I mentioned a brand new report on the way forward for GDP as a measure of prosperity on Occasions Radio at 11.20 final night time.

The report is great. The Oxfam web site notes in its introduction to the report:

A staggering sixty-five per cent of ladies’s working hours are unpaid each week and excluded from official measures of financial exercise, an Oxfam report has discovered. Radical Pathways Past GDP highlights how unpaid care – which accounts for forty-five per cent of all adults’ working hours every week globally – is excluded from gross home product (GDP) calculations.

The dialogue paper seems at how the over-reliance on GDP warps governments’ priorities. Girls perform nearly all of unpaid care – almost 90 billion hours every week.

There’s a rising consensus amongst policymakers and establishments that GDP is now not match for objective as the first indicator of financial and social progress. By excluding many elements that contribute to the general well being of the financial system and wider society, the metric steers policymakers in direction of priorities which can be fuelling inequality, gender and racial injustice and local weather breakdown. The report argues that transformative options to GDP are urgently required and that narrowly outlined development ought to by no means be a main goal or finish purpose.

The report considers lots of the weaknesses of GDP and represents an actual try to spice up the narrative round this challenge. I could not agree with it on each element, however I welcome it.

I used to be in a position to quote Robert Kennedy in what I stated final night time. He stated in 1968, shortly earlier than he was assassinated:

The gross nationwide product doesn’t permit for the well being of our kids, the standard of their training or the enjoyment of their play. It doesn’t embrace the fantastic thing about our poetry or the power of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officers. It measures neither our wit nor our braveness, neither our knowledge nor our studying, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our nation, it measures all the things in brief, besides that which makes life worthwhile.

He was proper.