Steven Stoll, Orion Magazine - The inventor of GDP, the economist Simon Kuznets, never intended it as an indicator of progress or happiness. Kuznets sent a report to Congress in 1934 that included a new way of reporting on the state of the economy, but cautioned that “the welfare of a nation can . . . scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”
Yet advocates of economic growth seized Kuznets’s indicator and simply chose to ignore his apprehension. They reduce national welfare to national income, regardless of the social distribution or ecological effects of wealth. They look at history with the same foggy lens, missing the social relations behind the history of capitalism, as though everything preceding the Industrial Revolution was just a million-year recession. In their view, the problem with European feudalism was that it generated too little wealth, not that it was a social system built on violence. They see the steam engine as the invention that made possible the first explosive increase in worker productivity—rather than as a machine that created a poor and hostile working class in Britain and the United States. GDP soared, but the first industrial workers lived in sickness and starvation.
However, when we talk about national wealth, we tend to stress just the opposite—that it benefits everyone because a rising tide lifts all boats—when, in reality, as Robert Reich once quipped, it only lifts the yachts. Again, GDP obscures the truth. For example, divide our country’s GDP in 1790 (preindustrial) and 1890 (industrial) by the U.S. population at those times, and the increase per person appears remarkable. But these gains weren’t distributed equally. The apparent rise in individual income during that century also hides the immense poverty and environmental destruction that came as a consequence of growth. It tells us nothing of the violence between workers and employers for livable wages, an eight-hour workday, and basic factory safety. Affluence can be shared, or hoarded. Corporate profits do not create equitable living standards; only equitable public policy does that.
Consider the sale of a two-dollar t-shirt by a big-box store. The sale instantly becomes part of GDP, but there would have been no sale were it not for the undercompensated labor of the Cambodian woman who made the shirt. A Cambodian woman who, in one year, stitches and sews $195,000 worth of goods is paid $750. That calculates to a share of three-thousandths of every retail dollar. Meanwhile, many Cambodian workers aren’t paid enough to adequately feed their families.
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