“In our economy, everything has a price – but nothing, it seems, has a value. We find it hard to really tell whether the things we value are growing or dying”. So begins an excellent interview by Joe Flower with “anti-economist” Hazel Henderson. The yardsticks we have chosen to measure our “progress” are economic ones: margin, GNP, jobs, the Dow Jones, the prime rate. Everything else — the health of our children, clean air, the safety of our communities, the feeling of belonging, a sense of meaning — has to compete on the same grounds, and the comparisons become absurd. Environmental damage, stress on workers, or risk to consumers from the costs of things don’t count at all in such economic measures, until they get turned into dollars by suits or regulatory action — and then they get counted on the plus side. Henderson is developing a national quality of life measure for the U.S. “We are going to distribute it with the Calvert Group in Washington, D.C., starting in the fall. We want to release our quality of life indicators, without putting money coefficients on them, at the same time that the government puts out the GNP”. Read the interview here.
