There was an article in “The Conversation” this morning about the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, planning to release a statement called “The Measuring What Matters”. It’s a plan to track wellbeing using about 50 indicators of how Australians are doing. Chalmers said the traditional economic metrics – GDP, income, employment – didn’t tell the whole story. Other things also mattered.
No shit, Sherlock.
The article below is one I wrote over a decade ago. I went hunting for it this morning when I read The Conversation article because I remembered the Australian Bureau of Statistics proposing something similar back then and calling for submissions, and I remembered my submission being about there had to be a simpler way than 50 indicators.
I don’t know if it’s a case of me just being attuned, or if the idea that how we define and measure “wealth” is all wrong and a big part of our problem is finally hitting public consciousness, but I’ve been involved in a similar conversation lately on Mastodon, about economic growth and degrowth and donut economics.
But anyhow, here’s the original, decade old article. I reread it and think, it still stacks up. I’d love your thoughts.
Capturing the Good Life in Statistics
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has started a blog called “Measures of Australia’s Progress”. It’s a public consultation about what we could use, instead of or along with GDP, as a measure of “progress’. It asks “Is life in Australia getting better? How will we know if it is?”
I find this immensely encouraging, and I wonder why I hadn’t heard of it before? I knew about Bhutan’s “gross national happiness” indicator, which has been around in alternate circles for yonks. But it’s a clumsy, soft measure and I could never see mainstream politics taking it really seriously.
Of course one of the seductions of GDP is that it is used internationally, but the MAP site has a page with links to all the similar projects around the world, including UK and USA, and it says “There has been an explosion of interest in indicator projects over the last several years, both in Australia and around the world”.
That official statistical bureaus are looking for other ways of meauring wealth beyond how much stuff we buy and sell is, to me, really exciting. It’s really hard to argue that simple, green, frugal equals good when the measuring stick used to measure progress is how much wasteful overconsumption we’ve indulged in over the last year.
It’s like our whole society is in a giant hot dog eating competition and it’s called progress.
But wealth is a slippery beast and it’s not so simple to nail it down in a way that can be measured and compared, in a way that newspapers can grab onto and politicians can use. Marge Piercy has a poem called “The Perpetual Migration” that has a lovely part in it about wealth:
“Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow
Marge Piercy, “The Perpetual Migration”
of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night
and not too much Monday morning,
a chance to choose, a chance to grow,
the power to say no and yes, pretties
and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.”
It’s very beautiful and true, but I can just see the poor ABS statisticians trying to measure it. I’m all in favour of the ABS consultation, but when it comes to having my say, it’s tricky. How do you measure progress?
The Australian Bureau of Statistics project tries to solve it by a kind of complex of measures grouped under society, economy, and environment, with a whole heap of sub measures such as health, education, crime, social cohesion, productivity, biodiversity, atmosphere and so on, each with their own tick or wavy line or cross. They’re all measurable, but they don’t grab you. It’s like comparing a big box of apples with oranges. My eyes glaze over.
I’ve been trying to summon up the courage to have a say. The concept at the centre of it, I think, is that once everybody in a society has enough, has their basic needs met, producing and consuming more stuff takes us backwards, not forwards. It destroys common wealth like air and soil and water and wildlife and being able to lie on the beach on a sunny morning without a hole in the ozone layer overhead. It steals resources from future generations that they will need for “enough”. The only areas in which you can keep producing more and keep becoming wealthier is in art and knowledge and culture and science and care. And that’s the thing.
I think a society is progressing, is becoming wealthier when more of its citizens have the basics, when less is borrowed from future generations, and when more is given to future generations in the form of knowledge and culture and a thriving planet. That would give us three basic measures.
The basic needs themselves are not simple. A nation is wealthier when more of it’s citizens have enough, are above the poverty line, but we Australians are all wealthy by the standards of Somalians. A nation is wealthier when more of its citizens are healthy. A nation is wealthier when more of its citizens have access to education, at every life stage from early childhood to third age. A nation is wealthier when people do not need to hoard to feel safe but can rely on their community to rally to their aid, when it has a good and functional fire, police, ambulance, and emergency services, and community connections. It’s not simple, but we should be able to have a crack at coming up with a measure for whether we are going forwards or backwards at providing everyone with the basics.
Borrowing from future generations is a simpler measure. Are we using more or less non-renewable resources than last year. Less? Yay, that’s progress.
And thirdly, how much have we invested in art and knowledge and culture and science and caretaking. There will, of course, be huge debates about whether it is better to spend money on opera or street art, a cure for malaria or for coral bleaching, an internet protocol or a novel, surfing or soccer, dune care or koala rescue. But an overall dollar value will do for a measure of progress.
By these kind of measures, simple, green, frugal equals wealthy, and that feels like the truth to me. What do you think?
Hi Linda,
Have you read Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful or Greer’s Wealth of Nature? Both make the case that all human economies represent a subset of the natural economy, from which all our wealth comes. I wonder if that idea fits with your thoughts, because if we create value in the human economy, by drawing down irreplaceable natural capital, then in a sense we haven’t achieved anything. Yes, we might have unlocked that capital for human use, but we can only do so once (hence we deprive all other humans, including our descendents, from using that capital)\
I guess that line of thinking suggests that the best way to achieve progress is to manage nature so as to grow its capital — a very permie idea 😉 I guess the hard part is measuring natural capital in a way that’s comparable to human capital — sadly, we live in a society that says “if I can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist”
I read Woman on the Edge of time a few years back (by Marge Piercy) and loved it.
ps. wish our fijoas looked like yours!
Cheers, Angus
Hi Linda. Every time I read something of yours, it is generally on a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about myself but haven’t had the chutzpah to get it down in words. So, thank you for doing this. I thoroughly agree that indicators and such like are thoroughly unappealing and are unlikely to grab people. I’ve been thinking a lot about whether what Nate Hagens refers to as the “great simplification” is something we’ll plan for or whether it will simply happen to us all. The more I think and the more people I listen to, the more I am convinced that unless we have an alternative vision of the good life that is clear enough and appealing enough for us all to get behind, we are all in for a very rough ride indeed. I’ve been part of the climate movement here in my town though I’ve stepped back a bit of late. I do think it is an important mode of disrupting the comfortable status quo, but it doesn’t in and of itself offer a vision of the good life beyond the negatives of “no coal” and “no oil”, in itself a form of reductionism – and reductionist thinking is one way we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. This is why I liked 470 so much: it gave us a glimpse of a possible good life, albeit an emergent one, that we might all get behind. But I think it probably needs further iteration (not necessarily by you – but in general) and more detail, and a range of interpretation – a simple, ethical life will be more local, so by its very nature will look a bit different depending on where we are. So, I guess what I am saying is that describing what a good life looks like is probably the most important thing any of us could be doing in the age of the meta-crisis. Thanks again.
Hi Sara, you might be pleased to know you are in very good company with that view. I read something by Ursula Le Guin just this morning, where she says the most important work is done by people “who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.”