26)  The Dashboard Fix

The problem right now in the United States is that the stock market is doing better while people are doing worse.  The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) has been going up steadily for the last 5 decades, but the median income of an American hasn’t risen at all. 

See the Scientific American article “Measuring What Matters” (August 2020) by Joseph E. Stiglitz.  This article explains the root cause of the inequities in the U.S. and the world, and it is called the GDP.  The author not only explains what is wrong and how to fix it, but the article is easy to read and to understand.

He says that in the 1940’s, there needed to be a measure of how well a country was doing, and the only numbers available were the GDP, which they invented.  It is a number made up of all the values a country has plus all the sales.  The thinking was that this annual number would reflect how well the people in the country were doing, even though they knew that it was very one-dimensional, but it was all they had.  As a result, it became the standard against which most countries and companies measured themselves by.  If it was going up, that was good.

However it did not measure the quality of life, and consequently that suffered.  Globalization didn’t help, sending jobs around the world looking for the cheapest labor.  So where are we now?  Most of the people in the world are living hand to mouth, a rough patch in life can lead to personal disaster, thus the homeless and the disillusionment with the system.

What can we do about it?  There are 2 main ways to fix a broken system: 1) tear it down so that a new system can take its place, and 2) modify it. 

We can find many examples of the first option, until recently sort of hidden, but now out in the open.  Notice those who are rising up against the police and their stations.  Bring the system down.

The second option is actually harder, to get entrenched modes of operation to change.  Civilization is like a big train, once it gets moving, hard to change its speed, it’s called momentum.

According to this article, the fix lies in making GDP only one of a set of measurements, to create a dashboard of numbers which more accurately reflects every part of peoples’ lives.   Having done a lot of research on the subject, they have come up with a hundred important areas of life which indicate how well things are going, but to make the dashboard less busy, it would be smart to narrow the 100 down to about 11, and they are:

1.  Housing        

2.  Income

3.  Jobs

4.  Community

5.  Education

6.  Environment

7.  Civic Engagement

8.  Health

9.  Life Satisfaction

10.  Safety

11.  Work-Life Balance

 

If a country could start measuring itself by these numbers, they could be compared to those same numbers in other countries.  Decision makers need to be able to point to these numbers to say that their decisions are improving things.  Theoretically doing this would fix many of the inequities and the people of the world would benefit.

Surprisingly this improvement is attracting the attention of countries and even the World Bank and IMF are beginning to use it.

But again, how do we get the juggernaut to change?  Well in this case we have an ally, the planetary consciousness, called Gaia.  As a species, we have overwhelmed the resources of the planet, too many people, and most looking for “more”---as a wise man said, “Grasping”.

I believe that a more sane response to life’s offerings is to say “enough”, not “more”.  But humans can’t help measuring themselves against their neighbors, comparing, and needing to feel “one up”.  Most our cultures encourage the use of the wealth of a person to indicate where they stand compared to others.  This is like using the GDP to measure a country’s success, a single number which can lead to an unhappy person.

The fix is easy, use a dashboard of numbers for a person as well as for a country.  If this was adopted, many of the problems with our civilization would go away.  More people would say “enough” to money because they could also focus on the quality of their life.

I am not in favor of tearing the system down.  That would lead to chaos where survival and security would become the most pressing concerns most of the time.  I personally am lazy, like to not have to think about those basic things all the time.  I think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes into play here---if I have security taken care of, etc., then I can spend time on self-actualization.

Gaia is sending messages to us now, climate shifts, bigger storms, fires.  People can ignore these relatively slow changes, get used to them.  But now there is also the virus, a global reckoning which promises to not go away for a few months, possibly years. 

My point is that this is the perfect opportunity to install the dashboards.  Our ways of life are being disrupted already, turned on their heads, so this is the time.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gdp-is-the-wrong-tool-for-measuring-what-matters/

Unfortunately you may have to pay to read the article, but I think it is important.