snapshot: Poverty Among Women & Families, 2015, NWLC, September 2016, https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Poverty -Snapshot-Factsheet-2016.pdf.

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21.

22.

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Statistics Canada, Canadian Income Survey 2017, released 2019. https://www150 .statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/daily-quotidien/190226/dq190226b-eng.pdf?st=tGGcXktV; Noah Zon and Hannah Aldridge, “Why is lone-parent poverty so high and what can we do about it?” https://maytree.com/wp-content/uploads/Policy-Brief-Lone-Parent -Poverty.pdf. See also the Pew Research Center analysis of the 2017 Current Population Survey March Supplement, reported in Gretchen Livingstone, “The Changing Profile of Unmarried Parents,” April 25, 2018, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/04/25 /the-changing-profile-of-unmarried-parents/. “Cross-national single mother poverty rates,” from the Luxembourg Income Study, cited at The Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, http://www.ncdsv.org /images/LM_PovertyRatesSingleMothersHigherUS_6-2011.pdf. See also Matt Bruenig, “The Single Mother, Child Poverty Myth,” April 14, 2014, The American Prospect, https://prospect.org/power/single-mother-child-poverty-myth/. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), “Labour Force Participation Rate by Sex and Age Group,” 2016. https://stats.oecd.org/index .aspx?queryid=54741. OECD, “Average Annual Hours Actually Worked per Worker,” 2017, https://data.oecd .org/emp/hours-worked.htm; and OECD, “Time Spent in Paid and Unpaid Work, by sex,” https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54757. For further comparisons showing greater Norwegian male contributions to household work and higher rates of free time in Norway, see also OECD, “Average Minutes per Day Spent on Leisure Activities in OECD Countries Plus China, India and South Africa by Gender, as of 2016,” showing 355 minutes in Norway and 271 minutes in the United States, https:// www.statista.com/statistics/521992/time-spent-leisure-countries/; and OECD, “Special Focus: Measuring Leisure in OECD Countries,” in Society at a Glance: OECD Social Indicators 31, figure 2.9: “Men Have More Leisure Than Women,” https://www .oecd.org/berlin/42675407.pdf. Also see “Norwegian Men Most Helpful with Housework, OECD Survey Finds,” Reuters, March 6, 2014, https://www.reuters.com/article /us-womensday-oecd-survey-idusbrea251nf20140306. See a review of evidence from several medical studies in Ana Sandoiu, “Poor Work-Life Balance Leads to Poor Health Later in Life,” Medical News Today, October 29, 2016, https:// www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313755.php; also see Alan Kohll, “The Evolving Definition of Work-Life Balance,” Forbes, March 27, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites /alankohll/2018/03/27/the-evolving-definition-of-work-life-balance/#17e68fd89ed3. Solicitor-General of Canada, “Cost of Crime to Victims,” Canadian Urban Victimization Survey no. 5 (1985): 1, http://madgic.library.carleton.ca/deposit/govt/ca_fed /publicsafetycuvsb%205_1985.pdf. Colin Dodds and Ronald Colman, The Cost of Crime in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, April 1999), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/crime/crime.pdf. The GPI Atlantic “shattered lives” category and estimates were based on a study by criminologists Paul Brantingham and Stephen Easton, “The Crime Bill: Who Pays and How Much?,” Fraser Forum, (Fraser Institute, 1996), https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default /files/CrimeBillWhoPaysandHowMuch.pdf. Brantingham and Easton in turn used Canadian court award estimates from Brandon Welsh and Irvin Waller, Crime and

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Its Prevention: Costs and Benefits, (Ottawa: Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, April 1995). More recent crime cost estimates are in Stephen Easton, Hilary Furness, and Paul Brantingham, Cost of Crime in Canada: 2014 Report (Fraser Institute, October 2014) http://www.sfu.ca/~easton/Econ382/cost-of-crime-2014-revised-FPPs .pdf. Dodds and Colman, The Cost of Crime in Nova Scotia.

5. SCALING UP 1.

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The large sample size allowed a high degree of statistical validity and two crosstabulations with a 95 percent confidence level of plus or minus 3 percent. We used strict random sampling techniques under Statistics Canada supervision. Reports on these separate sets of indicator results on employment, health, security, caregiving, unpaid work, core values, and other subjects presented at community meetings are available at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/publications/communitypubs.htm. For example, the Halifax Harbour study is cited in several books, journals, and government Web sites, such as http://legacycontent.halifax.ca/harboursol/documents /gpi_report_001.pdf. The reports cited are Sally Walker et al., Application of the Genuine Progress Index Approach to Analyzing Reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Nova Scotia Freight Transport Sector (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, May 1999), http://www .gpiatlantic.org/pdf/freight/freight.pdf; Ronald Colman, “Gender Equality in the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index” (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, October 1999), https://cdn.dal .ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/diff/ace-women-health/ACEWH_gender_equity_in _genuine_progress_index.pdf and http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/misc/genderequality .pdf; Ronald Colman, Women’s Health in Atlantic Canada: A Statistical Portrait (Halifax: GPI Atlantic and the Maritime Centre for Excellence in Women’s Health, February 2000), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/womens/womens.pdf; Sara Wilson, The Costs and Benefits of Sewage Treatment and Source Control for Halifax Harbour (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, July 2000), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/water /halharbour.pdf, and on the Halifax Regional Municipality Web at http://legacycontent .halifax.ca/harboursol/documents/gpi_report_001.pdf with executive summary at: http://legacycontent.halifax.ca/harboursol/GPIWaterQualityAccountsSummary.php; Ronald Colman, Cost of Obesity in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, March 2000), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/obesity/ns-obesity.pdf; and GPI Atlantic, Recreation Nova Scotia, and Sport Nova Scotia, “Atlantic Men Becoming Couch Potatoes: Increased Heart Disease Risk Will Cost Health Care Systems” (press release), February 2000, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/exercise.pdf. Anders Hayden, Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time, Consumption & Ecology (London: Zed Books, 1999). Globe and Mail, “The Altered State,” June 7, 2003, F7, referenced in Linda Pannozzo and Ronald Colman, Working Time and the Future of Work in Canada: A Nova Scotia GPI Case Study (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, April 2004), 355, http://www.gpiatlantic.org /pdf/workhours/workhours.pdf.

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “Average Annual Hours Actually Worked per Worker,” https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx? DataSetCode=ANHRS; and OECD, “Part-Time Employment Rate. Total, % of Employment, 2015,” https://data.oecd.org/emp/part-time-employment-rate.htm. This example and those that follow are from Ronald Colman and Anders Hayden, Work Time Reduction in the Nova Scotia Civil Service. Recommendations to the NS Government and Public Sector Unions Based on Successful Work Time Reduction Experiments in Europe and North America, (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, 1999), 14, http://www .gpiatlantic.org/pdf/misc/worktime.pdf; and Pannozzo and Colman, Working Time and the Future of Work in Canada: A Nova Scotia GPI Case Study, 355. Colman and Hayden, Work Time Reduction in the Nova Scotia Civil Service. For current evidence, see, for example, Charlotte Graham-McLay, “A 4-Day Workweek: A Test Run Shows a Surprising Result,” New York Times, July 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes .com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workweek-new-zealand.html, reporting on successful New Zealand and Swedish experiments showing that employees completed the same amount of work as efficiently in thirty-two hours as in forty while greatly increasing their family, exercise, and leisure time. Pannozzo and Colman, Working Time and the Future of Work in Canada.355. See, for example, M. Jahoda, Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Sharon Kirsh, Unemployment. Its Impact on Body and Soul (Ottawa: Canadian Mental Health Association, 1983). Kevin Cox, “Nova Scotians Protest Against Job Cuts,” Globe and Mail, April 27, 2000, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/nova-scotians-protest-against -job-cuts/article18422653/. See, for example, European Parliamentary Research Service, Human Health Implications of Organic Food and Organic Agriculture, December 2016, http://www.europarl .europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/581922/EPRS_STU(2016)581922_EN.pdf. Statista, “Forecast market value of organic food and beverage markets worldwide in 2018 and 2027,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/869052/global-organic-food-and -beverage-market-value/. Comparable estimates are from Zion Market Research, “Organic Food and Beverages Market by Product Type: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2017-2024,” which estimates a 15% compounded annual growth rate from $124.7 billion in 2017 to $323.1 billion by 2024. https://www .zionmarketresearch.com/report/organic-food-beverages-market; and “Organic Food: Panacea for Health?”, Lancet, 389, no. 10070 (February 18, 2017): 672, which estimates a 2.5-fold growth in the global organic market in just four years (2016-2020) to $200 billion, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)30391 -4/fulltext?elsca1=etoc. Canadian Organic Growers et al., Investing in Organic Agriculture: A Path to Clean, Inclusive, Economic Growth, November 30, 2016, https://www.cog.ca/wp-content /uploads/2018/08/Recommendations-for-NAPF-Exec-Summary.pdf. Organic Trade Association, Organic Industry Survey 2016. Results summarized at https:// www.ota.com/news/press-releases/19031. In the United States the number of organic producers grew by 65 percent from 2004 to 2014, and total organic sales in 2015 hit a

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17. 18.

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new record of US$43.3 billion, up 11 percent from the previous year’s record level and far outstripping the overall food market’s growth rate of 3 percent. In the twenty-eight European Union countries, organic farming has grown steadily by an average of 6 percent a year over ten years, and by 13 percent a year in twelve countries that joined the EU since 2004; European Commission, Facts and Figures on Organic Agriculture in the European Union, especially pp. 9–10, https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info /files/food-farming-fisheries/trade/documents/report-organic-agriculture-eu-2013 _en.pdf. India’s organic market is growing at 25–30 percent a year and could triple in size in the next four years: Economic Times, “Organic Food Market Growing at 25–30 Percent, Awareness Still Low: Government,” October 15, 2015, http://economictimes .indiatimes.com/industry/cons-products/food/organic-food-market-growing-at-25 -30-awareness-still-low-government/articleshow/49379802.cms; and Dilip Kumar Jha, “India’s Organic Food Market to Treble in Four Years,” Business Standard, May 18, 2016, http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/india-s-organic-food -market-to-treble-in-four-years-116051600098_1.html. This investigative process is extensively described in freely available GPI Atlantic reports, so there is no need for new entrants to reinvent the wheel. With only modest resources, they can adopt, adapt, revise, and expand the indicators we used while remaining true to the original meaning and intent. Global Footprint Network, “Earth Overshoot Day,” https://www.overshootday.org /newsroom/press-release-june-2019-english/; and https://www.overshootday.org/. Kimberley Tran and Ronald Colman, Financial Security and Debt in Nova Scotia, (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, September 2008), figure 5.3: “Change (Percent) in Total Real After-Tax Income (1999–2004) and Median Debt Value (1999–2005), Canada,” based on Statistics Canada’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), and Statistics Canada’s tables: “Income, Pensions, Spending and Wealth: Assets and Debts Held by Family Units, Total Amounts, by Net Worth Quintile,” http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/livstand/finsec.pdf. See Statistics Canada, “Canada’s Employment Downturn,” https://www150.statcan .gc.ca/n1/pub/75-001-x/2009112/article/11048-eng.htm; Bank of Canada, “The ‘Great’ Recession in Canada: Perception vs. Reality,” https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2011/03 /great-recession-canada-perception-reality/; and Canadian Encyclopedia, “Recession of 2008–09 in Canada,” https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/recession -of-200809-in-canada. In the United States, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve confessed a similar blindness before Congress: “Greenspan Admits ‘Mistake’ That Helped Crisis,” Associated Press, October 23, 2008, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27335454/ns/business -stocks_and_economy/t/greenspan-admits-mistake-helped-crisis/#.WU9w5OuGOpp. The article reports that Greenspan “conceded the meltdown had revealed a flaw in a lifetime of economic thinking and left him in a ‘state of shocked disbelief.’ ” Additional reports are at “Greenspan Admits ‘Flaw’ to Congress, Predicts More Economic Problems,” Public Broadcasting Service, October 23, 2008, https://www.pbs.org /newshour/show/greenspan-admits-flaw-to-congress-predicts-more-economic

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22.

23.

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25. 26.

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-problems#; “Greenspan—I Was Wrong About the Economy. Sort of,” Guardian, October 23, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/oct/24/economics -creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan; and “Federal Reserve Missed Financial Crisis Warning Signs in 2007, Documents Show,” Telegraph, December 18, 2013, http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9812304/Federal-Reserve-missed -financial-crisis-warning-signs-in-2007-documents-show.html. Jennifer Scott, The Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index Soils and Agriculture Accounts: Part 1: Farm Viability and Economic Capacity in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, April 2001), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/agriculture/farmviability.pdf. Jennifer Scott and Ronald Colman, The GPI Soils and Agriculture Accounts: Economic Viability of Farms and Farm Communities in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, August 2008), 26–27, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf /agriculture/farmviability08.pdf. Statistics that follow are from the same report and are derived from data in Statistics Canada’s Agriculture Economic Statistics. Statistics Canada, Census of Agriculture 1991 and 2011. See Martin Beaulieu, “Demographic Changes in Canadian Agriculture,” Statistics Canada, catalogue no. 96-325-X, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/96-325-x/2014001/article/11905-eng.htm. As reported by Roberto Ferdman, “The Decline of the Small American Family Farm in One Chart,” Washington Post, September 16, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com /news/wonk/wp/2014/09/16/the-decline-of-the-small-american-family-farm-in-one -chart/?utm_term=.4ba096df09f0. Brian Halweil, “Where Have All the Farmers Gone?”, World Watch Magazine, 13, no. 5 (September/October 2000), http://www.worldwatch.org/node/490. Statistics Canada, Census of Agriculture 1991 and 2011 and Beaulieu, “Demographic Changes in Canadian Agriculture.” These numbers are replicated in other jurisdictions. In the twenty-eight European Union countries, for example, the total number of farms fell by 26 percent between 2005 and 2013, and 31 percent of remaining farms are run by farmers age sixty-five and older. Eurostat, “Small and Large Farms in the EU—Statistics from the Farm Structure Survey,” October 2016, https://ec.europa.eu /eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Small_and_large_farms_in_the_EU _-_statistics_from_the_farm_structure_survey&oldid=357625# “The Cost of Organic Food,” Consumer Reports, March 19, 2015, reported organic food to be 47 percent more costly on average, http://www.consumerreports.org/cro /news/2015/03/cost-of-organic-food/index.htm. But this average conceals wide disparities among types of food, with organic food anywhere from 10 to 100 percent more costly. One ad hoc survey found organic tomatoes (50 percent), milk and eggs (60 percent), and peanut butter (100 percent) more expensive: “I Compared the Price of Organic and Regular Items at Whole Foods—Here’s What I Found,” Business Insider, August 7, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.in/I-compared-the-price-of-organic-and -regular-items-at-Whole-Foods-heres-what-I-found/Peaches/slideshow/48395991. cms; Rich S. Piroget al., “Food, Fuel, and Freeways: An Iowa Perspective on How Far Food Travels, Fuel Usage, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Leopold Center Pubs and Papers 3 (2001), http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/leopold_pubspapers/3.

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28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

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Mark Bittman, “The True Cost of a Burger,” New York Times, July 15, 2014, https://www .nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/the-true-cost-of-a-burger.html?_r=0. Natasha Gilbert, “One-Third of Our Greenhouse Gas Emissions Come from Agriculture,” Nature (October 31, 2012), citing “the latest figures from Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a partnership of 15 research centres around the world,” https://www.nature.com/news/one-third-of-our-greenhouse-gas -emissions-come-from-agriculture-1.11708. The European Commission has estimated that food accounts for 31 percent of the European Union’s emissions: Environmental Impact of Products (EIPRO): “Analysis of the Life Cycle Environmental Impacts Related to the Total Final Consumption of the EU 25” European Commission Technical Report EUR 22284, 2006, cited in Tara Garnett, “Where Are the Best Opportunities for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Food System (Including the Food Chain)?”, Food Policy 36 (2011): S23–S32, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science /article/abs/pii/S0306919210001132. Multipliers measure the size of outputs such as income, spending, and employment compared with inputs such as (in this case) size and type of farm. Jennifer Scott and Ronald Colman, The GPI Soils and Agriculture Accounts: Towards a Healthy Farm and Food System—Indicators of Genuine Progress (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, October 2008), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/agriculture/thffs.pdf; J. W. Chism and R. A. Levins, “Farm Spending and Local Selling: How Do They Match Up?”, Minnesota Agricultural Economist, 676 (1994), cited in Grace Communications Foundation, “Food Policy and Economics,” http://www.sustainabletable.org/491/food-economics. See also Carolyn Fortuna, “Economic and Social Impact of Family Farms—and Their Loss,” January 12, 2017, Inspired Economist, http://inspiredeconomist.com/2017/01/12 /economic-social-impact-family-farms-loss. Scott and Colman, The GPI Soils and Agriculture Accounts: Towards a Healthy Farm and Food System. Ralph Goodale, A Win-Win: Enhancing Public Health and Public Revenue: Recommendations to Increase Tobacco Taxes, 2004, 4, http://www.smoke-free.ca/pdf_1/2004taxreport .pdf; and Canadian Pediatric Society, “Effect of Changes in the Price of Cigarettes on the Rate of Adolescent Smoking,” Paediatrics & Child Health 3, no. 2 (March-April 1998): 97–98, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851278/. The latter article cites several studies concluding that “increasing the price of tobacco products through taxation has been associated with a decline in the use of tobacco products, primarily cigarettes, by adolescents.” In sharp contrast, the analysis finds that educational and public awareness programs and limiting tobacco sales by age have not had clear effects. Health Canada, Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey (CTUMS), Annual Results 1999–2006, 2006. See CTUMS historical tables at https://www.canada.ca/en/health -canada/services/publications/healthy-living/overview-historical-data-1999-2012 .html#tab2; https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/healthy -living/overview-historical-data-1999-2012.html - tab2; Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, “Tax Revenues from Tobacco Sales: Provincial and Federal Tobacco Tax Revenues, 1990–1991 to 2014–2016,” table 2, http://www.smoke-free.ca/pdf_1/totaltax.pdf.

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35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

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43.

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Ronald Colman and Janet Rhymes, The Cost of Tobacco Use in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, August 2007), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/tobacco /costoftobacco-ns-2007.pdf. M. Ceraso, D. Ahrens, and P. Remington, “Increasing Tobacco Taxes: An EvidenceBased Measure to Reduce Tobacco Use,” Wisconsin Medical Journal, 104, no. 4(2005). As cited by G. Guindon, S. Tobin, and D. Yach, “Trends and Affordability of Cigarette Prices: Ample Room for Tax Increases and Related Health Gains,” Tobacco Control 11 (2002): 35–43, http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/11/1/35. C. Gallet J. and List, “Cigarette Demand: A Meta-Analysis of Elasticities,” Health Economics 12, no. 10 (2003): 821–35, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14508867. For Nova Scotia, for example, GPI Atlantic calculated the average provincial value of such conservation easements at C$1,339 per hectare, based on the difference between the real estate value of fertile land and its productive value (the ability of the land to generate net income for farmers). Jennifer Scott, Nova Scotia GPI Soils and Agriculture Accounts: Part 2: Resource Capacity and Use; Section 3: Land Capacity (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, July 2008), 11, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/agriculture/landcapacity .pdf. U.S. Department of Agriculture Budget Fiscal Year 2017 Budget Summary, page 63: Natural Resources Conservation Service, https://www.obpa.usda.gov/budsum /fy17budsum.pdf; and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, https://www.nrcs.usda.gov /wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/programs/easements/acep/. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Payments for Ecosystem Services,” http://www.fao.org/3/a-ar584e.pdf. Also see International Institute for Environment and Development, “Markets for Watershed Services—Country Profile: Honduras—Jesus de Otoro,” http://www.watershedmarkets.org/documents/Honduras _Jesus_de_Otoro.pdf. Jean-Claude Brethes, “The Canadian Atlantic Groundfish Experience and the Constraints to the Conservation of Fisheries Resources: A Perspective,” Ocean & Coastal Management 39, nos. 1–2 (1998): 135–50, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article /pii/S0964569198000209?via%3Dihub; and Jacquelyn Rutherford, “Too Many Boats Chasing Too Few Fish: The Collapse of the Atlantic Groundfish Fishery and the Avoidance of Future Collapses Through Free Market Environmentalism,” Studies by Undergraduate Researchers at Guelph 2, no. (Fall 2008), https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index .php/surg/article/view/803/1207. United Nations Environment Programme, Global Environment Outlook 3: Past, Present and Future Perspectives (London: Earthscan Publications, 2002), 125, file:///C:/Users /usewr/Downloads/GEO-3%20REPORT_English.pdf. National Centers for Environmental Information, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Climate Report—December 2015, https://www.ncdc .noaa.gov/sotc/national/201512. Quoted in Justin Gillis, “Climate Chaos, Across the Map,” New York Times, December 30, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/science/climate-chaos-across-the-map.html.

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Benjamin Hulac, “Cheap Gas Fires Up Big SUV Sales, Slows Electric Cars, Hybrids,” Scientific American (September 8, 2015), https://www.scientificamerican.com /article/cheap-gas-fires-up-big-suv-sales-slows-electric-cars-hybrids/; and Reuters, “The Environment? Cheap Oil Is juicing U.S. Gas and SUV Sales,” Fortune, February 8, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/02/08/cheap-oil-gas-suv-sales/. Chris Isidore, “Low Gas Prices Boost SUV and Pickup Sales,” CNN Money, December 4, 2015, http://money.cnn .com/2015/12/04/autos/gas-prices-suv-pickup-sales/index.html, reports, “Thanks to low gas prices, more Americans are buying big, gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs. Sales of both jumped 10 percent this year, according to sales tracker Autodata. That’s nearly twice the increase in overall vehicle sales.”

6. CHALLENGES BEHIND THE SCENES 1.

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Although we received tremendous in-kind support from Statistics Canada in the form of data access, advice on methodology, review of drafts, and so on, the agency’s budget does not fund external work. One unintended consequence of our distance from the policy process was that policy makers tended to use our results without citation. They may have picked up the numbers from a media story when we released a report. That didn’t help spread word about our work at GPI Atlantic, but we took it as a positive sign that some in the government were making the numbers their own. As reported by Nic Marks, NEF Fellow and creator of the Happy Planet Index (HPI, http://happyplanetindex.org/), “Big Ideas,” https://nicmarks.org/big-ideas/. Linda Pannozzo and Minga O’Brien, The Nova Scotia GPI Forest Accounts Vol. 2: A Way Forward—Case Studies in Sustainable Forestry, (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, November 2001), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/forest/forest2.pdf. The Nova Scotia government adopted this recommendation on a modest scale after our report’s release in 2001. Even that small intervention quickly resulted in a marginal increase in selection harvesting so that by 2005, clear-cutting had dropped from 98 percent of all harvesting to 94 percent—the lowest percentage on record in the thirty years for which data were available. See Figure 9, p. 29 in Linda Pannozzo and Ronald Colman, GPI Forest Headline Indicators for Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, May, 2008), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/forest/forestupdate.pdf. KPMG Forest Products, https://home.kpmg.com/ca/en/home/industries/energy/forest -products.html. Scientific evidence and GPI Atlantic’s own market studies have shown that when the nonmarket values of a forest are compromised, the quality of the wood cut from it also declines; T. Zhang and J.-F. Gingras, “Twig Tweaking—Timber Management for Wood Quality and End-Product Value,” Canadian Forest Industries (November /December 1999) and Pannozzo and O’Brien, The Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index Forest Accounts: Vol. 2, chap. 8, sec. 2, “Wood Quality and Market Value,” 180–84. By revealing the links between non-market and market factors (in this case between

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ecological forest management and the differential prices of timber according to its quality) full-cost accounting is in far greater accord with not only science but also economic efficiency than an accounting system that ignores the nonmarket values of natural, social, human, and cultural capital. Transport Canada, Estimates of the Full Costs of Transportation in Canada, Synthesis Report, August 2008, cat. no. TP 14819E, 30, http://publications.gc.ca/collections /collection_2009/tc/T22-165-2008E.pdf. An earlier estimate prepared for Transport Canada by the Centre for Transportation Studies at the University of British Columbia used a value of $CAD 4.25 million; Anming Zhang et al., Towards Estimating the Social and Environmental Costs of Transportation in Canada, 2004–05, http://www.bv.transports.gouv .qc.ca/mono/0965490.pdf, 26 and 52–53; see also New Zealand Government, Ministry of Transport, Social Cost of Road Crashes and Injuries: 2016 Update, March 2017, http://www .transport.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Research/Documents/Social-cost-of-road-crashes -and-injuries-2016-update-final.pdf; U.S. Department of Transportation, Office of the Secretary of Transportation, memorandum, “Guidance on Treatment of the Economic Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) in U.S. Department of Transportation Analyses—2016 Adjustment,” August 8, 2016, https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs /2016%20Revised%20Value%20of%20a%20Statistical%20Life%20Guidance.pdf. Kathleen Kingsbury, “The Value of a Human Life: $129,000,” Time, May 20, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,00.html. Anna Alberini et al., “Does the Value of a Statistical Life Vary with Age and Health Status? Evidence from the United States and Canada,” Resources for the Future, 2002, http:// ageconsearch.tind.io/record/10769/files/dp020019.pdf. See also the literature review by W. Kip Viscusi and Joseph Aldy of Harvard University, “The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical Review of Market Estimates Around the World,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 27, no. 1 (2003): 5–76, http://camra.msu.edu/documents/ViscusiandAldy2003.pdf. For example: John Loomis and Earl Ekstrand, “Economic Benefits of Critical Habitat for the Mexican Spotted Owl: A Scope Test Using a Multiple-Bounded Contingent Valuation Survey,” Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 22, no. 2 (1997): 356–66, http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/30847/1/22020356.pdf; John Loomis, Armando González-Cabán, and Robin Gregory, “A Contingent Valuation Study of the Value of Reducing Fire Hazards to Old-Growth Forests in the Pacific Northwest,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, July 1996, https://www.fs.fed.us/psw /publications/documents/psw_rp229/psw_rp229.pdf. Sara Wilson, The GPI Water Quality Accounts: Case Study: The Costs and Benefits of Sewage Treatment and Source Control for Halifax Harbour (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, July 2000), http://legacycontent.halifax.ca/harboursol/documents/gpi_report_001.pdf. Sally Walker, Anne Monette, and Ronald Colman, The Nova Scotia Greenhouse Gas Accounts for the Genuine Progress Index (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, August 2001), http:// www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/greenhouse/ghg.pdf. National Public Radio, “Trump’s Speech on Paris Climate Agreement Withdrawal, Annotated,” June 1, 2017, http://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/531090243/trumps-speech-on -paris-climate-agreement-withdrawal-annotated.

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15.

16.

17.

18.

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United States Department of Energy, U.S. Energy and Employment Report, January 2017, https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/2017%20US%20Energy%20and %20Jobs%20Report_0.pdf. Government of the United Kingdom, HM Treasury, Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Final Report, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk /20100407172811/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/stern_review_report.htm. This amounts to $10 million a minute every day. David Coady et al., “How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies,” International Monetary Fund Working Paper (2015), https://www.imf .org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf, see 17–22 for a breakdown of subsidies. Chris Hope et al., “Quantifying the Implicit Climate Subsidy Received by Fossil Fuel Companies,” Cambridge Judge Business School Working Paper no. 02/2015, https:// www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/workingpapers/wp1502.pdf. Oliver Milman, “Canada Gives $3.3bn Subsidies to Fossil Fuel Producers Despite Climate Pledge,” Guardian, November 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world /2016/nov/15/climate-change-canada-fossil-fuel-subsidies-carbon-trudeau. Joshua S. Hill, “US Still Subsidizing Fossil Fuels to Tune of $27 Billion,” CleanTechnica, June 6, 2018,https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/06/us-still-subsidizing -fossil-fuels-to-tune-of-27-billion/. There are many other examples of the importance of economic valuation of nature’s services and the losses incurred when that economic value is not recognized. In southern Louisiana, for example, wetlands had been vanishing due to human activity for decades, gradually and imperceptibly removing a natural buffer to severe storms and the surges they engender. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed much of New Orleans in August 2005, an expert team led by Robert Costanza collected historical data on storm tracks and damages and on hurricane wind speeds and their diminution as they hit wetlands. The team built a statistical model of the value of wetland storm protection services and concluded, “A loss of 1 ha [2.5 acres] in wetland in the model corresponds to an average $33,000 increase in storm damage from specific storms.” They then used their model to estimate the total economic value that coastal wetlands in the United States provide in storm protection services: US$23.2 billion a year. The results made a powerful economic case for wetland conservation, protection, and restoration, which could have blunted the force of Hurricane Katrina and avoided at least some of the massive loss of life and damages caused by that disaster. Robert Costanza et al., “The Value of Coastal Wetlands for Hurricane Protection,” Ambio 37, no. 4 (June 2008): 241–48, https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447(2008)37[241:TVOCWF]2.0.CO;2. Pannozzo and Colman, GPI Forest Headline Indicators for Nova Scotia. Age class data, as summarized in figures 1–7, pp. 8–13 of that report, were compiled from the following sources: The Forest Resources of Nova Scotia (1958); Nova Scotia Forest Inventory Provincial Summary 1965–71, 1970–78, 1975–82, 1976–85, 1979–89; Department of Natural Resources GIS 1995 Inventory Data (September 1999 update); and DNR GIS Unpublished Inventory Data (1997–2003). Expressed as percentage declines, the 61- to 80-year-old age class dropped by 65  percent between 1958 and 2003; the 81- to 100-year-old age class by 93 percent; and the 101+-year-old age class by 97 percent. Forests over 60 years old constituted

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24. 25. 26.

27.

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59 percent of all provincial forests in 1958 but only 13 percent in 2003. In the same period the young forests up to age 20 increased by a remarkable 327 percent, and the 21- to 40-year-old age class increased by 103 percent. These trends were accelerated by the advent of highly mechanized machinery, which had increased logging and harvest levels by nearly 60 percent since the early 1980s alone. Sara Wilson and Ronald Colman, The Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index Forest Accounts Vol. 1: Indicators of Ecological, Economic and Social Values of Forests in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, November 2001, rev. to March 2002), 90, http://www .gpiatlantic.org/pdf/forest/forest1.pdf. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Canadian Cost-Benefit Analysis Guide: Regulatory Proposals, 37, https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/rtrap-parfa/analys/analys-eng.pdf. David Pimentel and Michael Burgess, “Soil Erosion Threatens Food Production,” Agriculture 3, no. 3 (2013): 443–63, http://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/3/3/443/htm. Healthy topsoil is an extraordinarily valuable resource; a single acre contains 900 pounds of earthworms, 2,400 pounds of fungi, 1,500 pounds of bacteria, 133 pounds of protozoa, and 890 pounds of arthropods and algae. See D. P. Singh and B. K. Sarma, “Indigenous Soil Microbial Biodiversity: Key to Sustainable Agriculture,” in Microbial Diversity: Modern Trends, ed. R.C. Ram and Asha Sinha, (New Delhi, India: Daya Books, 2007), 95. Christian Gollier et al., “Declining Discount Rates: Economic Justifications and Implications for Long-Run Policy,” Economic Policy 23, no.56 (October 1, 2008): 758–95, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0327.2008.00211.x; Kenneth Arrow et al., “Should Governments Use a Declining Discount Rate in Project Analysis,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 8, no. 2 (July 16, 2014): 145–63, https://academic .oup.com/reep/article/8/2/145/2888825; Cameron Hepburn, “Valuing the Far-off Future: Discounting and Its Alternatives,” October 2006, https://www.semanticscholar. org/paper/Valuing-the-Far-off-Future%3A-Discounting-and-its-Hepburn/e45f84d1c58f6dfdaae98e188361a1fb0b8a8764; Nick Hanley, Jason Shogren, and Ben White, “Cost-Benefit Analysis and Environmental Policy” in Introduction to Environmental Economics, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), chap. 5; and Cameron Hepburn, “Use of Discount Rates in the Estimation of the Costs of Inaction with Respect to Selected Environmental Concerns,” OECD Papers, (December 7, 2007), http://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?cote=env/epoc /wpnep%282006%2913/final&doclanguage=en. See, for example, Peter Howard, “Omitted Damages: What’s Missing from the Social Cost of Carbon,” Environmental Defense Fund (March 13, 2014), http://costofcarbon .org/files/Omitted_Damages_Whats_Missing_From_the_Social_Cost_of_Carbon .pdf; and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Evaluation of Climate Models,” in AR5 Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (2013), https://www.ipcc .ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf. See, for example, P. Bein and D. Rintoul, Shadow Pricing Greenhouse Gases. Proceedings of the Third Biennial Conference of the Society for Ecological Economics: Nature, Wealth and the Human Economy in the Next Millennium, August 1999, available through the Adaptation and Impacts Research Group, Environment Canada.

3 187. GENU INE P RO GRESS MEETS POLI TI CS

7. GENUINE PROGRESS MEETS POLITICS 1.

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4. 5.

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7. 8. 9.

All our GPI reports (108 in total), available at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/publications /pubs.htm, regularly pointed to data gaps and insufficiencies and to methodological uncertainties. The reports include specific recommendations for improvements in these areas. Linda Pannozzo et al., The 2008 Nova Scotia GPI Accounts: Indicators of Genuine Progress (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, April 2009), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/integrated /gpi2008.pdf. See also the companion Nova Scotia GPI Headline Indicators Database, provided free of charge to the Nova Scotia Statistics Agency, which allows easy updating of all the most important data sets and replication of the GPI for other jurisdictions. The database is available for free download at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/publications /integrated.htm. For an overview of each GPI domain and component, see chapter 4 of our GPI policy manual and chapter 5 of that manual for a description of measurement methods: Linda Pannozzo and Ronald Colman, New Policy Directions for Nova Scotia: Using the Genuine Progress Index to Count What Matters (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, July 2009), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/integrated/new_policy_directions.pdf. An overview of actual results for Nova Scotia for 2008 can be found in the summary table at the start of our integrated GPI section, Linda Pannozzo et al., The 2008 Nova Scotia GPI Accounts. More detailed descriptions of results and methodologies can be found in the individual reports in the publications section of the GPI Atlantic Web site, http:// www.gpiatlantic.org/publications/pubs.htm. OECD Observer, “Is GDP a Satisfactory Measure of Growth?”, no. 246/247 (December 2004–January 2005), http://oecdobserver.org/news/archivestory.php/aid/1518/Is_GDP _a_satisfactory_measure_of_growth_.html#sthash.5zVdPO4M.dpuf. Organisation of Economic Co-Operation and Development, “Better Life Index,” http:// www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/. European Commission, “Beyond GDP: Measuring Progress, True Wealth, and WellBeing,” http://ec.europa.eu/environment/beyond_gdp/2007_conference_en.html; and the 2009 EU roadmap, http://ec.europa.eu/environment/beyond_gdp/EUroadmap_en .html. Eurostat, Measuring progress towards a more sustainable Europe—Sustainable development indicators for the European Union—Data 1990–2005, December 2005. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-statistical-books/-/KS-68-05-551. Note that the 2005 indicators were later refined in 2007: Eurostat, Measuring progress towards a more sustainable Europe: 2007 monitoring report of the EU sustainable development strategy, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/5619864 /KS-77-07-115-EN.PDF/06ee41ca-2717-46ee-bee5-07e6bf6c26a2. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, European Benchmark Indicators, http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/2006/EuropeanBenchmarkIndicators. World Bank, “Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services,” https:// www.wavespartnership.org/en/about-us. World Bank, “Natural Capital,” https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/natural-capital#; World Bank, “Natural Capital Accounting Taking Hold as Countries Go Beyond

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GDP,” May 21, 2014, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/05/21/natural -capital-accounting-taking-hold-as-69-countries-go-beyond-gdp. The Gini coefficient is used to measure inequality across the full income spectrum, whereas quintile and decile data assess inequalities at the extremes (the gap between the richest and poorest). World Bank, “Measuring Income Inequality”, updated 2013, https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/1790/study-description. Also “LAC Equity Lab: Income Inequality - Income Distribution,” https://www.worldbank .org/en/topic/poverty/lac-equity-lab1/income-inequality/income-distribution. United Nations et al., System of Environmental-Economic Accounting 2012: Central Framework. United Nations, 2014, https://unstats.un.org/unsd/envaccounting/seeaRev /SEEA_CF_Final_en.pdf. New Zealand Ministry of Social Development, The Social Report 2016, http:// socialreport.msd.govt.nz/. Statistics New Zealand, Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand, 2002, 16, http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/Measuring-NZ -progress-sustainable-dev-%20approach/monitoring-progress-towards-sustainable -nz.aspx. Office for National Statistics, United Kingdom, “Measuring National Well-Being: Life in the UK: 2016,” https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing /articles/measuringnationalwellbeing/2016. See also Ian Bache and Louise Reardon, The Politics and Policy of Wellbeing: Understanding the Rise and Significance of a New Agenda (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016), for an account of the development and significance of the well-being agenda particularly in the UK and European contexts. Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 2009, http://library.bsl.org .au/jspui/bitstream/1/1267/1/Measurement_of_economic_performance_and_social _progress.pdf. Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up (New York: New Press, 2010), vii–viii. For a good summary of such work, see K. H. Alfsen et al., “International Experiences with ‘Green GDP,’” Report 2006/32, https://www.greengrowthknowledge.org /resource/international-experiences-green-gdp. See also R. Repetto et al., Wasting Assets: Natural Resources in the National Income Accounts (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 1989). Stiglitz et al, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 67. On this issue, see also 72–73, 170–71, 193, 233, and 240 of that report. “Green GDP” accounting is also criticized in Marc Fleurbaey and Didier Blanchet, Beyond GDP: Measuring Welfare and Assessing Sustainability (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). India Carbon Outlook, “Green GDP and India’s Five-Year Plan,” December 2009, http:// carbon-outlook.com/content/green-gdp-and-india%E2%80%99s-five-year-plan. World Bank, India—Diagnostic Assessment of Select Environmental Challenges: An Analysis of Physical and Monetary Losses of Environmental Health and Natural

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Resources, 2013, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/220721468268504319/An -analysis-of-physical-and-monetary-losses-of-environmental-health-and-natural -resources. Numbers for 2014 are from World Health Organization, Global Report on Diabetes, Geneva, 2016, http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/204871/1/9789241565257_eng .pdf?ua=1. For 2018, numbers are from Amy Kaiser et al., “Global Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes Over the Next Ten Years (2018–2028),” Diabetes 67, suppl. 1 (July 2018), https:// diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/67/Supplement_1/202-LB. Carole deDios, an analyst at Decision Resources Group Inc., cited in “Sales of SinglePill Combination Drug Therapies for Type 2 Diabetes, Such as Those from GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Will Grow 24 Percent Per Year,” DRG— Decision Resources Group, September 24, 2002, https://decisionresourcesgroup.com /press-releases/124090-sales-of-single-pill-combination-drug-therapies-for-type-2 -diabetes-such-as-those-from-glaxosmithkline-and-bristol-myers-squibb-will-grow -24-per-year/. Cited from Kappel’s interview with Greg Critser, in Judith Shaw, Trans Fats: The Hidden Killer in Our Foods (New York: Pocket, 2004), 116. International Diabetes Federation, IDF Diabetes Atlas, 9th ed., 2019, https://diabetesatlas .org/en/. C. Laird Birmingham et. al., “The Cost of Obesity in Canada,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 160, no. 4 (February 23, 1999): 486, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih .gov/10081464/. J. Cawley and C. Meyerhoefer, “The Medical Care Costs of Obesity: An Instrumental Variables Approach,” Journal of Health Economics 31, no. (2012): 219–30, https://www .sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167629611001366?via%3Dihub; also available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w16467.pdf. Hugh Waters and Ross deVol, Weighing Down America: The Health and Economic Impact of Obesity (Santa Monica, CA: Milken Institute, November 2016), chap. 5, “Costs,” http://assets1c.milkeninstitute.org/assets/Publication/ResearchReport/PDF /Weighing-Down-America-WEB.pdf. Sara Tartoff et al, “Obesity and Mortality Among Patients Diagnosed With COVID-19: Results From an Integrated Health Care Organization,” Annals of Internal Medicine August 12, 2020, https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-3742. Also on June 25, 2020, citing “consistent evidence,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed a Body Mass Index of 30 or more as increasing “a person’s risk of severe COVID-19 illness,” https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p0625-update-expands-covid-19.html. G. Miller et al., “Quantifying National Spending on Wellness and Prevention,” Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research 19 (2008): 1–24, https://www.ncbi .nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19548511. Ronald Colman, The Cost of Chronic Disease in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, 2002), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/chronic.pdf. Nova Scotia Department of Health Promotion and Protection, Government Administrative Histories Online, http://novascotia.ca/archives/gaho/authority.asp?ID=40.

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Ronald Colman and Janet Rhymes, The Cost of Tobacco Use in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, August 2007), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/tobacco/costoftobacco -ns-2007.pdf. Ronald Colman, The Cost of Tobacco in Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic and Cancer Care Nova Scotia, 2000), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/tobacco /costoftobacco-ns.pdf; Updated in Colman and Rhymes, The Cost of Tobacco Use in Nova Scotia. Health Canada, Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey (CTUMS), Overview of Historical Data, 1999 to 2012, table 2, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada /services/publications/healthy-living/overview-historical-data-1999-2012.html. Ronald Colman, The Economic Impact of Smoke-Free Workplaces: An Assessment for Nova Scotia, prepared for Nova Scotia Department of Health (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, September 2001), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/tobacco/smoke-free-ns.pdf. Similar reports for other provinces are available at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf /health/tobacco/smoke-free-nb.pdf (New Brunswick) and http://www.gpiatlantic.org /pdf/health/tobacco/smoke-free-nf.pdf (Newfoundland and Labrador). These studies also were used by municipalities that introduced smoke-free ordnances in different parts of the country. Nova Scotia Department of Education and Department of Health Promotion and Protection, Food and Nutrition Policy for Nova Scotia Public Schools: Policy Directives and Guidelines, https://www.ednet.ns.ca/docs/foodnutritionpolicyguidelines.pdf and http://www.ednet.ns.ca/healthy_eating/pdf/22454_ver1_lo_res.pdf. Nova Scotia Department of Education and Department of Health Promotion and Protection, Food and Nutrition Policy for Nova Scotia Public Schools, 8 and 12. Sally Walker and Ronald Colman, The Cost of Physical Inactivity in Halifax Regional Municipality, prepared for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Nova Scotia (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, August 2004), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/inactivity-hrm .pdf. For example, Karen Hayward and Ronald Colman, Cost of Obesity in Alberta: Summary Report, prepared for the Alberta Cancer Society and funded by Alberta Health Services (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, January 2010), http://www.albertahealthservices.ca /poph/hi-poph-surv-phids-cost-of-obesity-2010.pdf. The Canadian Cancer Society commissioned GPI Atlantic’s The Cost of Tobacco Use in Nova Scotia. Recreation Nova Scotia and Sport Nova Scotia commissioned GPI Atlantic’s The Cost of Physical Inactivity in Nova Scotia. Cancer Care Nova Scotia commissioned GPI Atlantic’s Cost of Obesity in Nova Scotia. The Atlantic Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health commissioned reports on women’s health: “Women’s Health in Atlantic Canada January, 2003 Update, Volume 1: Social Determinants of Women’s Health in Atlantic Canada,” http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/womens/womensvol1.pdf; “Women’s Health in Atlantic Canada January 2003 Update, Volume 2: Determinants of Health: Intra -Provincial Differences,” http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/womens/womensvol2 .pdf; and “A Profile of Women’s Health Indicators in Canada,” http://www.gpiatlantic .org/pdf/health/womens/whbreport.pdf.

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Health Canada funded Karen Hayward and Ronald Colman, The Tides of Change: Addressing Inequity and Chronic Disease in Atlantic Canada (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, July 2003), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/inequity.pdf. The report is also available in French, Une vague de changement: Iniquités et maladies chroniques au Canada atlantique, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/inequity_fr.pdf. The Public Health Agency of Canada funded Karen Hayward, Health Disparities Indicators: Background Report for Developing Health Disparities Indicators in Canada (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, July 2008), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/hdi08.pdf. Health Canada funded Sean Rogers and Ronald Colman, The Socioeconomic Gradient of Health in Atlantic: Evidence from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia 1985–2001 (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, November 2005), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/hiec121605.pdf. The Nova Scotia Department of Health Promotion and Protection, the British Columbia Ministry of Health, and the Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention Branch of the Public Health Agency of Canada jointly funded Karen Hayward, The Health Costs of Poverty in Canada: A Literature Review of the Evidence and Methodologies Needed to Produce a Full Report (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, March 2008), http://www.gpiatlantic.org /pdf/health/povcost.pdf. GPI Atlantic partnered with three universities and a provincial agency across the country in Dennis Raphael et al., Income, Health and Disease in Canada: Current State of Knowledge, Information Gaps, and Areas of Needed Inquiry, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/health/cihr.pdf. Sally Walker et al., The Nova Scotia Solid Waste-Resource Accounts (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, 2004), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/solidwaste/solidwaste.pdf. Statistics Canada, Waste Management Industry Survey: Business and Government Sectors, 16F0023X, no. 16 table 2, “Diversion of Waste by Province and Territory,” http:// www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16f0023x/2013001/t013-eng.htm. Iman Mustafa, Composting by Households in Canada, no. 16-002-X, “Composting by Curbside Collection by Selected Census Metropolitan Areas,” http://www.statcan .gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2013001/article/11848-eng.htm. Sally Walker et al., The Nova Scotia GPI Solid Waste-Resource Accounts (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, July 2004), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/solidwaste/solidwaste.pdf. When models predicting more serious climate effects are used, savings were estimated at $200 million a year, or $233 per capita. Many components of this full-cost accounting equation are actual annual costs, savings, and benefits. The inclusion of reduced greenhouse gas emissions as a cost saving of the new waste management system uses accepted discount rates to translate anticipated future climate change damage costs into estimated annual greenhouse gas emission costs and savings. That is based on the assumption that people value a dollar now more highly than one gained or lost in the future. These estimates therefore favor the current generation by discounting the expected climate change costs that future generations will pay. These job statistics are based on numbers tabulated by the Nova Scotia government for twelve categories of solid waste management jobs. See Walker et al., The Nova Scotia GPI Solid Waste-Resource Accounts, table 26, p. 98. One U.S. study found that every

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50.

51.

15,000 tons of solid waste create one job in a landfill system but seven for composting or nine for recycling the same amount of waste. That calculation counts only direct handling of materials and not extra spin-off jobs such as those in industries that rely on recycled and composted materials: Jobs Research Trust, “Jobs from Waste,” The Jobs Letter, no. 118 (2000), www.jobsletter.org.nz/jbl11800.htm#jobs. In 1996, for example, the Halifax Metropolitan Authority, which ran the city’s main landfill, paid $10.4 million to compensate residents for “loss of quality of life and property values” due to leachate contamination from the nearby landfill. Kim Moar, “550 Get Dump Compensation,” Halifax Daily News, February 27, 1996, cited in Walker et al., The Nova Scotia GPI Solid Waste-Resource Accounts, 119. The full rationale, explanation, and evidence for each component of the waste management cost-benefit analysis and equation are explained in detail in part 3 of Walker et al., The Nova Scotia GPI Solid Waste-Resource Accounts, 78–125. Linda Pannozzo et al., The 2008 Nova Scotia GPI Accounts. When models predicting more serious climate change damage costs were used for the discounted greenhouse gas emission component of the cost estimate, the total annual cost of driving jumped to $14.8 billion. For detailed explanations of how each of the nineteen costs were calculated and the data sources used, see Aviva Savelson, Ronald Colman, and William Martin, The GPI Transportation Accounts: Sustainable Transportation in Halifax Regional Municipality (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, March 2008), http://www.gpiatlantic.org /pdf/transportation/hrmtransportation.pdf; and Aviva Savelson, Ronald Colman, and William Martin, The GPI Transportation Accounts: Sustainable Transportation in Nova Scotia, (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, November 2006), http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf /transportation/transportation.pdf. Greg Keenan, “Canadian, U.S. Car Sales Hit Record Levels in 2016,” Globe and Mail, January 4, 2017, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news /canadian-us-car-sales-hit-record-levels-in-2016/article33502204/. See also Alicja Siekierska, “Canadian Vehicle Sales Hit the Two Million Mark for First Time in 2017,” Financial Post, January 3, 2018, https://business.financialpost.com/transportation /canadian-vehicle-sales-hit-the-two-million-mark-for-first-time-in-2017. Most sales were of SUVs and light trucks. In the United States 11.9 million SUVs and light trucks and 5.3 million cars were sold in 2018: see https://www.statista.com/statistics/199983 /us-vehicle-sales-since-1951/. David Jolly, “Despite Push for Cleaner Cars, Sheer Numbers Could Work Against Climate Benefits,” New York Times, December 7, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015 /12/08/business/energy-environment/despite-push-for-cleaner-cars-sheer-numbers -could-work-against-climate-benefits.html. Linda C. Brinson, “How Much Air Pollution Comes from Cars?”, Howstuffworks, August 29, 2012, https://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-pollution-from-cars.htm; Environmental Defense Fund, “New DOT Report to Congress Is Important Roadmap to Cut Global Warming Pollution, Say Environmental and Transportation Groups,” news release, April 22, 2010, https://www.edf.org/news/new-dot-report-congress-important -roadmap-cut-global-warming-pollution-say-environmental-and-tr.

3247. GE NU INE P RO GRESS MEETS POLI TI CS

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

Lauri Myllyvirta, “Quantifying the Economic Costs of Air Pollution from Fossil Fuels,”  Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, February 2020, https:// energyandcleanair.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Cost-of-fossil-fuels-briefing .pdf; World Health Organisation, “Mortality and Burden of Disease from Ambient Air Pollution,” https://www.who.int/gho/phe/outdoor_air_pollution/burden/en/; India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative Pollution Collaborators, “The Impact of Air Pollution on Deaths, Disease Burden, and Life Expectancy Across the States of India: The Global Burden of Disease Study 2017,” Lancet Planetary Health 2, no. 1 (January 2019): e26–e39, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519618302614; and Centre for Science and Environment, Body Burden 2015: State of India’s Health, cited in “Air Pollution Causes 30,000 Deaths in Delhi Annually, Fifth Leading Cause of Death in India,” First Post, December 16, 2015, http://www.firstpost.com/india/air-pollution -causes-30000-deaths-annually-in-delhi-fifth-leading-cause-of-death-in-india-2547278 .html. South China Morning Post, October 3, 2018, citing results from a new Chinese University of Hong Kong study: Ernest Kao, “Air Pollution Is Killing 1 Million People and Costing Chinese Economy 267 Billion Yuan a Year, Research from CUHK Shows,” https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2166542/air-pollution -killing-1-million-people-and-costing-chinese. These policy reforms were drawn from the groundbreaking work of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (www.vtpi.org/), whose founder and director, Todd Litman, contributed substantially to the GPI transport accounts. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2011, https://www.iea.org/reports /world-energy-outlook-2011 and https://carnegieendowment.org/2011/11/28/world -energy-outlook-2011-event-3447. See also “World Headed for Irreversible Climate Change in Five Years, IEA Warns,” Guardian, November 9, 2011, https://www.theguardian .com/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change; and Geoffrey Simpson, “Amid Dire Warnings, Canada Is MIA,” Globe and Mail, November 19, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/jeffrey-simpson/amid-dire -warming-warnings-canada-is-mia/article2241898/comments/. Statistics Canada, “Commuting to Work,” 2001 Census, cited in Savelson et al., The GPI Transportation Accounts: Sustainable Transportation in Halifax Regional Municipality, fig. 11, “Travel to Work (Employed and Over 15 Years of Age) by Mode of Transportation for Selected Municipalities in Canada, 2001.” Joseph Goodman, Melissa Laube, and Judith Schwenk, “Curitiba Bus System Is Model for Rapid Transit,” Reimagine 12, no. 1 (Spring 2007), “http://reimaginerpe.org/node/344. Arcadis, “Sustainable Cities Mobility Index 2017,” https://www.arcadis.com/en/global /our-perspectives/sustainable-cities-mobility-index-2017/. “GPI Headline Indicators Database” (in Excel) is available under “The Nova Scotia 2008 Genuine Progress Index” at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/publications/integrated.htm. Pannozzo and Colman, New Policy Directions for Nova Scotia; “GPI Overview Presentation” (PowerPoint) is available under “The Nova Scotia 2008 Genuine Progress Index” at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/publications/integrated.htm.

8 . A NE W ZEALAND INTE R LUDE325

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

Issues of Reality Check are available at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/realitycheck/index .htm. Michael MacDonald, “Nova Scotia’s First NDP Government Faces Rocky Road Into Election Year,” Globe and Mail, December 7, 2012, https://www.theglobeandmail.com /news/politics/nova-scotias-first-ndp-government-faces-rocky-road-into-election -year/article6082864/. MacDonald, “Nova Scotia’s First NDP Government Faces Rocky Road.” European Commission, “Beyond GDP” and the EU roadmap. OECD, “Better Life Index”; and OECD Observer, “Is GDP a Satisfactory Measure of Growth?” UK Office for National Statistics, “Measuring National Well-Being.” The Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW), of which I was research director in its formative years (2001–2007), despite stated intentions to evolve into an accounting system, unfortunately never moved beyond indicator mode. There were other serious problems with the CIW, which eventually led me to leave, including its decision to aggregate all its data into a single number, which is methodologically fraught with problems, and the organization’s decision, largely for convenience, to settle for several seriously flawed conventional indicators. It is no wonder that when a group called Engage Nova Scotia, which had strong ties to the ruling provincial Liberal Party, commissioned the CIW at great expense to produce a quality-of-life index for Nova Scotia, the results were virtually meaningless. In fact, without evidence or consideration of climate change and other environmental impacts, the organization simply trumpeted its belief in continued economic growth as compatible with quality of life. David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, Good News for a Change: How Everyday People Are Helping the Planet (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002). For an overview and transcript of conference presentations, see http://www.gpiatlantic .org/conference/index.htm. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007). See the two-volume Developing a Community Genuine Progress Index: Materials for Community Development Planners (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, August 2000 and December 2003); and Ronald Colman et al., Development and Application of Community Health Indicators. Final Report to Canadian Population Health Initiative (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, August 2004), as well as several PowerPoint presentations on results. All are available at: http://www.gpiatlantic.org/publications/communitypubs.htm.

8. A NEW ZEALAND INTERLUDE 1.

See, for example, Government of New Zealand, NZ Progress Indicators Tupuranga Aotearoa, economic, environmental, and social indicators at http://www.stats.govt.nz /browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/nz-progress-indicators/Home.aspx.

326 8 . A NE W ZEALAND IN TER LUDE

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

Government of New Zealand, Ministry of Social Development, The Social Report 2016, based on data from 2014, http://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work /publications-resources/monitoring/social-report/index.html. Statistics New Zealand, August 2002, Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand, 90, http://archive.stats.govt.nz/~/media/Statistics/browse-categories /environment/sustainable-development/monitoring-progress-sustainable-nz /monitoring-sustainable-development.pdf. A February 2003 review of this report is available at http://archive.stats.govt.nz/~/media/Statistics/browse-categories/environment /sustainable-development/monitoring-progress-sustainable-nz/sustainable-development -report-review.pdf. Statistics New Zealand, Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand, 90. Statistics New Zealand, Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand, 65; Ministry of Social Development, The Social Report 2003, 76–77, http://socialreport. msd.govt.nz/2003/index.shtml. New Zealand’s 2003 Social Report, remarks, for example: “Several studies have demonstrated links between social connectedness and the performance of the economy as well as positive outcomes for individual health and wellbeing.” (Ministry of Social Development, Social Report 2003, 108). This economic linkage also was made explicit by the New Zealand Treasury in a working paper by Veronica Jacobsen et al. titled Investing in Social Wellbeing: An Analytical Framework, no. 02/23, December 2002, https://treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2007-09/twp02-23.pdf. New Zealand Legislation, Local Government Act 2002, Reprint as at 1 March 2017, http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0006/40.0/DLM131394.html. See, for example, Quality of Life in New Zealand’s Eight Largest Cities 2002, dated 30 June, 2003, http://www.qualityoflifeproject.govt.nz/pdf/Survey_Eight_Cities_Report.pdf. The 2003 report is at https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/37800316/quality-of -life-in-new-zealands-eight-largest-cities-2003. For the Quality of Life project description and the most recent (2018) survey results, see http://www.qualityoflifeproject.govt.nz/. Ronald Colman, The Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index: Insights for New Zealand (Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Social Development, 2004), https://www .msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/working-papers /wp-08-04-nova-scotia-genuine-progress-index.html (see full report and executive summary links). Canada Council for the Arts (CCA), Overview of Key Demographic Trends— Possible Impact on Canadian Arts Attendance, Canada Council for the Arts, 2002, https:// canadacouncil.ca/research/research-library/2003/11/overview-of-key-demographic -trends, 19; CTV News: “Dozens of Aboriginal Languages Near Death: UNESCO,” November 8, 2009, http://www.ctvnews.ca/dozens-of-aboriginal-languages-near-death -unesco-1.451581; and see “Native American Languages,” in The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), https://www .infoplease.com/encyclopedia/arts/language/linguistics/native-american-languages. Statistics New Zealand, “Speakers of te reo Māori,” New Zealand Progress Indicators, December 2013, http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/nz-progress -indicators/home/social/speakers-of-te-reo-maori.aspx. At the time of writing, results

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12.

on Maori speakers from the most recent (2018) New Zealand Census had not yet been released. New Zealand History, “History of the Māori Language,” Maori Language Week, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/maori-language-week/history-of-the-maori -language; Ministry of Social Development, “Māori Language Speakers,” The Social Report 2016, http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/cultural-identity/maori-language-speakers .html; and Wikipedia, “Māori Language Revival,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /M%C4%81ori_language_revival. A study undertaken at Victoria University in Wellington includes comments on this Maori-GPI affinity: The GPI forms an important aspect of the courses taught at Te Wānanga o Raukawa  .  .  . [where] an academic group  .  .  . have been researching and developing expertise on a tikanga Māori based GPI. There is an intuitive link between tikanga Māori and the normative framework that underpins the Nova Scotia GPI. This has been further reflected in the adoption by the Māori Party of a national-level GPI as a core policy initiative.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Tikanga Māori means the Māori way of doing things. Derived from the Māori word for “right” or “correct,” tikanga is sometimes used to refer to culture, customs, folklores, styles, and meanings. Aaron Packard, “Rethinking Progress: Evaluation of the Wellington Regional Genuine Progress Index” (thesis, 2009), 79–80, http://www .gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Aaron-Packard-Thesis-2009-Rethinking -Progress-An-evaluation-of-the-Wellington-Region-Genuine-Progress-Index .pdf; and http://sustainablecities.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Packard-Chapman-2011 .pdf. Available as book at https://www.amazon.ca/Rethinking-Progress-evaluation -Wellington-Regional/dp/3843362858. On page 80, see the citation from Pita Sharples, “Maori Perspectives on Water Resources.” Cited in “Seven Generation Sustainability,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation _sustainability; in “Constitution of the Iroquois Nations,” http://www.indigenouspeople .net/iroqcon.htm; and in “Iroquois Wisdom,” https://springgrovemnheritagecenter.org /mission/their-eyes-were-my-eyes/iroquois-wisdom/. New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, “State of the Labour Market Scorecard—March 2018,” https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/9a57c13ef4/state -labour-market-scorecard-mar-2018.pdf. See also Joanne O/Brien, “Stats Show Maori Still Facing Discrimination,” Radio New Zealand, October 15, 2015, http://www.radionz .co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/287010/stats-show-maori-still-facing-discrimination. Ministry of Social Development, “Unemployment,” The Social Report 2016, http:// socialreport.msd.govt.nz/paid-work/unemployment.html. Tony Blakely and Don Simmers, “Fact and Action Sheets on Health Inequities,” University of Otago, June 2011, http://www.indigenouspsych.org/Resources/fact -action-health-inequalities.pdf. Department of Corrections and Statistics New Zealand, “New Zealand’s Prison Population,” NZ Official Yearbook 2012, http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats /snapshots-of-nz/yearbook/society/crime/corrections.aspx.

3288 . A NE W ZEALAND IN TER LUDE

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

Ministry for the Environment, “Proposed National Environmental Standard for On-Site Wastewater: Discussion Document: 4. What Are the Options?”, July 2008, http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/rma/proposed-national-environmental -standard-site-wastewater-discussion-document/4-what. OECD Environmental Performance Reviews: New Zealand, OECD, 2007, http://www .oecd.org/environment/country-reviews/38709768.pdf; and “Conclusions and Recommendations,” OECD Environmental Performance Review of New Zealand, 2007, https://www.oecd.org/env/country-reviews/37915514.pdf. See also the 2015 book by Marie Brown et al., OECD Environmental Performance Reviews: New Zealand 2017, OECD Environmental Performance Reviews (Paris: OECD Publishing), https://doi .org/10.1787/9789264268203-en. Quality of Life in New Zealand’s Cities: The Quality of Life Survey, http://www .qualityoflifeproject.govt.nz/. Packard, “Rethinking Progress.” Quality of Life Report 2016: Topline Report, http://www.qualityoflifeproject.govt.nz /pdfs/Quality_of_Life_2016.pdf. See “Measuring Changes in the Wellington Region’s Progress and Wellbeing,” GPI: Measuring the Region’s Wellbeing, http://www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/; and “Frequently Asked Questions,” http://www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/faq/. The detailed reports are Wellington Region Genuine Progress Index (GPI): 2001–2010, June 2011 (164 pp.), http://www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Wellington-Region-Genuine -Progress-Index-GPI-2001-2010.pdf; and Wellington Region Genuine Progress Index: 2001–2013, October 2014 (139 pp.), http://www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/assets /WR-GPI2001-2013.pdf. The Greater Wellington Region Council’s 2017–18 Annual Report, p. 20, announces that its GPI has been updated and: “Annual Report for the Year Ending 30 June 2018,” October 31, 2018, http://www.gw.govt.nz/assets/council-reports /Meeting_Documents/7502_Agenda_Council%20meeting%2031%20October%202018 .pdf. However, at the timeof writing, those most recent results were not yet available. Nicola Durling, “The Approach to the Wellington Region Genuine Progress Index (WR-GPI) 2001–2010,” June 2011, 13, http://www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/assets /Uploads/The-Approach-to-the-Wellington-Region-Genuine-Progress-Index-WR -GPI-2001-2010.pdf. Wellington Regional Strategy, Waikato Regional Council, and Auckland Council, The Costs of Physical Inactivity: Toward a Regional Full-Cost Accounting Perspective, https://www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/The-Costs-of-Physical -Inactivity-Toward-a-regional-full-cost-accounting-perspective.pdf. Garry McDonald et al., A Genuine Progress Indicator for the Auckland region— Valuation Methodology, prepared by the New Zealand Centre for Ecological Economics and Market Economics for the Auckland Regional Council: Auckland Regional Council, technical report 2009/101, http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/council/documents /technicalpublications/TR2009101%20-%20A%20Genuine%20Progress%20 Indicator%20for%20the%20Auckland%20Region%20Valuation%20Methodology.pdf. The summary report and results are at: Garry McDonald et al., A Genuine Progress

8 . A NE W ZEALAND INTE R LUDE329

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

Indicator for the Auckland Region Summary Report, July 2009, http://folk.uio.no /roberan/docs/GPI%20summary%20report.pdf. A year later the same team prepared a report for Environment Waikato: A Genuine Progress Indicator for the Waikato Region Summary Report, June 2010, https://www.waikatoregion.govt.nz/assets/PageFiles /36757/2010%20Marco%20Waikato%20Regional%20Perception%20Sur vey /Waikato%20GPI-Summary%20Report%20(EERNZ%20June%202010).pdf. Murray Patterson et al., Beyond Gross Domestic Product: The New Zealand Genuine Progress Indicator to Measure the Economic, Social and Environmental Dimensions of Well-Being from 1970 to 2016 (Palmerston North, NZ: Massey University, 2019), https://www.massey.ac.nz/shadomx/apps/fms/fmsdownload.cfm?file_uuid =8581767A-167D-4E43-A520-3862512B319D. Patterson et al., Beyond Gross Domestic Product, table 3.1, p. 25, and table 25.2, p.145. Andrew Whiteford, “Are Genuine Progress Indicators an Expensive Step Sideways?”, June 2011, http://www.infometrics.co.nz/are-genuine-progress-indicators-an-expensive -step-sideways/. The analysis endorsed the conclusion of two other economists that “there might be such a strong correlation between GDP and other softer measures of well-being that it is impossible to justify the cost and effort spent on the new measures.” And yet despite the differences in approach between Auckland and Wellington, it is encouraging that three major municipal governments—Wellington, Auckland, and Waikato—recently collaborated closely on a detailed costing study for New Zealand, The Costs of Physical Inactivity: Towards a Regional Full-Cost Accounting Perspective, which used and openly acknowledged the Nova Scotia GPI approach and methods. Patterson et al., Beyond Gross Domestic Product, table 25.1, p. 144; and the World Bank graph, “GDP per Capita (Constant LCU)—New Zealand,” at https://data.worldbank .org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KN?locations=NZ. This is a reference to the report that was turned into the book by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up (New York: New Press, 2010). Packard, “Rethinking Progress.” Packard’s analysis further recognizes the congruence of the Nova Scotia Community GPI work in Kings County and Glace Bay with the “community ethos” of New Zealand’s 2002 Local Government Act, which requires that municipal and local governments identify intended “community outcomes.” Local Government New Zealand, Local Government Know How: The Local Government Act 2002—An Overview, p. 31, “Community Outcomes,” https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets /planning/who-does-what/doc/know-how-guide-2002.pdf. Wellington Region Genuine Progress Index: 2001–2013. See also the FAQ page, http:// www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/faq/. Wellington Region Genuine Progress Index: 2001–2013, 7. Wellington Regional Council, “How Can We Use the GPI?”, http://www.gpiwellingtonregion.govt.nz/faq/#howtouse. See http://www.qualityoflifeproject.govt.nz/pdfs/Quality-of-Life-2018.pdf; and https:// www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/366484/auckland-fares-badly-in-quality-of -life-survey.

3 30 8. A NE W ZEALAND I N TER LUDE

37. 38.

39.

40.

See “Wellington Named Deutsche Bank's Most Liveable City for Second Year Running,” https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12058582. Victoria University, Wellington, “New Zealand Well-Placed on Wellbeing” (news release), September 20, 2018, https://www.victoria.ac.nz/news/2018/09/nz-well-placed -on-wellbeing. Ceri Parker, “New Zealand Will Have a New ‘Well-Being Budget,’ Says Jacinda Ardern,” January 23, 2019, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/new-zealand-s-new-well -being-budget-will-fix-broken-politics-says-jacinda-ardern/. The prime minister promised use of the New Zealand Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, which includes valuation of natural, social, and human capital. David Hall, “Ardern’s government and climate policy: despite a zero-carbon law, is New Zealand merely a follower rather than a leader?” The Conversation, 4 October, 2020, https://theconversation.com/arderns-government-and-climate-policy-despite-a -zero-carbon-law-is-new-zealand-merely-a-follower-rather-than-a-leader-146402; and David Hall, “NZ has dethroned GDP as a measure of success, but will Ardern’s government be transformational?” The Conversation, 7 June, 2019, https:// theconversation.com/nz-has-dethroned-gdp-as-a-measure-of-success-but-will -arderns-government-be-transformational-118262.

9. INVITATION TO BHUTAN 1.

2.

3.

National Statistics Bureau of Bhutan, 2017 Population and Housing Census of Bhutan, 2018, http://www.nsb.gov.bt/publication/files/PHCB2017_national.pdf. Increased rates of victimization are also documented in the 2015 GNH Survey. Also see Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research, A Compass Towards a Just and Harmonious Society: 2015 GNH Survey Report, 2016, http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/wp -content/uploads/2017/01/Final-GNH-Report-jp-21.3.17-ilovepdf-compressed.pdf; Kuensel, “Dealing with Rising Crime Rate,” February 10, 2018, http://www.kuenselonline .com/dealing-with-rising-crime-rate/; and Tshering Dolkar, “Youth Substance Abuse in Bhutan: A Challenge to the Pursuit of Gross National Happiness,” National Institute of Drug Abuse, 2012, https://www.drugabuse.gov/international/abstracts /youth-substance-abuse-in-bhutan-challenge-to-pursuit-gross-national-happiness. Lam Dorji, Secretary, Ministry of Finance, Royal Government of Bhutan, quoted in Alexander Jones, “Bhutan: The World’s Fastest Growing Economy,” International Banker, July 31, 2017, https://internationalbanker.com/finance/bhutan-worlds-fastest -growing-economy/. The statistics are from various sources, including the United Nations Development Programme annual reports for Bhutan (2009–2016), http://www.undp.org/content /bhutan/en/home/library/annual-reports.html, http://www.undp.org/content/bhutan /en/home/countryinfo.html, and “Inequalities in Human Development in the 21st Century,” http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes/BTN .pdf. Also see Central Intelligence Agency, “Bhutan,” World Fact Book, https:// www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/geos/bt.html;

9. INVITATIO N TO BH U TA N 331

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

“Case Story on Cross-Border Power Export from Dagachhu Hydropower Development,” Green Power Development Project and Asian Development Bank, April 2011, http://www.oecd.org/countries/bhutan/48651659.pdf; “Hydropower and the Bhutanese Economy,” Kuensel, September 14, 2015, http://www.kuenselonline.com /hydropower-and-the-bhutanese-economy/; and Lakshmi Premkumar, A Study of the India-Bhutan Energy-Cooperation Agreements and the Implementation of Hydropower Projects in Bhutan, December 2015, http://www.vasudha-foundation.org/wp-content /uploads/Final-Bhutan-Report_30th-Mar-2016.pdf. Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2017: Transcending the Middle-Income Challenge, p. 190, gives a slightly lower figure for the ratio of external debt to GDP than aforementioned sources: 110 percent in 2016; see https://www .adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/237761/ado-2017.pdf. The most recent available figure at press time is 111 percent: Sherub Dorji, “Bhutan’s Debt to GDP ratio increased to 111%”, Bhutan Broadcasting Service, 22 July, 2019, http://www.bbs.bt /news/?p=117981. “Bhutan: Life Expectancy at Birth,” http://countryeconomy.com/demography/life -expectancy/bhutan. United Nations Development Programme, “Bhutan: Human Development Indicators,” Human Development Reports, http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/BTN. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Bhutan; and http://countrymeters.info /en/Bhutan#literacy. Royal Government of Bhutan, National Statistics Bureau, National Accounts Statistics, 2000–2006, October 2007, http://www.nsb.gov.bt/publication/files/pub7nw7416on .pdf; Gross National Happiness Commission, reports and publications, and five-year plans, http://www.gnhc.gov.bt/en/?page_id=45#; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Jigme_Singye_Wangchuck. Asian Development Bank, 20th by 2020: Bhutan’s Drive for Improved Governance, 2014, https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/59695/bhutan-drive-improved -governance_0.pdf. See, for example, “The World’s Most Dangerous Airports—and Why You Should Fly There Anyway,” https://www.allianztravelinsurance.com/travel/flight/worlds-most -dangerous-airports.htm; and https://wanderwisdom.com/transportation/Most -Dangerous-Airports. Use of GDP largely replaced GNP in 1991, some years after the king’s reference. As noted in chapter 1, GNP measures the value of goods and services produced by all the citizens of a country wherever they are, whereas GDP measures the total value of all goods and services produced within the boundaries of a country. Jigmi Y. Thinley, “Sustainability and Happiness—The Vital Link. GNH: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development,” April, 2012, http://rio20.net/wp-content/uploads /2012/05/vitallink.pdf. Bhutan Observer, “Bhutan’s First Old Age Home Opens in Radhi,” March 15, 2011, 5, http://gpiatlantic.org/bhutan/bhutan-observer/Bhutan-old-age-home-1.pdf. Bhutan Observer, “Old Age Homes Not a Solution But a Need: PM,” April 8, 2011, 1 and 23, http://gpiatlantic.org/bhutan/bhutan-observer/Bhutan-old-age-home-2.pdf.

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13. 14.

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16. 17.

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Bhutan Observer, “To Start Old Age Homes or Not,” April 8, 2011, 2, http://gpiatlantic .org/bhutan/bhutan-observer/Bhutan-old-age-home-2.pdf. In his 2000 National Day Address in Trashigang, Bhutan’s Fourth King sounded this warning: “If we do not make any effort to change this trend of large numbers of our villagers leaving to seek employment in urban centres, there is every possibility that, within the next twenty years, most of our villages will become empty and even our ancestral homes and farms will be abandoned.” Jigme Singye Wangchuck, King of Bhutan, Immortal Lines: Speeches of the 4th Druk Gyalpo Jigme Singye Wangchuck, “National Day Speech, Trashigang, December 2000” (Thimphu, 2007). United Nations Development Programme, Thailand Human Development Report 2007: Sufficiency Economy and Human Development, 2007. The citation from King Bumibol is on page 20, and other citations from Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont are on page iv, http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/Rio20/images /Sufficiency%20Economy%20and%20Human%20Development.pdf. Jigme Singye Wangchuck, King of Bhutan, Immortal Lines: Speeches of the 4th Druik Gyalpo Jigme Singye Wangchuck, “National Day Speech, December 2005” (Thimphu, 2007). Karma Ura, Sabina Alkire, and Tshoki Zangmo, GNH and GNH Index: A Short Guide to Gross National Happiness Index, Centre for Bhutan Studies, 16–18, https://www.ophi .org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Ura-et-al-Bhutan-Happiness-Chapter.pdf. Karma Ura and Karma Galay, eds., Gross National Happiness and Development: Proceedings of the First International Seminar on Operationalization of Gross National Happiness, Centre for Bhutan Studies, 2004, http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com /Conference%20Proceedings/First%20GNH%20Conf%20GNH%20and%20Dev /1GNH%20Conference.pdf. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Development Policy and Analysis Division, “Least Developed Countries,” https://www.un.org/development /desa/dpad/least-developed-country-category.html. Canada’s International Development Research Centre was the major funder for this 2005 conference, and it also funded much of GPI Atlantic’s subsequent work in Bhutan. The United Nations Development Programme funded travel costs for the Bhutanese delegation; the Canadian International Development Agency funded travel costs for participants from Asia, Africa, and South America; and other federal, provincial, and municipal government agencies also contributed to conference costs. Presenters included John Ralston Saul, philosopher and author; Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface Inc. (the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer); Bhutan’s Home Minister, Jigmi Y. Thinley, who later became Bhutan’s first democratically elected prime minister; Francisco VanderHoff Boersma, founder of the fair-trade concept; Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India; Mathis Wackernagel, co-architect of the Ecological Footprint; Sanjit Bunker Roy, founder of the Barefoot College; New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring; educator and author John Taylor Gatto; Krishna Kumar, director of Kerala’s Total Literacy Program; economist and author John Helliwell; Farouk Jiwa, founder of Honey Care Africa; Alan Savory, holistic management pioneer; Paul Gipe, one of the world’s leading renewable

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energy experts; Joel Salatin, a leading organic farmer and author; and Holly Dressel, coauthor, with David Suzuki, of Good News for a Change. Andrew C. Revkin, “A New Measure of Well-Being from a Happy Little Kingdom,” New York Times, October 4, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/science/a-new -measure-of-wellbeingfrom-a-happy-little-kingdom.html. The conference is comprehensively documented at http://www.gpiatlantic.org/conference /index.htm.

10 (MIS)MEASURING GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

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See, for example, the critique in Dana Becker and Jeanne Marececk, “Dreaming the American Dream: Individualism and Positive Psychology,” in Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2, no. 5 (2008): 1767–80, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf /10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00139.x. John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, eds., World Happiness Report 2017, 17, https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2017/HR17.pdf. The most recent World Happiness Report 2020 is at: https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2020 /WHR20.pdf, and the 2019 report at https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/. The 2018 report focuses on happiness and migration: https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness -report/2018/WHR_web.pdf. For previous years’ reports, see https://s3.amazonaws .com/happiness-report/2016/HR-V1_web.pdf; https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness -report/2015/WHR15_Sep15.pdf; http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02 /WorldHappinessReport2013_online.pdf; and https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness -report/2012/World_Happiness_Report_2012.pdf. The World Happiness Report 2020 for the first time adds a chapter on “How Environmental Quality Affects Our Happiness” written by Christian Krekel and George MacKerron (https://happiness -report.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/WHR20_Ch5.pdf), but this stand-alone analysis has no impact on the index indicators, logic, calculation methods or country rankings. Country rankings in the World Happiness Report 2020 are on pages 19–21. World Population Review, “Ecological Footprint by Country 2020,” https:// worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/ecological-footprint-by-country. See, for example, Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 2011); and Joachim Weimann, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb, Measuring Happiness: The Economics of Wellbeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). United States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2015: Bhutan, https://2009-2017.state .gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport//index.htm#. Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research, A Compass Towards a Just and Harmonious Society: 2015 GNH Survey Report, 2016, http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com /wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Final-GNH-Report-jp-21.3.17-ilovepdf-compressed.pdf. Stage 2, section 6, of the Royal Government of Bhutan’s Protocol for Policy Formulation requires that all policies “shall be subjected to the Gross National Happiness (GNH)

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10. 11.

12.

13.

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Policy Screening Tool.” The protocol is available at https://policy.asiapacificenergy.org/ sites/default/files/RGOB-Policy-Protocol-2014.pdf. For the scoring mechanism, see Jasper Bergink, “Does GNH Policy Work? The Answer Is in Common Values,” Centre for Bhutan Studies, http://www.forastateofhappiness.com/tag/centre-for-bhutan-studies/. Karma Tshiteem, Secretary, Gross National Happiness Commission, interviewed on November 30, 2009, in Princeton University’s “Oral History Program,” the National Academy of Public Administration, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, https://successfulsocieties.princeton .edu/sites/successfulsocieties/files/interviews/transcripts/3377/Karma_Tshiteem.txt. Royal Government of Bhutan Protocol for Policy Formulation, Stage 2, Section 6, https://policy.asiapacificenergy.org/sites/default/files/RGOB-Policy-Protocol-2014.pdf. Royal Government of Bhutan, Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs, Department of Local Governance, Mainstreaming: Gender, Environment, Climate-Change, Disaster, and Poverty Into the Development Policies, Plans and Programmes in Bhutan, 2015, 3, 5, 27, and elsewhere, http://www.undp.org/content/dam/bhutan/GECDP%20Mainstreaming.pdf. James Boutwell and John Westra, “Benefit Transfer: A Review of Methodologies and Challenges,” Resources 2, no. 4 (October 2013): 517–27, https://www.mdpi.com/2079 -9276/2/4/517. See also Ecosystem Valuation: Methods, Section 8, “Benefit Transfer Method,” http://www.ecosystemvaluation.org/benefit_transfer.htm. Purchasing power parity (PPP) compares in U.S. dollars what it costs to buy the same basket of goods (e.g., pen, soda, light bulb) in different countries and adjusts currency exchange rates between different countries accordingly. That means the purchasing power exchange rate is the ratio of the currencies’ respective purchasing powers. Let’s say the same basket of goods costs $100 in Bhutan and $300 in the United States; then the PPP exchange rate is 1:3. Likewise, PPP assumes that exchange rates between currencies are in equilibrium when their purchasing power is the same in each country. Here Bhutan’s 2010 GDP is assessed in 2005 U.S. dollars at PPP. For PPP calculation and estimation methods, see https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/brief/methodology-calculation. Ida Kubiszewski, Robert Costanza et al., “An Initial Estimate of the Value of Ecosystem Services in Bhutan,” Ecosystem Services 3 (2013)” e11–e21, http://www.adaptation-undp .org/sites/default/files/downloads/an_initial_estimate_of_the_value.pdf. A subsequent National Forest Inventory carried out from 2012 to 2015 found that actual forest cover in Bhutan was 71 percent: Department of Forests and Park Services, National Forest Inventory Report, Volume 1. http://www.dofps.gov.bt/wp-content/uploads/2017/07 /National-Forest-Inventory-Report-Vol1.pdf. The services provided by Bhutan’s ecosystem and their estimated value for those outside and inside Bhutan are listed in Table 3, p. e15, in Ida Kubiszewski, Robert Costanza, et al., “An Initial Estimate of the Value of Ecosystem Services in Bhutan.” Kubiszewski, Costanza, et al., “An Initial Estimate of the Value of Ecosystem Services in Bhutan.” Karen Hayward and Ronald Colman, The Economic Value of Voluntary Work in Bhutan. monograph no. 2, 2012, National Statistics Bureau, Royal Government of Bhutan, Thimphu, http://www.nsb.gov.bt/publication/files/pub9zv5515po.pdf.

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Lham Dorji, National Statistics Bureau, Bhutan, “Alcohol Use and Abuse in Bhutan,” monograph no. 1, 2012, http://www.nsb.gov.bt/publication/files/pub1vc5889ov.pdf. Jigmi. Y. Thinley, press statement, February 10, 2012, Prime Minister’s Office, Thimphu, Bhutan. Unfortunately, the full statement, in the author’s possession, is no longer available online, but citations from it appear in the opening sections of Karen Hayward, Linda Pannozzo, and Ronald Colman, Valuing Bhutan’s True Wealth: Using the New National Accounts to Inform Enlightened GNH Policies (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, February 2012), www.gpiatlantic.org/bhutan/docs/valuing_bhutans_true_wealth.pdf; and National Statistics Bureau monograph no. 2.

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Winston Churchill, speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, May 23, 1909; and Winston Churchill, address to the House of Commons, November 11, 1947. Both cited by Richard Langworth, writer, historian, and senior fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Winston Churchill—Myth and Reality: What He Actually Did and Said, citations available at https://richardlangworth.com/. Jigmi Y. Thinley, “Honourable Prime Minister’s Letter to International Participants to Educating for GNH Workshop,” November 2009, unpublished. Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley, Opening Address, Educating for Gross National Happiness international workshop, Hotel Phuntsho Pelri, Thimphu, Bhutan, December 7, 2009, http://www.gpiatlantic.org/bhutan/educating.html and click on “opening statement.” Council of Ministers of Education Canada, Measuring Up: Canadian Results of the OECD PISA Study, 2016, https://www.cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications /Attachments/365/PISA2015-CdnReport-EN.pdf. Also see Linda Pannozzo, Karen Hayward, and Ronald Colman, How Educated Are Nova Scotians? Education Indicators for the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, 2008), http://www .gpiatlantic.org/pdf/education/nseducation.pdf; Hector Tobar, “American Adults Have Low (and Declining) Reading Proficiency,” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-american-adults-have-low-and -declining-reading-proficiency-20131008-story.html; and Karen Hardy, “PISA Results Show Further Decline in Australia’s Education Rankings,” Canberra Times, December 6, 2016, http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/secondary-education-act/pisa-results -show-further-decline-in-australias-education-rankings-20161206-gt56yb.html. Linda Pannozzo, Karen Hayward, and Ronald Colman, Education Indicators for the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index (Halifax: GPI Atlantic, February 2008), http:// www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/education/nseducation.pdf. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) found that “the socio-economic composition of schools explains far more of the differences in student performance between schools than do other school factors that are more easily amenable to policy makers, such as school resources and school policies.” OECD, School Factors Related to Quality and Equity. Results from Pisa 2000 (Paris: OECD, 2005).

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Those findings are confirmed in the 2015 PISA results. For example: “Socio-economically disadvantaged students across OECD countries are almost three times more likely than advantaged students not to attain the baseline level of proficiency in science.” OECD, PISA 2015: PISA Results in Focus, 2016, https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in -focus.pdf. See, for example, Robert L. Linn, “Educational Assessment: Expanded Expectations and Challenges,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 15, no. 1 (1993): 1–16; Kenneth J. Rowe, “Assessment, League Tables and School Effectiveness: Consider the Issues and ‘Let’s Get Real’!”, Journal of Educational Enquiry 1, no. 1 (2000): 73–98; and Brit Griffin, “Making the Grade. The Politics of the Grade 3 Test,” High Grader Magazine (January/ February 1998): 20–23. Other critiques are described in Section 32.1, “Student Achievement Measured by Standardized Tests,” pp. 236–46 of GPI Atlantic’s “Educating for Gross National Happiness” literature review document 2, section 2, December 2009. Paul Howe, “Political Knowledge and Electoral Participation in the Netherlands: Comparisons with the Canadian Case,” paper presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, Winnipeg, June 3–5, 2004, https://www .cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2004/Howe,%20Neth%20and%20Can.pdf. Sporadic one-time polls and surveys reveal public attitudes once in a while but do not show changes over time. A rare Canadian opinion survey was done in 2015 by the Environics Institute and David Suzuki Foundation: https://davidsuzuki.org /wp-content/uploads/2017/09/focus-canada-2015-public-opinion-climate-change .pdf; and Canadian attitudes are included in occasional global surveys such as: C:/Users/Administrator/Downloads/Pew-Research-Center-Climate-Change -Report-FINAL-November-5-2015.pdf; and https://news.gallup.com/poll/147203 /Fewer-Americans-Europeans-View-Global-Warming-Threat.aspx. Thanks to Yale University and Pew Research Center studies, more consistent and comparable U.S. public opinion data are now available over time. These show that 26 percent of Americans were “very worried” about global warming in April 2020, down from 29 percent in December 2018, but up from 19 percent in 2016 and just 11 percent in 2014. The report authors speculate that the 2020 dip may be due to coronavirus worries overtaking all other concerns. Results also show that in both 2020 and 2018, 62 percent of Americans now think global warming is caused by human activity, up from less than half five years earlier. But even now, only one in five knows that nearly all scientists agree that global warming is due to human activity. Anthony Leiserowitz et al., Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018 (Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Yale University), https://climatecommunication.yale .edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/climate-change-american-mind-april-2020b.pdf; http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Climate-Change -American-Mind-December-2018.pdf. The November 2016 report is at http:// climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american -mind-november-2016/. The chart on the proportion of Americans who were worried about climate change is at http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data /six-ten-americans-worried-global-warming/. The 2010 report is at http://environment

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11.

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.yale.edu/climate-communication/files/ClimateChangeKnowledge2010.pdf. See also Pew Research Center, “The Politics of Climate,” October 4, 2016, https://www.pewresearch .org/science/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-climate/; and Katherine Bagley, “Latest Climate Polls: More Knowledge but Urgency Lags,” Inside Climate News, November 9, 2015, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08112015/new-polls-climate-change-more -knowledge-not-necessarily-more-urgency. Special Study Panel on Education Indicators, Education Counts: An Indicator System to  Monitor the Nation’s Educational Health (Washington, DC: National Centre for Education Statistics, 1991), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED334279.pdf. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Education for All 2000–2015: Achievements and Challenges (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2015), http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002322/232205e.pdf. (UNESCO, Educating for a Sustainable Future: A Transdisciplinary Vision for Concerted Action (International Conference in Thessaloniki, December 9–12, 1997; Paris, UNESCO, 1998), 18, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000110686. For example, in 1997 OECD initiated an interdisciplinary program to identify “key competencies” that contribute to a “well-functioning society” and that are “necessary for individuals to lead an overall successful life, and for society to face the challenges of the present and the future.” See D. S. Rychen and L. H. Salganik, “Definition and Selection of Competencies: Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations (DeSeCo),” https:// www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/41529556.pdf ; and OECD, “Summary of the Final Report: Key Competencies for a Successful Life and a Well-Functioning Society,” 2003, 2, http://www.netuni.nl/courses/hre/uploads/File/deseco_finalreport_summary .pdf. On ecological literacy, for example, see David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy. Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 133. Linda Pannozzo, Karen Hayward, and Ronald Colman, How Educated Are Nova Scotians?, especially 46–47: For the first time, in this educated populace study, data are now available on the ecological footprints of Canadians based on their educational attainment. These results support Orr’s observation that higher levels of formal education lead to more unsustainable lifestyles. Thus, those Canadians who have only some secondary education use 6.76 global hectares per capita, those who have completed secondary education use 6.96 global hectares, while those who have a university degree use 8.67 global hectares each in order to sustain their lifestyles.

15.

See fig. 17, “Ecological Footprint by Educational Attainment, Canada, 2005.” For the definition of global hectares, see Global Footprint Network, Footprint Term Glossary, 2007, https://www.footprintnetwork.org/resources/glossary/. UNESCO, Education for Sustainable Development: United Nations Decade (2005–2014), International Implementation Scheme” (Paris: UNESCO), http://unesdoc.unesco.org /images/0014/001486/148654E.pdf.

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United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, The Least Developed Countries Report 2016, June 9, 2017, http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/ldc2016_en.pdf. Art-ong founded his school on the moral principles of “enlightenment, duty and devotion, understanding, character, action, thanking, integrity, oneness and nobility.” Chularat Saengpassa, “Art-ong must show us he has what it takes,” Nation, September 8, 2014 https://www.nationthailand.com/opinion/30242738. See also https:// sathyasaicollege.nsw.edu.au/dr-art-ong-jumsai-visits-sathya-sai-school/. Chularat Saengpassa, “Art-ong must show us he has what it takes,” Nation, September 8, 2014. See also http://www.saibaba-x.org.uk/11/jumsai.html; and https://rationalwiki .org/wiki/Sathya_Sai_Baba.

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3. 4.

5. 6.

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Prime Minister of Bhutan, Jigmi Y. Thinley, “Making a Commitment to Organic Agriculture,” March 12, 2011, http://www.sji.bt/assets/PDFs/HPM.17.Mar.organic.pdf. See, for example, Dhananjay Mahapatraj, “Over 12,000 Farmer Suicides per Year, Centre Tells Supreme Court,” Times of India, May 3, 2017, http://timesofindia .indiatimes.com/india/over-12000-farmer-suicides-per-year-centre-tells-supreme -court/articleshow/58486441.cms; and Vandana Shiva, “From Seeds of Suicide to Seeds of Hope: Why Are Indian Farmers Committing Suicide and How Can We Stop This Tragedy?”, Huffington Post, May 29, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com /vandana-shiva/from-seeds-of-suicide-to_b_192419.html. Kuensel, “Food Import Value Almost Triples that of Export,” December 6, 2018, http:// www.kuenselonline.com/food-import-value-almost-triples-that-of-export/. Arndt Feuerbacher et al., “Is Bhutan Destined for 100 Percent Organic? Assessing the  Economy-Wide Effects of a Large-Scale Conversion Policy,” PLoS ONE 13, no. 6 (June 13, 2018), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone .0199025. This carefully researched article finds organic yields in Bhutan 24 percent lower than conventional yields but points to the potential for higher organic productivity through improved organic methods. “GNH Centre: Structure and Approach of Programme Offerings,” October 2010 (unpublished). The executive director was appointed by the prime minister, and I had a major role in selecting the program director, who subsequently brought the third person on board. The program director seemed remarkably well qualified, but it was precisely his existing prominence and international connections that helped to lead the center in an entirely different direction than the original earthier, domestic vision. Dasho Neten Zangmo, “Submission on Bhutan’s Mineral Development Policy, 2011.” This document is not published online but has been made available to GPI Atlantic by the author. Royal Government of Bhutan, Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs, Department of Local Governance, Mainstreaming: Gender, Environment, Climate-Change, Disaster,

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

and Poverty Into the Development Policies, Plans and Programmes in Bhutan, 2015, 28, http://www.undp.org/content/dam/bhutan/GECDP%20Mainstreaming.pdf. Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) of Bhutan, Improving the Business Environment: The Case of the Mining Industry in Bhutan, May 2016, esp. 33ff, https://www.acc.org.bt /sites/default/files/Mining%20research%20report.pdf. Thus the ACC report on Bhutan’s mining industry pointed to an overall “lack of monitoring and controls due to limited resources” (65), and it documented “illegal operations in the absence of any control body in Bhutan” (19). The report noted that “DGM [Department of Geology and Mines] inspectors are the central human control of the mining sectors. On the other hand, DGM inspectors are without computer, internet access, vehicles, financial means, regular training and consideration” (54). According to the ACC, the possibility of real control is undermined by an inherent conflict of interest, “since DGM is both the decision maker and the key controller of the mining industry [and] is responsible for regulation and also facilitation of mineral production” (55). In addition, the mining industry’s Community Development Agreements, which are supposed to ameliorate mining impacts, are not enforced, as no agency is responsible for implementing them (61). There is no proper financial disclosure program for mining inspectors, engineers, owners, CEOs, and staff (69). See Anti-Corruption Commission of Bhutan, Improving the Business Environment. Royal Government of Bhutan, Mineral Development Policy May 2017, http://www.gnhc .gov.bt/en/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/MDP-2017.pdf. Royal Government of Bhutan, National Environment Commission, Bhutan Environment Outlook 2008, 18, http://www.nec.gov.bt/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Bhutan -Environment-Outlook-2008_1.pdf. Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2017: Transcending the Middle-Income Challenge, 189–93, https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication /237761/ado-2017.pdf. Growth and debt figures refer to Fiscal Year 2016 (ended June 30, 2016). Cited in Alexander Jones, “Bhutan: The World’s Fastest Growing Economy,” July 31, 2017, https://internationalbanker.com/finance/bhutan-worlds-fastest-growing-economy/. See “A Banana Leaf Feast”, video (6.5 minutes), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =NCFnh_soQgo&feature=youtu.be. Dawa Gyelma, “Building Boom Chokes Thimphu Drains,” January 11, 2016, http:// www.thethirdpole.net/2016/01/11/building-boom-chokes-thimphu-drains/. Only two reliable national census surveys have been conducted (2005 and 2017). The 2017 census count for Thimphu Thromde (Municipality) is 114,551. See National Statistics Bureau of Bhutan, 2017 Population and Housing Census of Bhutan, 2018, http:// www.nsb.gov.bt/publication/files/PHCB2017_national.pdf. The Thimphu population figure for 1990 is an estimate and might not be comparable in all respects to the census results. For example, many new urban migrants are still officially registered in their rural home villages and therefore might not be counted in some Thimphu population estimates. As well, Thimphu has expanded so greatly that several new suburbs are outside the official city limits. For various estimates, see, for example, Country Studies,

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18.

19.

20.

“Size, Structure, and Settlement Patterns,” http://countrystudies.us/bhutan/18.htm; RAO Online, “The Pressure for Expansion Continues,” http://www.raonline.ch/pages /story/bt/btstthimphu01.html; and World Population Review, “Bhutan Population,” http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/bhutan-population/. Tashi Wangdi, “Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus in Bhutan,” Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism 19, suppl. 1 (April 2015): S14–S15, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc /articles/PMC4413377/. “Sikkim Became India’s First Fully Organic State in 2016,” Indian Express, December 31, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/sikkim-became-indias-first -fully-organic-state-in-2016-4452765/. Vidhi Doshi, “Sikkim’s Organic Revolution at Risk as Local Consumers Fail to Buy Into Project,” Guardian, January 31, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global -development/2017/jan/31/sikkim-india-organic-revolution-at-risk-as-local-consumers -fail-to-buy-into-project.

13. A “NEW ECONOMIC PARADIGM” FOR THE WORLD 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

Samudra Gupta Kashyap, “Assam Losing Crores to Extortionists at Border: Panel Report,” Indian Express, May 22, 2008, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/assam -losing-crores-to-extortionists-at-border-panel-report/312806/. Royal Government of Bhutan, Time for a Sustainable Economic Paradigm: Input for the Draft Outcome Document for Rio + 20. Submitted to the United Nations, November 2011, http://alterrafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Bhutans-input-to-Rio+201. pdf, and at https://langleygroupinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/Bhutan-s-input -to-Rio-20.pdf. Defining A New Economic Paradigm: The Report of the High-Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness (New York: United Nations Headquarters, April 2, 2012), https:// sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/617BhutanReport_WEB_F.pdf. Defining A New Economic Paradigm, 105–107. Defining a New Economic Paradigm, Annexes 1–5 and 10–12. See also: Royal Government of Bhutan, Time for a Sustainable Economic Paradigm. This was also distributed to participants in advance of the April 2 meeting at UN Headquarters. The summary citations from speakers’ remarks here and following are from Bhutan’s report to the United Nations cited earlier: Defining A New Economic Paradigm: The Report of the High-Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness (New York: United Nations Headquarters, April 2, 2012), https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content /documents/617BhutanReport_WEB_F.pdf. Bachelet served as president of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and would serve again from 2014 to 2018. The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, generally called the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, was set up by French President Sarkozy in 2008. See Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report by

1 4 . CAN GENU INE P RO GRESS RE A LLY HA PPEN ?341

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, September 2009, http://files.harmonywithnatureun.org/uploads/upload112.pdf. United Nations Secretary-General, “Secretary-General’s Remarks to High-Level Thematic Debate on “The State of the World Economy and Finance and its Impact on Development,” May 17, 2012, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2012 -05-17/secretary-generals-remarks-high-level-thematic-debate-state-world. Statement by His Excellency Jigmi Y. Thinley, Prime Minister, Kingdom of Bhutan, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, June 20, 2012, https://rio20.un.org/sites/rio20.un.org/files/bhutan_pms_statement-20 _june_2012.docx. Prime Minister Thinley also gave speeches at Rio to the International Society for Ecological Economics and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, both of which made him quite a hero in the nongovernmental world. Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace, stated, “Rio+20 has turned into an epic failure. It has failed on equity, failed on ecology, and failed on economy.” Cited in G. P. Thomas, “What Happened at Rio+20? An Overview of the Highs, Lows and Achievements of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development,” https:// www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=242 and elsewhere. The statements are cited in World Health Organisation, “United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio + 20) 2012,”. https://www.who.int/southeastasia /activities/impacts-of-climate-change, and at https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012 -07-12/future-who-wants-or-needs/. Mary Robinson, “Was Rio + 20 a Failure of Political Leadership?” CNN, June 26, 2012, http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/26/world/americas/rio20-mary-robinson-failure /index.html. Royal Government of Bhutan, Time for a Sustainable Economic Paradigm. Suzerainty is defined as “a situation in which a powerful region or people controls the foreign policy and international relations of a tributary vassal state while allowing the subservient nation internal autonomy” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzerainty).

14. CAN GENUINE PROGRESS REALLY HAPPEN? 1. 2.

The Constitution of the Kingdom of Bhutan, http://www.nationalcouncil.bt/assets /uploads/files/Constitution%20%20of%20Bhutan%20English.pdf. Bruce Watson, “The Troubling Evolution of Corporate Greenwashing,” Guardian, August 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/aug/20 /greenwashing-environmentalism-lies-companies, and Ben Webster, “Idyllic Meat Wrappers Hide Harsh Reality of Mass Modern Farming,” Times, March 10, 2018, https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/idyllic-meat-wrappers-hide-harsh-reality-of -modern-mass-farming-8mkfdmtzt. According to Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association, one of the industry's most

3 4 214. C AN GENU INE P RO GRESS R EA LLY HA PPEN ?

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

powerful lobby groups: “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.” Laura Sullivan, “How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic would be Recycled,” National Public Radio, September 11, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled -the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled. On estimates by Great Britain’s Royal Statistical Society on the total proportion of plastics recycled since 1950, see Laura Parker, “A Whopping 91% of Plastic isn’t Recycled,” National Geographic, December 20, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/07/plastic-produced -recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/#close. “Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos World Economic Forum,” New York Times, January 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/climate/greta-thunberg-davos -transcript.html. Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843; as also appears as “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), https://genius.com/Robert-c-tucker-the-marx-engels-reader-chapter-14 -for-a-ruthless-criticism-of-everything-existing-annotated. Rutger Hoekstra, Replacing GDP by 2030: Towards a Common Language for the WellBeing and Sustainability Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 242. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (New York: Viking, 2007); reprinted by Penguin in 2008 under the title Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. “TIME 2019 Person of the Year,” https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta -thunberg-choice/. See, for example, Greta Thunberg, “Our House Is on Fire,” Guardian, January 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta -thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate; and Damian Carrington, “School Climate Strikes: 1.4 Million People Took Part, Say Campaigners,” Guardian, March 19, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/greta-thunberg-climate-change-davos/; https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/19/school-climate-strikes-more -than-1-million-took-part-say-campaigners-greta-thunberg. Greta Thunberg’s United Nations speech can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJsdgTPJpU. Paul Krugman, “Australia Shows Us the Road to Hell,” New York Times, January 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/australia-fires.html. Valerie Valcovici, “Greta Thunberg to Congress: ‘Don't Listen to Me. Listen to the Scientists,’ ” Reuters, September 18, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/climate -change-thunberg-congress/update-1-greta-thunberg-to-congress-dont-listen-to -me-listen-to-the-scientists-idUSL2N2690MK. BBC Radio 4 “Ten Things We Learned When Greta Thunberg Met David Attenborough,” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/270DpZjTRtdscc0qbQbmDH7/10 -things-we-learned-when-greta-thunberg-met-david-attenborough. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance Web site is at https://wellbeingeconomy.org/. See also chapter 24 of Robert Costanza et al. (eds.), Sustainable Wellbeing Futures: A Research and

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13.

14.

Action Agenda for Ecological Economics (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, May 2020). Collaborative research published by former members of Bhutan’s International Expert Working Group includes the following: R. Costanza et al., “Toward a Sustainable Wellbeing Economy,“ Solutions 9, no. 2 (April 2018), https://www.thesolutionsjournal. com/article/toward-sustainable-wellbeing-economy/; R. Costanza et al., “Modelling and Measuring Sustainable Wellbeing in Connection with the UN Sustainable Development Goals,” Ecological Economics 130 (2016): 350–55, http://www.idakub .com/academics/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2016_Costanza_SDGs-EcoEco.pdf; R. Costanza et al., “The UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Dynamics of Well-Being,” Solutions 7, no. 1 (January-February 2016): 20–22, http://www.idakub .com/academics/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2016_Costanza_SDGs-Solutions.pdf; R. Costanza et al., “Comment: Time to Leave GDP Behind,” Nature 505 (January 16, 2014): 283–85, http://www.idakub.com/academics/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2014 _Costanza_Nature_GDP.pdf; K. V. Ragnarsdóttir et al., “Beyond GDP,” Geologist Online 24, no. 9 (October 2014): 12–16, http://www.idakub.com/academics/wp-content /uploads/2017/02/2014_Ragnarsdottir_Geologist.pdf; and R. Costanza et al.,“The Future We Really Want,” Solutions 4, no. 4(July-August 2013): 37–43, http://www .idakub.com/academics/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2013_Costanza_Solutions _FutureWeWant.pdf. The National Performance Framework can be found at https://nationalperformance. gov.scot. See, for example, Eleanor Ainge Roy, “New Zealand's World-First ‘Wellbeing’ Budget to Focus on Poverty and Mental Health,” Guardian, May 14, 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/14/new-zealands-world-first-wellbeing -budget-to-focus-on-poverty-and-mental-health; BBC News, “Iceland Puts Well -Being Ahead of GDP in Budget,” December 3, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world -europe-50650155; IWA (Institute of Welsh Affairs), “Wellbeing Worldbeaters: New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland,” October 30, 2019, https://www.iwa.wales/click/2019/10 /wellbeing-worldbeaters-new-zealand-and-scotland/; and Nan Spowart, “Nicola Sturgeon Pushes Use of ‘Wellbeing Economy’ Over GDP,” The National, August 3, 2019, https://www.thenational.scot/news/17814293.nicola-sturgeon/. See also Ian Bache and Louise Reardon, The Politics and Policy of Wellbeing: Understanding the Rise and Significance of a New Agenda (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016), for an account of the development and significance of the well-being agenda, particularly in the UK and European contexts. Nadja Popovich and Adam Pearce, “It’s Not Your Imagination: Summers Are Getting Hotter,” New York Times, July 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive /2017/07/28/climate/more-frequent-extreme-summer-heat.html?mcubz=1, reporting on data from James Hansen, retired NASA climate scientist and professor at Columbia University. The data show how summer temperatures have shifted toward more extreme heat over the past several decades. Also see “Climate Extremes Become the Norm,” Virgin, https://www.virgin.com/virgin-unite/leadership-and-advocacy /climate-extremes-become-norm.

3 4 414. CAN GENU INE P RO GRESS R EA LLY HA PPEN ?

15. 16.

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). William E. Rees, “Ecological Economics for Humanity’s Plague Phase,” Ecological Economics 169 (March 2020): 106519.

15. FORGING A NEW ECONOMY 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

William E. Rees, “Ecological Economics for Humanity’s Plague Phase,” Ecological Economics 169 (March 2020): 106519. These overlapping assets are generally defined as follows: Natural capital: The natural environment, its biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods and services they provide. These goods and services are essential for basic needs such as survival, climate regulation, habitat for other species, water supply, food, fiber, fuel, recreation, cultural amenities, and the raw materials required for all economic production. Social and cultural capital: The web of interpersonal connections, social networks, cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, trust, and the institutional arrangements, rules, norms, and values that facilitate human interactions and cooperation between and among people. These contribute to social cohesion; strong, vibrant, and secure communities; and good governance, and they help to fulfil basic human needs such as participation, affection, and a sense of belonging. Human capital: Human beings and their attributes, including physical and mental health, knowledge, and other capacities that enable people to be productive members of society. This involves the balanced use of time to fulfil basic human needs such as fulfilling employment, spirituality, understanding, skills development, creativity, and freedom. Built capital: Buildings, machinery, transportation infrastructure, and all other human artefacts and services that fulfil basic human needs such as shelter, subsistence, mobility, and communications. Paul Hawken, ed., Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (New York: Penguin, 2017). Ida Kubiszewski et al., “The Future Value of Ecosystem Services: Global Scenarios and National Implications,” Ecosystem Services 26 (June 2017): 289–301, http://www.idakub .com/academics/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017_J_Kubiszewski_ESscenarios.pdf. “Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos World Economic Forum,” New York Times, January 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/climate/greta-thunberg-davos -transcript.html. See, for example, The Solutions Journal—For a Sustainable and Desirable Future, www .thesolutionsjournal.com; the work of the New Economics Foundation at https:// neweconomics.org; Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams, The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown-Up Economy (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2019); Hawken, Drawdown; David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, Good News for a Change: Hope for a Troubled Planet (Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2002); and

AC K NOW LE D GM E NTS345

Matthew Green, “ ‘New Economics’: The Way to Save the Planet?”, Reuters, May 9, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-extinction/new-economics -the-way-to-save-the-planet-idUSKCN1SE2CN.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1.

Dr. Waring is professor of public policy at the Institute of Public Policy, Auckland University of Technology. See If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (London: Macillan, 1988), which has been translated into several languages and is the subject of a major documentary film. Marilyn Waring’s recent book, Still Counting: Wellbeing, Women’s Work and Policy-Making (Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams, December 2018), describes her personal struggle to get politicians and the public to see the limitations of GDP and to use better and more comprehensive measures.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics represent figures or tables. accountability, 80–81 accounting: for forests, 98–101; GDP limitations, 15–19, 44–45, 64–65, 115, 131–32; for GNH, 182–85; indicators and, 34–38, 56; in policy, 16, 44–45, 83, 88–93, 264–65; net accounting, 16–18, 32, 83–86, 265, 313n39; resource accounting, 27–30, 115, 299n24–25; for social and environmental costs, 36–38, 88–93. See also full-cost accounting agriculture, 58; in Bhutan, 157–58, 164, 211–17; chemicals in, 213–14, 226–27, 233–34; economics of in GPI, 85–91, 313n39; in EU, 311n26; in new economic paradigm, 280; local farming, 88–89, 121, 133–34; organic, 82, 211–17, 309n15, 311n27, 338n4; in SJI, 223–27, 229, 231–34, 237, 247–59. See also soil quality air pollution, viii–ix, 24, 116, 119, 271; subsidies to, 106; transportation and, 125, 127; who pays costs, 28, 72, 93 Alerce Trust, 230, 288 Anderson, Ray, 135, 170 Ardern, Jacinda, 155

Aristotle, 54 Attenborough, David, 269 Australian fires, x, 25, 279 Automobiles. See transportation Bachelet, Michelle, 242, 340n7 Bangladesh, Rana Plaza collapse, 50–51 Ban Ki-Moon, 7–8, 26, 240, 245 Bhatt, Vinod, 237 Bhumibol (King), 167 Bhutan: agriculture in, 157–58, 211–17; accounting for GNH, 182–85; Buddhism and, 157–66, 172–73, 180, 203, 228; bureaucracies in, 208, 215–16, 249–50, 257–58; challenges to GNH, 175–76, 220–22; democracy in, 176, 186–87, 224; educating for GNH, 187–89, 198–210; foreign aid to, 158–59, 168, 209–10, 249–50; GNH Centre, 189–90, 217–20; GNH conferences, 168–71, GNH philosophy, 159, 161–68; ‘happiness’ meaning in, 161–62, 172–73; history of, 157–61; India and, 160, 177–78, 249, 254–55, 257; Lhotshampa (Nepalese)

348 IND E X

in, 176–78; measuring GNH, 178–81; mining in, 221, 338n10; new economic paradigm and, 7–8, 236–56, 277–78; rural-urban migration in, 165–66, 207, 231–32, 331n14, 339n16; sovereignty of, 163, 177–78, 249, 254–55; UN and, 175, 236–45, 249–50, 254–56, 262–63, 277–78; as UN Champion of the Earth, 164. See also specific topics Bierregaard, Richard, 24 biodiversity, 99, 146, 280, 296n9 Birol, Faith, ix Blessed Unrest (Hawken), 135, 267 boycotting, 285 Bretton Woods, 8, 19, 238–39, 245, 248–49, 256, 279 Brundtland Commission, 47 built capital, 107, 110, 343n2 bureaucratic resistance to change, 96, 197, 257–59, 265; in agriculture, 86–87, 213–17 in Bhutan Foreign Ministry, 249–56; in education, 197–98, 207–10; local avoidance of, 134, 223, 270; in Nova Scotia, 77–78, 130, 132 Cajete, Gregory, 200 Canada, agriculture in, 82, 87, 217; BC carbon tax, 92; Canadian Alliance, 72; Canadian Knowledge Survey proposal, 196–97; civic literacy in, 193; climate change survey 336n9; community GPI survey, 72, 74, 308n1; consensus values in, 57; data gaps in, 14–15, 191–98; discount rate in, 110; education measures in, 190–98, 337n14; environmental accounting in, 299n25; funding from, 59, 224, 332n20; gender discrimination in, 65–66, 305n10, 306n15, 307n18; GDP data dominance in, 14–15; GHG emissions in, 104–6; GPI as national pilot in, 61; health costs in, 95, 118–20; imprisonment in, 70; income and debt in, 17, 84–85; indigenous languages in, 143; Hans

Messinger, 42–44, 61, 97, 151, 288, 301n2; poverty in, 66, 282; recession in, 85; resistance to new measures in, 137, 139, 143, 149, 153, 198; silo approach in, 96, 143; Statistics Canada surveys, 30; Statistics Canada time use data, 30, 60–62, 64, 304n3–4, 306n16; tobacco in, 37, 89–90, 120, 133; transport in, 124–27; work sharing in, 76–78. See also Nova Scotia; specific topics Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW), 128, 178, 191, 265; flaws in 193–94, 197–98, 325n67 capital—natural, human, social, and built, 29–37, 99, 107, 115, 139–40, 278–80, 343n2; capital-driven growth, 12; definition, 343n2; discounting and, 110–11; in Bhutan, 180–85; in GDP, 15–16; GPI categories, 58; in New Zealand, 139–40, 142 capitalism, 3, 130, 132, 272–75, 294n12 Capra, Fritjof, 28 Centre for Bhutan Studies (CBS), 178–81 Charles (Prince), 240, 242 Chataway, John, 77 cheap labor, 50–51, 86–87, 272–73 children: discounting future, 109–12; poverty and, 53, 66, 306n17; and unpaid child care, 63–67 Chinchilla, Laura, 242 Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, 46, 289 chronic disease, cost of, 119–20 Churchill, Winston, 186–87 CIW. See Canadian Index of Wellbeing Clark, Helen, 138 climate change, assessment reports on, 297n14, 302n8; carbon tax, 37, 92, 106, 126, 280–81; data on, 23–24, 295–96n2–8, 297n14, 343n14; economics of, 104–6; knowledge of, 193, 336n9; policy for, 22, 36, 92, 279; precautionary principle and, 49. See also greenhouse gas emissions Cobb, Clifford, 4, 44 Cobb, John, 32

IND EX 3 49

communities: community GPI, 72–74, 132–36, 234, 270–71, 329n32; community service in education, 205–06, 229; culture of, 165; globalization challenges, 233–34; municipal measures NZ, 141, 148–54, 156; policy for, 72–73; Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative Bhutan, 222–235, 256; urban migration effect on, 157, 165–66, 207, 212, 231 conservation, environmental: easements, 90, 91, 313n39; pillar of GNH, 162–64, 173; indigenous value, 146, 164 consumption: in alternative indicators, 32, 116–17, 151; capitalism and, 272; equity and, 39, 51–52, 167, 279; in footprint analysis, 30, 39, 83–84, 200; in GDP, 10–13; impacts of, 51–52, 194–95, 204–5; price and policy impacts on, 87–93, 233, 280 contingent valuation, 103 control costs, 104–6 co-optation, 7, 220, 260–62 Copenhagen Climate Conference, 164, 237 corporations: in agriculture, 87–89; global vs local impact, 204–5; greenwashing by, 260–61; Irving Company, 260; Monsanto, 213, 217 Costanza, Robert, 182–84, 239–42, 277–78, 283, 316n21; as co-founder ecological economics, 27–28 Costa Rica, 242, 269 COVID-19, vii–x; economy and, 13; obesity and, 119, 320n28; stimulus packages for, 18; Coyle, Diane, 18–19 crime, 35, 71, 158; community action on, 133; costs of, 145, 307n24; for GPI, 67–70; “Cost of Crime in Nova Scotia, The,” 68 culture: building citizen initiative in Bhutan, 224; cultural capital, 140, 343n2; GNH pillar, 162, 165–66, 188, 177; Maori language and, 143–44, 327n12; of New Zealand, 154–55; organic farming and, 212; Sharchokpa language and, 229

Curitiba, Brazil, 127 Czechoslovakia, Velvet Revolution, 277 Daly, Herman, 5, 27, 32 damage costs, 104–06 data: for credibility, 23, 43, 78, 97–100, 113, 174, 263–64; on crime costs, 67–68; on current trends, 23–25, 296n6, 343n14; discounting and, 109–112; on footprint by education, 337n14; on forest age 316n22; gaps in, 14–15, 191–98, 303n17; for GNH survey, 179; historical lack of, 19, 239, 248, 275, 279; on measuring inequality, 319n10; self-report limitations, 179, 300n28. See also evidence; statistics; and specific topics Davidson, Richard, 240 Day, Stockwell, 72 debt: in Bhutan, 158, 221–22, 226–27; education on, 194, 205–6; in farming, 85–86, 213; financial crisis (2008–9), 17–18, 84–85, 206; global levels, 18, 25; Nova Scotia and layoffs, 75 Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), 200 democracy: in Bhutan, 186–87, 224 De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel, 155 Denmark, single mother poverty, 66; wind industry, 37 development: alternative scenarios, 283; for Bhutan, 157–71, 221–22; politics of, 249–50. See also economic growth; new economic paradigm discounting and discount rates, 109–12, 322n44 Dodds, Colin, 67 Dorji, Lam, 222 Drawdown (Hawken), 281–82 Dressel, Holly, 134–35 Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, 223–24, 228, 289 Ecological Footprint, 30; earth ‘overshoot’, 52, 83–84, 242; education and, 200,

350INDEX

337n14; equity and, 39, 52; GPI component, 58; World Happiness Report and, 173 ecology: ecological economics, 27–29, 316n21; ecological literacy, 194–95, 199–201, 336n9; ecological sustainability, 27–28, 47–49, 48, 278, 280; ecological stewardship, 91, 147, 184, 281; in education, 203–05; GDP and, 15–16, 19. See also ecosystem services; environment; sustainability; and specific topics economic growth: capitalism and, 130, 272–75; consensus on, 5–6, 14, 265; equated to health, 8, 12–14; GDP and, 19, 28, 64, 114, 241, 293n7; green GDP, 117; of health industry, 118–19; and monetary policy, 9; of organic food, 82, 270; policy and, 12–14, 84; of prison industry, 69–70; vs steady-state economy, 27, 167, 274. See also specific topics economics: of agriculture, 82, 85–88, 211–15, 232–34, 309n15, 311n27, 313n39; of climate change, viii–ix, 104–6, 323n48; of crime, 67–70, 145, 307n24; discipline of, 1–9, 12, 16–17, 20, 27–28, 38–40, 115–16, 283–84; discounting and, 109–12; ecological economics, 27–30, 316n21; of forests, 99–101, 314n7; in GNH, 161–63, 166–68, 182–85; Nova Scotia as pilot, 41, 61; politics as reflection of, 3, 5, 130–31, 259–60, 272–75; sustainability and, 47–49, 48, 109–12, 272–75, 278–80; translating science into, 88; of unpaid work, 35–36, 60–67. See also accounting; capital; capitalism; GDP; economic growth; employment; equity; financial crisis; financial incentives; full-cost accounting; income; new economic paradigm; poverty; and other specific topics ecosystem services: in Bhutan, 183–84, 221; climate change and, 111, 298n14;

descriptions of, 27–28, 107–08, 298n21, 343n2; discounting and, 110; of forests, 98, 101, 107–08; in new economy, 280–83; in New Zealand, 140; payment for, 90–91, 184, 281; value of, 27, 101, 107–08, 283; World Bank, UN and, 115. See also ecology; environment; sustainability; and specific topics education, 186–210; Bhutan literacy, 158; in Canada, 191–98; equity in, 192–93, 335n6; for GNH,188–89, 198–210; GPI connective tissue, 194–95; holistic, 39–40, 199–200; Maori, 144, 327n12; in SJI, 227–230; for sustainability, 195–96, 199–200 efficiency: GPI and, 72, 93, 314n7; in new economy 281 elections: in Bhutan, 187–88; GPI and, 79–81 employment and unemployment: Bhutan youth unemployment, 158; costs of unemployment, 77; crime and, 69; GDP and, 12; in GPI 56, 58; graduation rates and, 192; Maori rate,147, 158; sustainability and, 41 (fisheries), 105 (energy), 123, 322n45 (waste management); work sharing and, 75–78, 170 Engage Nova Scotia, 325n67 environment: accounting for 28–30, 36–38, 115, 299n23–25; appropriate technology for, 226; COVID-19 and, vii–x; current trends, 23–25; endangered species, 19, 24, 145–46; GDP and, 15–16, 19; as GNH pillar, 163–65; gradual collapse, 87–88; human dependence on, 39–40, 47–48, 278–79; organic farming and, 82–83, 133–34, 211–17; Pedestrian Day, 175–76; work sharing and, 75. See also agriculture; climate change; ecological footprint; ecology; ecosystem services; forests; greenhouse gas emissions; natural capital; natural resources; sustainability; Thunberg, Greta; and other specific topics

INDEX351

equity: consumption by rich and, 39, 52, 261; in Brundtland report, 47; data infrequency, 14; in education, 192; in GPI, 47, 51–54, 96; measurement methods, 319n10; in new economic paradigm, 242, 244, 278, 280–81; in New Zealand, 140, 147; in Stiglitz report, 116; in World Bank measures, 115 ethics: of discounting future, 109–12 European Union (EU): agriculture and, 309n15, 311n26; measurement and, 19, 114, 318n6; precautionary principle in, 49 evidence, for policy: belief in power of, 33, 44, 81, 128, 264–65, 283; for change agents, 267–72, 283; failures to affect policy, 54, 86–88, 124, 261, 265–68; for fiscal reform, 37, 45, 79–82, 88–93, 106, 153, 280–81; for forestry reform, 99, 314n5; for goal-setting, 79–81, 134; for GDP-based policy, 11, 15–19, 36, 53, 102, 106; on health inequities, 53, 303n22,n23, 304n24,n25; for market efficiency, 29, 72, 93, 124–27, 170, 314n7; measurement and policy priority, 20–22; for timely remedial action, 29–30, 83–88, 91, 276; translate science to economics, 88; for transportation, 125–27; for win-win solutions, 81–83, 125–26. See also data; statistics; and specific topics experts: GPI for, 97–100, 263–64. See also International Expert Working Group externalities, 28. See also full-cost accounting fair trade, 170, 215, 244, 281 Federal Reserve, 11, 294n15,n17,n18, 310n20 Felsenthal, Edward, 267 financial crisis 2008–09, 13, 84–85, 130–31, 205–06, 310n20; subprime mortgage, 293n11 financial incentives and penalties: in forestry, 99; to fossil fuels, 106; in full-cost accounts – GPI, 29–30, 36–37,

45, 79, 89–93, 153; in GDP, 11, 36; and monetization, 102; in new economic paradigm, 280–82; through payments for ecosystem services, 91, 281, 313n41; in transportation, 125–27. See also taxes fisheries, 19, 41, 56, 58, 91 Fitoussi, Jean-Paul, 116–17. See also Stiglitz foreign aid, 209–10, 248–50 forests, 98–101, 107–9, 314n7, 316n22; data lack, 14; deforestation, 24–25, 50, 87, 147, 302n11; government with industry, 259; in GDP, 15, 50; value in Bhutan, 164, 183, 334n14, for environment, 14–15; statistics, 24–25 fossil fuels: subsidies to, 106, 244, 281. See also air pollution; climate change; greenhouse gas emissions; transportation full-cost accounting, 6, 29–30, 44–45, 88–93, 242; in crime, 67–70; expanded capital model in, 29–37, 99, 107, 115, 139–40, 278–80, 343n2; in GHG emissions, 104–6; in health, 118–121, methodological challenges, 101–12; in transportation, 123–27; in unpaid work, 60–67; in waste management, 121–23, 322n44. See also accounting funding: by Alerce Trust, 230, 288; finances and, 46, 59, 136; for GPI, 41–42, 58–59, 74–75, 94–96; for Rethinking Development Conference, 332n20; for SJI, 224 GDP. See gross domestic product gender discrimination, 63–67, 69, 74, 305n10, 306n15 Genuine Progress Index (GPI): audiences, 97–98; core principles, 47–54, 161, 206, 283–84; in crime, 67–70; domains and components, 55–58, 58; indicators and accounts, 34–38, 56; methodology, 42–45, 60–62, 100–12, 299n23, 310n16; in New Zealand, 142–45, 149–54, 327n12;

352INDEX

Nova Scotia policy applications, 118–23, 132–34; NS policy manual, 113, 128, 318n2; in Nova Scotia politics, 61–62, 75–78, 94–96, 128–32, 261, 314n2; policy uses, 72, 75–93, 127, 271–72, 276; public relations, 97, 100, 264; GPI youth, 171, 289. See also communities: community GPI; full-cost accounting; and specific topics Genuine Progress Indicator (U.S.), 6, 32, 42–45, 116; in New Zealand, 151–52 Georgescu-Roege, Nicholas, 27 GHG emissions. See greenhouse gas emissions Gini coefficient, 319n10 Giovannini, Enrico, 242–43, 252–53 Global Footprint Network, 52, 83 globalization, impact, 278; on Bhutan, 159–60, 181, 236–37, 248–50; and cheap labor, 50–51, 86–87, 272–73; on communities, 136, 233–34; in GNH education, 204–5 GNH. See Gross National Happiness GNH Centre, 217–20 Good News for a Change (Suzuki/Dressel), 134–35 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 277 government: adoption of new measures, 6–7, 33, 79–81, 264–66; agriculture and, 82, 86–87, 90–91, 213–17; Bhutan accounting in, 182–85; Bhutan constitutional democracy, 162, 176, 186–87, 259; Bhutan development policy, 221–22; Bhutan submission to Rio+20, 340n2; Bhutan and WTO, 181; bureaucracy, 77–78, 96, 197–98, 207–9, 213–17, 249–59, 265; central banks, 11; citizen initiative, 224; commissions from, 71, 74–75, 94–95, 120; education and, 196–202, 207–9; European models, 66, 76; on forest policy, 259, 314n5; fossil fuel subsidies, 106; GDP and, 10–15; GNH screening tool in, 180–81, 221; in health policy 118–21; at local level, 32, 73–74, 80, 132–36, 150–54; new economic paradigm

and, 238–46; in New Zealand, 137–42, 148–54; nonprofits compared to, 154; in Nova Scotia, 61–62, 128–30; Nova Scotia on work sharing, 75–78; precautionary principle in, 49; political will in, 137; polluter pay principle in, 72; silos in, 40, 81, 96; in transport policy, 124–27; in waste management, 121–23. See also policy; politics; and specific topics GPI. See Genuine Progress Index graduation rates, 191–93 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, viii–x; Bhutan and, 237, 278; climate change and, 25, 104–6, 279, 282, 296n6; from farming, 88, 90, 312n29; global context, 51; GPI component, 58; GDP and, 22; in indicators and accounts, 36; infrastructure of, 126; in new economic paradigm, 280; precautionary principle and, 49; politics of, 261; thermal inertia, 296n6, in transportation, 74, 124–26, 323n48, valuation methods, 104–6, 109, 111; waste management and, 122–23, 322n44; and happiness reports, 174–75. See also climate change; fossil fuels Greenland ice sheet, 24, 295n4,n5 Greenpeace, 340n12 Green Revolution, India, 213–14, 234, 258 Greenspan, Alan, 294n18, 310n20 greenwashing, 260–61 gross domestic product (GDP), 9–20; account vs indicator, 34, 37, 131, 182; in agriculture, 85–86; in Bhutan, 157–58; capitalism and, 294n12; crime and, 69; definition, 9–11; externalities and, 28, 101; green GDP, 31–32, 116–17; GHG emissions in, 22, 49–50, 105–6; GNH accounts compared to, 182, 185; GNP and, 10, 15, 159, 161, 189, 331n9; gross vs net accounting, 17–19, 44; growth and, 10, 12–15, 130, 272; “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?,” 4; illness costs in, 31, 118–19; inequality and, 3, 17, 52–53; Kuznets and, 13, 65, 69, 293n7;

INDEX353

mainstream critiques of, 17, 114–16, 293n7; misuse of, 11–13, 16–17; objectivity in, 11–15; omissions from, 16–17; resource depletion in, 15–16, 50; unpaid work and, 60, 64–65 Gross National Happiness (GNH): accounting for, 182–85; challenges and misunderstandings of, 172–78; ecology in, 163–65, 173, 201; educating for, 188–90, 198–210, 228–230; globalization and, 236–37; GNH Centre, 217–20; history of, 159–60, 189–90; measuring, 178–85; organic agriculture and, 212–13; philosophy of, 159–69, 188–90, 220–22; in policy, 164, 175–76, 180–81, 220–23, 333n8; politics and, 248–60, 262–63; SJI and, 223–35, 264 Halstead, Ted, 4 Hansen, James, 343n14 Happy Planet Index, 98, 242 Harari, Yuval Noah, vii Hawken, Paul, 135, 267, 281–82 Hayden, Anders, 75 Hayward, Karen, 191, 288 health, population: in Bhutan, 179–80, 226, 231; chronic disease cost, 119; commissions and funding for, 74, 94–95, 120–1; data, 30–31; dying and, 179–80; in education, 194, 204–5; food and, 82, 88, 120–21, 194; GPI component, 58; among Maori, 147; obesity and, 50, 88, 119–21, 231, 300n28; physical activity and, 74, 121, 150, 231; policy, economics and, 45, 50, 118–21, 133; poverty, inequality and, 53, 121, 303n22,n23, 304n24,n25; tobacco and, 31, 37, 40, 50, 89–90, 120, 133 Hegemony of Growth, The (Schmelzer), 14 Henderson, Hazel, 4 Hoekstra, Rutger, 265 Honduras, 91 Hong Kong (China), 2, 127 household work. See unpaid work

human capital, 185, 245, 343n2 Hurricane Katrina, 316n21 hydropower in Bhutan, 158, 221–22 Iceland, 269–70 IEA. See International Energy Agency “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?” (Cobb, C./Halstead/Rowe), 4 IMF. See International Monetary Fund income: debt and, 18, 84; farming and, 85–86, 88–89; gender and, 65–66, 306n15; inequality of, 53, 116, 303n22, 304n25; national, 293n7; resource depletion and, 52. See also equity Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), 32, 40 India, 2, 237–38; agriculture in, 226–27, 258; Bhutan and, 160, 163, 177–78, 249, 254–55, 257, 259; pollution in, 117, 125, 271 Indigenous culture: conservation and 145–47, 164; knowledge, 165, 196, 199–200; language, 143–44, 229, 326n11; Maori, 142–48, 327n12 infrastructure deficit, 16 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 49, 295n5, 297n14, 302n8–10, 317n28 International Energy Agency (IEA), ix, 126 International Expert Working Group for new economic paradigm, 246–54, 257, 269, 282 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 18, 238–39, 248, 294n19, 297n13, 316n17 IPCC. See Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Irving Company, 260 ISEW. See Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare Jakobsdóttir, Katrín, 270 Jumsai, Art-ong, 209–10 Kappel, James, 118 Kennedy, Robert, 17

354INDEX

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 51 Kissinger, Henry, vii Klein, Naomi, 274 KPMG, 100 Krugman, Paul, 268 Kubiszewski, Ida, 283, 300n33, 334n14–16, 344n4 Kuznets, Simon, 13, 65, 69, 293n7 Laurance, William, 24 Layard, Richard, 240 leisure / free time, 58, 65–66, 76–77, 309n21 LePenies, Philipp, 11 Life in the UK report, 115 Limits to Growth report, 297n14 literacy. See education local economies, 88–89 Local Government Act NZ, 141, 148–49, 329n32 lockdowns, viii–x Lyons, Oren, 146 Mahbubani, Kishore, vii manufactured capital. See built capital Maori people, 140, 142–48, 164, 327n12 marketing the GPI, 95–98, 100, 264 Marx, Karl, 262, 275, 341n4 materialism, 46, 161, 188,201, 240 Mead, Margaret, 2–3 Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW), 31–32 Measuring America (Yarrow), 13–14 Measuring National Well-Being program, 115 Messinger, Hans, 42–44, 61, 97, 151, 288, 301n2 MEW. See Measure of Economic Welfare migration, rural-urban in Bhutan, 165–66, 207, 231–32, 331n14, 339n16 Miller, John, 200 mining, 221, 338n10 Mismeasuring Our Lives (book), 116 monetization, 35–36, 101–109 Monsanto, 213–14, 216–17

Moore, Barrington, Jr., 3 Morales, Eva, 246 Murdoch, Paul, 217–18 Naidoo, Kumi, 341n12 natural capital, 29–30, 37, 99, 107, 115, 343n2; and discounting, 110–11; GDP and, 15–16, 279; in GNH, 182–85; GPI domain, 58; human dependence on, 48, 140; in new economic paradigm, 240, 278, 280; in Statistics Canada, 299n25; in UN, 245, 115; in World Bank, 115, 318n9. See also natural resources natural resources: Atlantic fisheries, 41, 91; and COVID-19, viii–x; depletion by rich, 39, 52; in ecological economics, footprint, resource accounting, 27–30, 39, 140, 299n24,n25, 316n21; efficient use of, 278, 281; financial incentives for conservation, 29–30, 36–37, 89–93, 99, 280–82; gradual collapse of, 87–88; in green GDP, 117; GDP and, 15–19; in GNH, 164; indigenous values and, 146–47; and monetization, 102; in new economic paradigm, 240–42, 247, 275, 278–81; overshoot of, 83–84; and sufficiency economy, 167; and sustainability, 47–50; valuation of, 107–9; work sharing and, 75. See also natural capital; forests; soil quality; wetlands NDP. See New Democratic Party NEF. See New Economics Foundation Nepalese refugees (Lhotshampa), 176–78 Netherlands, 66, 76, 114, 170, 299n24 New Democratic Party (NDP), 129–30 new economic paradigm, vii–x, 7–8, 26, 236–58, 276–85; accounting in, 28, 38, 93, 185; core principles of, 47–54; ecological sustainability, 278, 280; efficient resource use, 278, 281; fair distribution, 278, 280–81; holistic view, 28; progress measures in, 4–5, 20, 26, 33, 78; resistance to, 132, 248–50; 257–63

INDEX355

New Economics Foundation (NEF), 98 New Zealand, 138–56; culture of, 143–44, 147, 154–55, 327n12; Local Government Act in, 141, 148–49; Maori people in, 140, 142–47; political change in, 148, 155; progress measures in, 115, 137–42, 150–56; Wellbeing Budget, 154–56, 269; Wellington Regional Council in, 149–54; re work hours, 309n8 Nordhaus, William, 31–32 Norway, 66, 307n21 Nova Scotia, ACSI failure; commissioned work in, 74–75, 95–96; community GPI in, 72–74, 132–34; crime costs in, 67–70; farming in, 85–88; as fertile ground, 40–42; forests in, 98–100, 107–9, 259–60, 314n5; GPI development in, 41–42, 55–59, 71, 116, 137, 190; GHG emissions in, 104–5; health costs in, 118–21; household work in, 63; as national pilot, 61; nutrition in, 120–21; politics in, 86–87, 118–23, 127–30, 137, 314n5; tobacco in, 40, 89, 120, 133; transport in, 123–27; voluntary work in, 60–62; waste in, 121–23, 322n45; work sharing initiative in, 75–78, 257–58 nutrition, 53, 63, 88, 228; in education, 119–21, 194,196, 205, 226, Obama, Barack, 105 obesity, 50. 88, 119–21, 231, 300n28 OECD. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development opportunity cost, 104 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 14, 19, 114; educational competencies, 337n13; PISA scores, 191–2, 335n4,n6; and work hours, 76, 307n21, 309n6 Orr, David, 200 Packard, Aaron, 149, 152, 327n12, 329n32 Pannozzo, Linda, 129, 191, 288 Patz, Jonathan, 240

Pennock, Mike, 180–81 pharmaceutical industry, 118–19 Pigou, Cecil, 64 PISA. See Programme for International Student Assessment plastics, 225–26, 229, 341n2 Plato, 5 Poetschke, Leonard, 72 policy, 78–93; in Bhutan, 169, 174, 181, 220–22; for climate change, 22, 36, 49, 92, 105–6, 281–82; for communities, 72, 132–6, 222–24, 232–35, 264, 270–71, 278; for crime prevention, 69–70; on discounting, 109–12; economic roots of, 130–31, 272–75; for equity, 51–54, 65–67, 280–81; for farming, 90–91, 211–17, 313n39; for fisheries, 91; for forests, 29, 99, 109, 314n5; full-cost accounting for, 29–30, 36–38, 45, 88–93; for gender equity, 65–67; GPI in Nova Scotia, 128–32, 314n2; GPI policy manual, 113, 128, 318n2; GPI utility for, 271–72; GDPgrowth on, 11–16, 20; GNH governance pillar, 168; GNH screening tool, 180–81, 221–22; for health, 50, 95, 118–21; for holistic, 40, 75, 81–83, 96, 143; limits of evidence on, 92, 264–68; measurement and, 21–22, 116–17, 153; for new economic paradigm, 280–82; in New Zealand, 141, 148–49, 153–56; for policymakers and change agents, 6–7, 43–44, 97–98, 263–72; precautionary principle and, 48–49; to prevent crises, 83–84, 87–88; for smoking prevention, 37, 40, 89–90, 120, 133; for transport, 125–27; for waste management, 121–23; work sharing and, 75–78. See also evidence, for policy; politics; government; and specific topics politics, 113–37, 257–72; in Bhutan, 186–89, 250–59; bureaucratic role in, 77–78, 96, 197–98, 207–9, 213–17, 249–59, 265; capitalism and, 272–75; climate change and, 22, 92, 105–6, 261, 267–9;

356INDEX

communities and, 72, 132–6, 222–24, 232–35, 264, 270–71, 278; consensus values in, 57, 79–81; cooptation and, 260–62; COVID-19 and, vii–x; economic influence on, 3, 5, 130–31, 259–60, 272–75; in education, 188–89, 197, 207–09; employment, work sharing and, 75–78, 170; equity and, 52–54, 272–73, 303n17; farming and, 86–87, 214–17, 232–34; foreign aid and 209–12, 248–50; forests and, 99–100, 260, 314n5; funding and, 75, 94–96; GPI and, 79–81, 128–32, 266; green GDP and, 117; greenwashing and, 260–61, 341n2; GNH and, 220–22, 258–59; growth, GDP and, 10–15, 20; of health care, 118–21; knowledge of, 193–4; new economic paradigm and, 248–56, 260–63; in New Zealand, 138, 145, 148–49, 155; political will, 128, 136–37, 278–80, 282–83. See also policy; government; and separate topics pollution: accounting for, 27–28, 35, 72, 93, 106, 281; air, viii–ix, 24, 116, 119, 271; in China, viii, 125, 324n53; clean water, viii, 29, 74, 298n22; in India, 117, 125, 271, 324n52from plastics, 225–26, 229, 341n2; from transportation, 125, 127; in United States, ix, 125 poverty: among elderly, 282; and cheap labor, 50–51, 86–87, 272–73; children and, 66, 306n17; consumption and, 39, 52, 261; and health, 53, 303n22,23, 304n24,n25; in politics, 54, 57; technology transfer and, 281 Power of a Single Number, The (LePenies), 11 PPP. See purchasing power parity precautionary principle, 47–49 price elasticity of demand, 90 productivity: accounting for losses in, 35, 67, 102–3; in soil, 35, 313n39; VSL and, 67, 102–3; work sharing and, 76–77 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 191–2, 335n4,n6

progress, 257–75; alliances for 264–70; bureaucratic impediments to, 77–78, 96, 197–98, 207–9, 213–17, 249–59, 265; capitalism and, 272–75; citizen role in, 224; at community level, 72–74, 132–6, 222–24, 232–35, 264, 270–71, 278; co-optation of, 260–62; education as key to, 191–202, 228–30, 271; future directions towards, 263–72; global dimensions of, 50–51, 136, 233–34, 237, 278; towards better health, 118–21; indicators and accounts, 34–37, 56, 131, 182; in international measures, 114–17; Kuznets on, 13, 71, 293n7; less vs more as, 69–70, 80; local models for, 134–36, 231–33, 270–71; markers of genuine, 5–6, 34, 57, 80–81, 161, 279–81; misuse of GDP for, 11–13, 17, 22–23, 241; towards GNH, 172–81, 220–22, 230–31, 259; towards new economy, 54, 241, 244–45, 276–85; normative values and, 12–14, 17, 22–23, 26, 57, 80, 109–12, 166; politics and, 113–37, 190; basic principles of, 47–54, 161–68, 189; resources for, 275, 277–78, 282; towards better transport, 123–27; in waste management, 121–23. See also financial incentives and penalties; Genuine Progress Index; and other specific topics public health. See health, population public relations for GPI, 97, 100, 264 purchasing power parity (PPP), 183, 334n13 quality of life: communities and, 32, 72–73, 223; consensus in progress measures, 34, 57, 80–81; and equity, 52; and GDP, 15, 17–18, 69, 116; in New Zealand cities, 141, 148–49, 153; in Nova Scotia, 41; time use and, 30; voluntary work and, 60; work-life balance and, 66, 77. See also specific topics Ray, Satyajit, 178 recessions. See financial crisis 2008–09

INDEX357

recycling, 121–23, 261, 322n45, 341n2 Redefining Progress, 44 Rees, William, 30, 253, 274–75, 276–77 refugees, 25, 177–78, 279, 297n13 renewable energy: discounting and, 110; expertise and models in, 170, 275, 278, 332n21; full-cost accounting and, 6; investment in, 45, 92, 105, 244, 280–81; in recovery from COVID-19, xi–xii, 13; in wind, 37, 301n39 replacement-cost analysis, 103–4 Replacing GDP by 2030 (Hoekstra), 265 research and research methods: on Bhutan ecosystem values, 183–84; on crime costs, 67–68; on climate trends, 23–24; on disease prevention, 119–120; on driving costs, 124; on education, 190–200; for expert audience, 97–100; on farm viability, 85–86; on financial security, 84; on full-cost accounting methods, 101–12, 299n23; funding and commissions for, 59, 74, 94–96, 120–21; in GNH survey, 179; life-cycle approach, 206; natural capital accounting, 182; in New Zealand, 139–41; on unemployment and work sharing, 76–77; on unpaid work, 60, 63; on waste management, 122–23; World Climate Research Programme, 24 “Rethinking Development” conference, 135, 170–71, 332n20,n21 Rio + 20 Summit, 238–39, 245–46, 248–49, 255–56, 340n2,n11,n12 Rio Declaration, 49 Robinson, Mary, 246 Rowe, Jonathan, 4 Roy, Bunker, 170–71 Sachs, Jeffrey, 242 Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative (SJI), 223–35, 256, 264 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 116, 252–53 Schmelzer, Matthias, 14 Schumacher, E. F., 232

Scotland, 269–70 sea level rise, x, 19, 23–24, 295n5 SEEA. See System for Environmental and Economic Accounts Seligman, Martin, 241 Sen, Amartya, 116–17. See also Stiglitz Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet (Hayden), 75 Sha Zukang, 246 Shiva, Vandana, 215–17, 225–27, 242 shorter work time. See work sharing Sikkim, 177–78, 233–34 single mothers, 64–66, 69, 306n16,n17, 307n18,n19 SJI. See Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative Slovenia, 269 social capital: in agriculture, 89; in Bhutan, 165–66, 175–76, 179, 182, 184–85, 224; definition, 343n2; GPI domain, 58; in new economic paradigm, 278; in New Zealand, 140–41, 143–44, 146, 326n6; survey on, 30. See also communities soil quality: economic valuation, 37 101; erosion and, 50, 110; in GNH, 212; topsoil composition, 317n26 South Africa, 277, 282 species extinction, 24, 48, 145–46, 267, 296n9 statistics: averages conceal inequities, 52–53; footprint – demand and supply, 30; environmental in UN, Canada, 115, 299n25; in GDP, 10–15; gross vs net, 18, 85–86; improvements in, 30–31, indicators and accounts, 34–38, 56; sample size, 72–74, 179, 308n1; single aggregate limitations, 43–44, 117, 197, 325n67; for unpaid work, 60–61, 64–65; for VSL, 102–3, 111–12. See also data; evidence; and specific topics Stern, Nicholas, viii, 105–6, 287 Stiglitz, Joseph, 116–17, 152, 185, 240, 242, 252 stimulus packages, 13, 14, 18, 131, 293n11 Sturgeon, Nicola, 269–70 Sufficiency Economy, 167, 243

358INDEX

Surveys: Canadian Knowledge Survey proposal, 194, 196–97; on civic literacy, 193; on climate change, 193, 336n9; at community level, 42, 72–74, 136, 270, 300n34; GNH survey, 137, 178–80; on happiness, 173–74; on health, 30, 300n28; on quality of life in cities, 153; on social capital, 30; on time use, 30, 60; on victimization, 67; on willingness to pay, 103; on work hours, 76 sustainability: Brundtland Commission, 47, 302n3; capitalism and, 272–75, 279–80; conservation and, 145–47; cooptation of, 260–62; as core GPI principle, 47–49; discounting and, 109–12; in education, 199–200; equity and, 39, 52; fisheries and, 41, 91; forests and, 98–99; global measures of, 115–17, 139–40, 318n6; in GNH, 162–68; Green Revolution and, 213–14, 226–27, 234; in new economic paradigm, 278–80; longterm, global view for, 50–51; urgency of, 23–25, 46, 265, 273, 278–79; in waste management, 121–23, 225; work sharing and, 75. See also agriculture; climate change; ecological footprint; ecology; ecosystem services; environment; forests; greenhouse gas emissions; Thunberg, Greta; natural capital; natural resources; and other specific topics Sustainable Seattle, 32, 40, 270, 300n34 suzerainty, 341n16 Suzuki, David, 134–35 Sweden, 66, 269, 309n8 System for Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA), 115 Tanzania, 91 taxes: for environmental protection, 29–30, 47, 89, 244, 280–81; for equity, 244; on foods, 90; and GDP, 11, 36–37, 90; on GHG emissions, 37, 92, 106, 126, 280–81; polluter pay principle, 72, 93;

tax shifting, 126; on tobacco, 37, 40, 89–90, 312n33; for transportation, 125; willingness to pay and, 103 technology: appropriate technology, 226–27, 237; technology transfer, 244, 281 Te Wānanga o Raukawa, 144 Thailand, 138, 167, 209–10, 243 Thimphu, 157–58, 166, 175–76, 230–31, 238, 252 Thinley, Jigmi Y.: on education, 188–89, 198, 200–2; on GNH accounts, 185; on GNH Centre, 189–90, 217–18, 220; on GNH vision 162, 165–66, 187–90, 222; on new economic paradigm, 235–39, 241–42, 245–47, 250, 253–55; on organic agriculture, 211–213; politics and, 222, 253–55, 258–59; at Rio + 20, 245–46, 340n11; at SJI, 225 This Changes Everything (Klein), 274 Tho, Havinh, 219 Thunberg, Greta, 261, 267–69, 283–84, 342n8 tobacco: costs of, 97, 120; and health, 31, 50, 90; smoking prevention, 40, 120, 133; taxes on, 37, 40, 89–90, 312n33 Tobgay, Tshering, 166 Tobin, James, 31–32 Toward a Steady-State Economy (Daly), 27 transportation, 6, 58, 82–83, 92, 123–27, 299n23, 314n46 Trump, Donald, 10, 105 Trungpa Rinpoche, Chogyam, 46, 289 Turpin, Bill, 40–41 UK. See United Kingdom UN. See United Nations UNESCO. See United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Ungurain, Merv, 40 UNICEF, 209–10 United Kingdom (UK), 14, 111, 115, 319n4 United Nations (UN): Ban Ki-Moon, 7–8, 26, 240, 245; on Bhutan development, 169; Bhutan New Economic Paradigm

INDEX359

initiative, 7–8, 175, 236–45, 249–50, 254–56, 262–63, 277–78; Brundtland Commission, 47, 302n3; Champion of the Earth award, 164; ; DESD, 200; environmental accounting, 115; Greta at, 267–68, 342n8; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 49, 295n5, 297n14, 302n8–10, 317n28; Rio + 20 Summit, 238–39, 245–46, 248–49, 255–56, 340n2,n11,n12; Rio Declaration, 49; UNESCO, 195–96; UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 25, 297n13; UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 49, 302n6; UNICEF, 209–210; World Happiness Report at, 173, 260 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 195–96 United States (U.S.): agriculture in, 82, 87, 91, 309n15; climate change attitudes in, 336n9; ecological footprint in, 39; Department of Education in, 193; financial crisis in, 14, 17–18, 294n18, 310n20; fires in, x, 279; forest loss in, 25; fossil fuel subsidies in, 106; GDP in, 10–11, 15; Genuine Progress Indicator, 32, 42–45; GHG emissions, 105, 125; Greta to, 268; growth imperative in, 10, 13–14, 17, 105; income loss in, 17; obesity costs in, 119; pollution in, ix; preventive care in, 119; prisons in, 70; renewable energy jobs in, 105; single mother poverty in, 66; vehicle sales in, 92, 125; VSL in, 103; work hours in, 66 unpaid work: data infrequency of, 14; gender discrimination and, 63–67, 69, 74, 305n10, 306n15,n16; in GPI, 44, 56, 58; GDP and, 16; 65; household work, 63–67; methods, 60, 104; in New Zealand, 140; policy implications, 63–67, 69, 74–75, 305n8; voluntary work, 35–36, 60–62, 184; Marilyn Waring on, 63, 288

Ura, Dasho Karma, 179–80 U.S. See United States value of a statistical life (VSL), 102–3, 111 Velvet Revolution, 277 vested interests, 129–31, 197, 248–50, 259–61, 272–75 Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 6 voluntary work. See unpaid work VSL. See value of a statistical life Wackernagel, Mathis, 5, 30, 242, 253 Wade, Robert, 12 Wangchuck, Dorji Wangmo, Queen, 160–61 Wangchuck, Jigme Khesar Namgyel, Fifth King, 187, 246, 250, 253 Wangchuck, Jigme Singye, Fourth King, 158–61, 168, 186–89, 236, 331n14 Waring, Marilyn, 4, 63–64, 288, 344n1 Waste: ecosystems and, 27–28, 47–48, 140; 27–28, 73, 140, 229, 261; education about, 229; management, 56, 58, 61, 97–98, 121–23, 282, 322n45; recycling, 121–23, 261, 322n45, 341n2; in Statistics Canada accounts, 295n25; in Thimphu, 230–31; toxic wastes, viii, 73, 231, 261; zero waste initiatives in SJI, 225–26, 230, 232 water filtration, watershed protection, 29, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 298n22 water pollution, viii, 298n22 well-being: in Bhutan-GNH, 159–63, 178–79; budget, 155, 269, 343n13; CIW, 128, 178, 191, 265; CIW flaws, 193–94, 197–98, 325n67; in communities, 32, 72, 134, 223–24; constituents of, 26, 30, 55–57, 80–81; ecosystem services and, 183, 278, 280; education and, 194, 196; equity and, 53–54; of future generations, 27, 50, 109–10, 146; GDP misused for, 12–13, 15–20, 25–26, 43, 48, 117, 131; in GPI, 79, 81, 152; household work and, 63; measurement of, 174, 301n36; in new economic paradigm, 33–34, 239–40,

3 6 0 IND E X

242, 247, 280–81; in New Zealand, 139–41, 152–53, 155, 269; OECD, EU, UK measures, 114–15, 319n14; voluntary work and, 60. See also Gross National Happiness; quality of life Wellbeing Economy Alliance, 269–70 Wellington Regional Council, 149–54 wetlands, 101, 107, 316n21 WHO. See World Health Organization “Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics,” 4 willingness to pay (WTP), 103 women, 63–67, 69, 74, 305n10, 306n15, 344n1 work sharing, 75–78, 170 World Bank: beyond GDP, 19, 115; Bretton Woods and, 19, 238–39, 248–49; Herman

Daly, 27, 287; final consumption expenditures, 293n3; India pollution costs, 117; inequality measures, 52, 115, 303n17, 319n10; Nicholas Stern, x, 107, 287; watershed values, 29, 298n22 World Climate Research Programme, 24 World Happiness Report, 173–75, 260 World Health Organization (WHO): particulate emissions, 125; pollution deaths, 24; poverty and health, 53; tobacco tax and health, 90 World Trade Organization (WTO), 169, 181 WTO. See World Trade Organization Yarrow, Andrew, 13–14 youth, 171, 267–69, 283–84