Beyond GDP: Bold new direction, or a few more statistics?

The Beyond GDP ‘movement’ has come a long way in the last seven years. Whereas it used to be a fringe affair, dominated by academics and eager NGOs, it is now a slick machine, politically hooked-in and with champions amongst major supranational organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the European Union,  and many countries, from Bhutan to Britain. It is now clear that movement is going somewhere, that changes are being made to what we measure, and to the rhetoric around progress.

But the big question is whether this new rhetoric will lead to actual changes in the decisions politicians make. As we have argued in our recent report Measuring our Progress, for new indicators to be political they need to meet criteria, including being politically resonant and easy to understand. At the recent Latin American Conference on measuring well-being and fostering progress, held in Mexico this month, I got the sense that these criteria are not understood in the same way by everyone in the movement.

The Conference did an excellent job of bringing together Chief Statisticians from all the major Latin American countries, and demonstrated their recognition that measuring well-being, in some way, is something that the countries in the region are interested in.

But too much was made of Latin American national statistics offices who are supposedly already measuring well-being and progress differently, when in fact all they are doing is repackaging old statistics, or adding a few more to their general pile of numbers. These endeavours, whilst they may be worthwhile, are not going to move our understanding of progress in a bold new direction, as all the hype might suggest.  Worse still, there may be a risk that such initiatives might defuse the energy in the movement.  To really measure progress differently:

• We need a framework for measuring progress with structure and hierarchy.  It needs to be clear what are the goals (which we need to maximise), what are our resources (they use of which must be minimised), and what are the processes and systems which allow our goals to be met with our resources (which need to be made more efficient). None of the approaches presented at the conference (apart from ours) had any such framework.
• Within this, the goal of increasing well-being needs to be understood as something which is inherently about the human, and not a mish-mash of things which academics and politicians think might be important. Environmental resource use also needs to be at the heart of measuring progress. There was not one presentation that focussed on measuring environmental impact during the conference.
• We need to recognise the economy as a means to an end, and not an end in itself.  There was much talk during the conference that GDP needs to be supplemented, not replaced.  Of course we agree that GDP should not disappear, but it does need to be put in its place, and that place is as an intermediary – measuring one of many systems that determine well-being.
• Measuring progress needs to be done in a simple and easy to understand way.  We need headline indicators, and not oodles of statistics.

Why is this not happening?  In some contexts, notably our own country the UK, at the European level, and in Ecuador, there is still hope for something that really redefines progress in this way. But, sadly, in others, there is a risk that the institutionalisation of the process, and the attempts to bring statistics offices on board, has lead to substantial watering down. Ultimately, it should not be surprising that institutions should be cautious about measuring progress differently.  Taken seriously, it means turning politics upside down.  Of course, some political figures may be keen to do this, but those that don’t want to may be acting in their own best interests by diffusing the beyond GDP process.

Perhaps there has also been a strategic error on the part of the movement.  Statistics offices have been targeted as the key agents who can make change in this area happen.  But, ultimately, most statistics offices have to do what their governments want.  They can measure a bunch of well-being statistics, but it won’t mean anything until governments decide that well-being is their goal.  In the UK, for example, Defra, the government department for the environment, had been measuring well-being on a small scale for three years, but it was not till David Cameron made a high-profile speech in November that well-being was seen as a big issue across Whitehall. The ONS has taken on the task of setting out to measure well-being with some conviction and quite some speed – this was only possible once a political direction had been set.

And speed is necessary.  The recent news that CO₂ emissions have increased at a faster rate than ever highlights that a new paradigm is necessary for us to get out of our planet-destroying growth addiction. Such a paradigm change can only happen if we understand progress differently. The Beyond GDP movement can play an important role in this, but it needs to stick to its visionary ideals, and not give in to bureaucracy and the status quo.