Gross Domestic Problem

There are countless components that contribute to success, happiness and fulfillment on an individual level and as a society. However, since we've been living in globalized capitalist system for many decades, there's just one metric that decides our measure of success; growth.

Again, that goes for individuals as well as societies. At the peak of our socioeconomic ladders we find the individuals who are most successful at growing their personal wealth, when we rank corporations we look at the price of their stocks, and when we measure the success of countries we compare their Gross Domestic Products. We look at the economic success and nothing else when we try to determine if a person, a company or a country has succeeded in the game of existence. Not only is this way of measuring success extremely one-dimensional, it's catastrophic. Economical growth is the be all and end all of individual and collective success, and everything else is subservient to that one particular measure, including all other things that make life worth living. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of economical growth, including happiness, the environment and the sanctity of life itself.

We have a couple of ways to measure this overarching economic success, like profits, stock prices and, the mother of them all, the Gross Domestic Product. When competing gladiators in the arena of the world economy are pitted against each other, we compare the growth of their economies using, among other things, the GDP. These past few decades China and America have been involved in the race of all races, with China catching up on the world's biggest economy at a frightening pace. With the U.S. reporting growth figures of around three percent per year, the fear of communism has been renewed because the People's Republic of China has shown figures that sometimes reached double digits. And while these two behemoths are vying for the number one spot in the globalized economy, onlookers forget how ridiculous this race is to begin with...

I've written about this a couple of times, but let me briefly remind you all that 70 is the most important number in our times. Why? Because you can use it to quickly calculate the doubling period of any number, given the percentage growth. So, if an economy grows 10 percent per year, the size of that economy doubles every 7 years, which is what you get by dividing 70 by 10. If the economy grows 2 percent per year, it doubles in size every 35 years. Get it? Knowing this, even the moderate growth of 2 percent each year is ludicrous. Demanding 2 percent growth per year is demanding that the economy doubles in just one professional or productive lifetime. That's just stupid, given the the size of the economy right now, is the result of all the growth of all the years that came before.

Even without knowing the rule of 70, it should be obvious that an economy that's depending on eternal growth is incompatible with a finite planet, which is something we see the effects of with our own eyes; we're killing the planet and everything on it, ourselves included. When cells grow uncontrollable in our bodies, we call that cancer. We've become a cancer on the living organism that is the planet we depend on for our survival. So the question if we continue measuring our success, and basing our economy on growth, has become an existential question the answer to which is a resounding negative. This planet is our home, so to go on measuring our success by the growth of our Gross Domestic Products is indeed a Gross Domestic Problem. And the GDP in itself is a stupid way to measure success; let me close by briefly explaining why.

Robert Kennedy made a beautiful speech when he wanted to become the Democratic nominee for the presidential elections in which he said that the GDP measures everything except the things that make life worth living, and he was right. Here's why. Imagine a street with ten houses with each house containing a family of a mother, a father and a child. They're all living their life, with two parents raising one child. Now imagine that every father or mother goes to the neighbors next door, asks them to take care of their child and offers them some money to do that. They all do that, with the exception of the parents of the last house, who knock on the door of the first house. Now, nothing has really changed; still each house has two parents raising one child, it's just not their own child. But the GDP has gotten a nice boost! If we want to raise the GDP, we need to all raise the child of our neighbors for money! We can do this for almost everything that reduces our joy in life. We could legalize all drugs. Now, I personally wouldn't have a problem with that, but it's debatable if it would do society any good. But the GDP would skyrocket as the billions of transactions now made on the black market would instantly become part of the official economy. We could get rid of all traffic signs, let go of all speed limits and cause a lot more accidents to happen, which would also boost GDP. And so on. I think you get the picture...

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