Earlier this month I was able to attend the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Seattle. I’ve been meaning to post a recap of what I heard there, and I still hope to, but today I’d rather write about something mentioned by one of the keynote speakers, Angela Glover Blackwell, the President & CEO of PolicyLink. She spoke about the role of smart growth in relation to social equity and creating a sustainable, green economy. The thing that struck me from her speech was her view of the three E’s of sustainability (environment, equity, economic). Most all of us would agree that equity often gets shoved aside in favor of economic and environmental concerns and that it should be given equal consideration among the three. Blackwell, however, argued that equity should rise above the other E’s and be the “growth model” going forward.
I’m not sure if this is a familiar argument or not, but it was the first time I’d heard it put this way and it got my attention more than anything else she spoke about. Too often we think of “growth” as both necessary and good. But what do we mean by growth? Typically it is measured by GDP, but does that really measure anything positive? I would argue that it doesn’t. Prior to the current recession, we saw America’s GDP rise, but the gap between rich and poor grew and incomes for most everyone but the wealthy remained stagnant. Putting GDP on such a pedestal and assuming that its growth leads unquestionably to good things has in reality lead to some pretty negative results. Much of our population, certainly those most in need, has been left behind by growth. From an ethical perspective, this is obviously quite bad. Unfortunately, many people look at things through a primarily economic lens and lose sight of the various externalities that result.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As Blackwell argues, we can achieve both “growth” and increased equity for everyone simultaneously. First, though, I think we need to either drop the term growth or at least redefine what it means. At minimum, a new measure needs to be developed that measures overall quality of life improvements. Gross National Happiness is an example of this, although I think it would have to be renamed in the United States to have any hope of catching on with the business community. This way of thinking falls in line with what that of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. Sen argues that economic growth should not be our concern, but instead human development. Development is defined as enhancing human capabilities through greater political freedom, increased economic opportunities, better social opportunities, increased transparency, and protective security (think social safety nets). Sen sees these elements as the expansion of human freedoms and as both the ends and means of development. If we used increased human development as our overarching objective (with the Human Development Index (HDI) as our metric), we would then be working towards a greater quality of life for all populations. I would argue that this would result in a much better outcome for nearly everyone, rather than pursuing growth for growth’s sake. Maybe the elite will accumulate slightly less wealth, but the rest of the world would be in much better shape.
I worry, though, that this approach is too pie in the sky given the general culture and nature of politics in our nation. We’ve basically developed our entire economic philosophy around the notion that a growing GDP is necessary for increased prosperity. The frustrating thing is that the vague objectives we all generally associate with growth are not that different between growing GDP and growing HDI. The idea is to improve our overall standard of living, but our chosen metric of GDP doesn’t actually measure that. It seems to me that this isn’t widely understood and that resistance would be quite stiff to ditching GDP in favor of HDI or some other similar metric. Perhaps the best chance would be to take advantage of the recession and attempt to explain this issue. In conjunction, some sort of panel or committee could be appointed by the President or Congress that would develop a new metric that fits the American ethos but does a better job of actually measuring growth in equitable prosperity rather than growth in goods produced. Of course, even if we actually started using a new measure (likely alongside GDP at first), it would probably take a generation or two for our national philosophy to shift to supporting HDI. But the rewards could be great and I’d still like to see us try, even if it is a long shot.
Does anyone think otherwise? Are there better ideas out there? I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say.
-Matt
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