This new book is a report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. That may sound dry but, in the language of the Fisher College of Business, "you can't manage what you can't measure--and if you measure the wrong things, you'll manage the wrong things."
Don't let Sarkozy's influence on the genesis of the commission to put you off. This book is a very important attempt to focus attention on the disrupted link between measures of economic well-being and actual well-being of societies and takes us toward new measures that make sense. It's not pretentious. They avoid 13 letter words, claims to have all the answers, and attempts to bash anyone. You don't have to be an economist or even college educated to understand it.
The Commission finds that we're getting it wrong and talking past each other because of weaknesses in the way we measure economic performance and social and individual well-being. They present page after page of examples showing that weaknesses in the way we measure things affects the way that we think and our conversations about world problems today.
The commission includes an all-star cast of leading economists and economic psychologists, including Nobel Prize winners and other notables such as Kahneman (Princeton) and Putnam (Harvard). They discuss many viewpoints and concepts, such as sustainability, without any of the psychobabble, anti-business, or social pretentiousness of the "socks and sandals brigade".
If everyone understood the issues raised in this book, we'd be having conversations about fixing things that were much more efficient and effective.
From Amazon.com
Product Description ([ame="http://www.amazon.com/Mismeasuring-Our-Lives-Why-Doesnt/dp/1595585192"]link[/ame])
In February of 2008, amid the looming global financial crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France asked Nobel Prize?winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with the distinguished French economist Jean Paul Fitoussi, to establish a commission of leading economists to study whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?the most widely used measure of economic activity?is a reliable indicator of economic and social progress. The Commission was given the further task of laying out an agenda for developing better measures.
Mismeasuring Our Lives is the result of this major intellectual effort, one with pressing relevance for anyone engaged in assessing how and whether our economy is serving the needs of our society. The authors offer a sweeping assessment of the limits of GDP as a measurement of the well-being of societies?considering, for example, how GDP overlooks economic inequality (with the result that most people can be worse off even though average income is increasing); and does not factor environmental impacts into economic decisions.
In place of GDP,
Mismeasuring Our Lives introduces a bold new array of concepts, from sustainable measures of economic welfare, to measures of savings and wealth, to a ?green GDP.? At a time when policymakers worldwide are grappling with unprecedented global financial and environmental issues, here is an essential guide to measuring the things that matter.
About the Author
Joseph Stiglitz is a professor of Economics at Columbia University and the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal and a Nobel Prize. He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. His books include
Globalization and Its Discontents,
The Three Trillion Dollar War, and
Making Globalization Work. He lives in New York City.
Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. The author of numerous books, including
Identity and Violence,
Rationality and Freedom, and
Development as Freedom, he is also the recipient of a Nobel Prize in Economics. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jean Paul Fitoussi is a professor of economics at Sciences-po and the president of OFCE (Sciences-po Center for Economic Research, Paris). He lives in Paris.
Product Details
- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: New Press, The (May 18, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1595585192
- ISBN-13: 978-1595585196
