How not to be gross. The trouble with the GDP obsession

Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, even sounds slightly repellent. All the outputs a country spews out into the world, minus none of the defilements to human welfare and the natural world. Gross is a good description. Unearth all the fossil fuels in the ground, burn them and watch the GDP meter spike, while civilisation drowns. Fight a war and see GDP spiral as you repair the damage you’ve inflicted. Sit back in grim satisfaction as your products cause an obesity epidemic and the economy spreads depression like a virus. But as long the volume of goods and services shows a steady rise, you are outpacing the abyss.

But more than just being blind to suffering, the obsession with GDP actively seems to thrive on human misery. According to psychologist Oliver James, who gives it the moniker, ‘selfish capitalism’, “it is absolutely critical for everybody to go around feeling miserable, filling the emptiness with commodities, dealing with misery by trying to give themselves short-term boosts with hamburgers or drink.”

Divorce and separation, seemingly unbridled negatives for human happiness, are a positive boon for GDP statistics, James points out. They result in more homes rented out, more fridges and furniture bought, extra DVD players needed etc. A world comprising solely of single person households would be terrible on many fronts – it would be an environmental disaster and would spread the blight of our time, loneliness. But as far as GDP is concerned, this outcome would be an unadulterated blessing.

Small wonder there is mounting pressure for other measurements of the state of the economy and society to knock GDP off the statistical throne it has occupied since the Second World War. According the author Dirk Philipsen, there are more than a hundred alternatives, ranging from the ‘Happy Planet Index’, to the Genuine Progress Indicator to the ‘Beyond GDP’ initiative.

These indexes both measure things that GDP ignores, such as childcare and housework, and take account of huge negative impacts that are grist to the mill of GDP. They are thus a far more realistic or complete picture of the health of the societies we inhabit. The book, The Spirit Level, painstakingly demonstrated that rising GDP, a blunt measure of rising societal wealth, can harbour great damage to well-being, incubating trends such as rising mental illness and obesity or declining social mobility.

But before we rush to ditch GDP as an economic measure, it is necessary to recognise that it does record something meaningful in our current society.

As economist Michael Roberts points out, ‘GDP is not designed to measure benefits to people but productive gains for the capitalist mode of production.’ And in a ‘capitalist mode of production’, there is an undeniable, if regrettable, link between the productive gains of the economy’s major institutions and the welfare of most people. If the system doesn’t make its productive gains, the disappointment is swiftly transferred downwards.

The 2007-9 recession and its aftermath made this plain to see. Global output slumped by eight percentage points and GDP in the OECD area (34 wealthy countries around the world) contracted by six percentage points. Those are the bare figures. But these statistical falls were accompanied by real-world spikes in unemployment and homelessness and serious depletions of income and wealth. With GDP per person still lumbering below its 2007 level, exploitative work contracts and self-employment have mushroomed. GDP may be blind but there is a connection between it and human welfare.

But, because this connection undoubtedly exists, it is used by governments and international agencies to justify all kinds of policies to resuscitate GDP which harm people. Neutral-sounding ‘structural reforms’, such as raising the pension age, restricting collective bargaining agreements or clamping down on ‘generous’ welfare benefits, are hawked as ways to return the world economy to a path of growth.

Sure, there is anger about these policies. Left Keynesians and others protest there are other ways to revitalise GDP growth. But there is unanimity that sustainable GDP growth is a worthy aim. And at the back of our minds there exists a seedy toleration of the anti-social consequences of rising GDP because, without it, the abyss seems to beckon. This is why, despite a wish to be humane on the part of many people, there is a deep ethical rot at the heart of our economies.

But, far from accepting this miserable bargain, we need to face it down. The god of GDP growth, as one economist puts it, needs to be dethroned. We don’t need alternative measures that co-exist with GDP, we need economic alternatives to GDP. Public policy should no longer aim at maximising GDP. It should aim at maximising human welfare and if that depresses GDP, so be it.

This change can take many forms. People growing their own fruit and vegetables rather than relying on the sugar-addled products of the food industry would improve well-being but be bad for GDP. A health policy that aimed at curing, where possible, physical and mental illness rather than merely treating their symptoms with drugs would benefit human welfare but dampen GDP. And policies to keep fossil fuels in the ground forsake future economic growth in the hope of ameliorating the impact of climate change.

It is estimated that the global economy needs to grow by at least 3% a year in order to make sufficient profits for large corporations. This means compound growth; growth on top of the growth already attained. It is doubtful whether this rate is possible but unquestionably it is not desirable. “Imagined physically,” says the geographer, David Harvey, “the enormous expansion in physical infrastructures, in urbanisation, in workforces, in consumption and in production capacities that have occurred since the 1970s until now will have be dwarfed into insignificance over the coming generation if the compound rate of capital accumulation is to be maintained”.

But should we collectively decide not to pursue the aim of maintaining the rate of capital accumulation, we need to be fully aware of what this implies. Not only do large corporations directly and indirectly (through supply chains) employ large swathes of the population, they also act as the destination for pension fund investments. The current and future wealth of millions of people depends on their success. Recognising this is not to justify the economic system but state a bare fact of social reality.

Corporations thus play a dual role in the economic system. Economic viability apparently depends on them but they are taking us in fundamentally anti-social, anti-ecological directions. This state can be characterised as one of economic bondage.

It might be argued that public investment should substitute for falling GDP. After all, the definition of GDP includes – in addition to consumer spending, business spending and investment and net exports – spending by the government. But, in order for growth to be maintained in this way the level of government involvement in the economy would have to rise more than anyone is advocating (Jeremy Corbyn included). This kind of economy would be akin to the Second World War economies of Britain and America. And of course without the huge stimulus of manufacturing weapons.

Twenty years ago there was unbridled optimism that the information economy was the future of capitalism. The number of new products was only limited by the boundaries of the human imagination. Steve Jobs could “anticipate technological desires you didn’t even know you had”. But digital capitalism has not turned out to be the saviour of corporate profitability and economic growth. “Info-tech,” says the author Paul Mason, “drives labour out of the production process, reduces the market price of commodities, destroys some profit models and produces a generation of consumers psychologically attuned to free stuff.”

We are currently living in a stagnant capitalist economy. Growth has levelled out at rate well below the average prior to the 2008 crash. Another slump is very likely, which will turn growth negative again, causing a depression. That’s the scenario, and all its human consequences, we have to imagine if we explicitly decide not to make the profits of multi-national corporations a priority.

Therefore, logically, not following the GDP compulsion anymore means constructing a post-capitalist economy. And in the short-term that entails safeguarding the incomes of millions of people. This implies the free (or at negligible cost) provision of many utilities and the use of a basic income as the primary source of people’s income, not as is commonly imagined, a fall back that gives people the confidence to make money elsewhere.

The most pressing task therefore is not just to illustrate how an alternative economic system is desirable, but to show how it would work. How it would provide and distribute income and wealth, substituting for the institutions that currently perform this function.

Too successful for its own good. Should we save capitalism from itself?

There are many kinds of capitalism. Free market capitalism, which easily morphs into the dominance of corporations. Or social market capitalism, in which there is a larger role for the state and workers are represented on company boards. There is even state capitalism, in which everybody works for state enterprises, which pass themselves off as socialist, but exploit people just the same.

But now perhaps there are only two kinds of capitalism which count. Successful capitalism and capitalism which is too successful for its own good. The consequences of each are different but equally horrible in their own way.

Back in the roaring nineties successful capitalism was thought to be the only game in town. In Britain, Tony Blair’s New Labour exemplified the social democratic acceptance of capitalism. The “market” would hum along unmolested in the background and the government would skim off the tax revenue. Labour spokespeople waxed lyrical about the wealth-creating genius of the private sector and spent the proceeds on tax credits for the working poor, the National Health Service – health spending went up by 30 per cent – and relieving child poverty. It was, in essence, a deal.

But, said Left and green critics of capitalism, this was a myopic accommodation, trading short-term advantages for long-term disaster. Growth – the social ecologist Murray Bookchin said expecting capitalism not to grow was like expecting a lion to become vegetarian – might support enlarged public spending but would eventually make the planet unliveable.

In 2007, a British professor of engineering worked out that, based on an economy growing at three per cent a year, we would consume resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humanity began as a species by 2040. In 33 years. I think the word you are grasping for is unsustainable.

As the writer Mark Fisher has said, successful capitalism was based on a fantasy: “A presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market”.

To believe in successful capitalism you had to stick your index fingers in your ears and sing “la, la, la” very loudly. But both celebrators and critics agreed that capitalism worked.

Oh shit

But just as capitalism was swaggering around the globe, assured in its invincibility, disaster struck.

The global economic meltdown happened, the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. $14.5 trillion of value was wiped from global companies.

The former masters of the universe, who meet at Davos, now speak of a “dystopian future” destroying the gains of globalization.“For the first time in generations, many people no longer believe that their children will grow up to enjoy a higher standard of living than theirs,” they warn.

Something had gone badly wrong.

The conventional explanation was that investment banks were too reckless, financial speculation overreached itself and the economy became dangerously skewed. But, in truth, capitalism had become too successful for its own good.

In the US, where the crisis was hatched, wages had stagnated since the mid-70s, while productivity – worker ouput that the employer benefits from – raced ahead. The result was not only spiralling inequality (the US was actually more equal than many western European countries in early ‘70s) and burgeoning corporate profits, but an orgy of personal borrowing so that consumption could be maintained despite the fact that earnings weren’t going up.

A cursory look at recent US economic history shows a series of bubbles. A massive stock market crash struck in 2000. The price of shares is dependent on the expectation of future corporate profits so crashes occur when there is a realisation of total over-optimism about profits. The crash was stopped from turning into a recession by reducing interest rates to below the rate of inflation for three years. Borrowing doubled – the house price and house building bubble ensued – but when that burst so spectacularly in 2007 there were no more bubbles left. Reality – the reality of stagnating earnings – could be evaded no longer.

A dusty old critique of capitalism suddenly became remarkably persuasive. That held that capitalism was inherently self-destructive. Each employer tries to keep wages, which are just another cost, as low as possible. But if they are too successful in that endeavour, the same workers with the low wages won’t be able to play their other vital role in capitalism, that of consumers of goods. Economic health depends upon the employer impulse to keep wages down being frustrated by another countervailing power. Capitalism can be too successful for its own good.

Flatliners

Worryingly for economic health, the US capacity for stagnating earnings has proved a very effective export. In the UK, earnings grew strongly throughout the ’80s and ‘90s but have flat-lined since 2003, four years before the onset of the ‘great recession’. Worker productivity, meanwhile, has kept on steaming ahead. Post-downturn wages rises in Britain are currently half the rate of inflation. Average wages are forecast to be no higher in 2015 than they were in 2001. France and Germany have followed a similar trajectory. Researchers describe an acute “decoupling”of earnings from growth.

The UK Resolution Foundation, which has produced a series of reports on living standards, worries that a return to growth won’t necessarily mean rising wages. Stagnating earnings also ensure burgeoning inequality (yes, it can get worse).

But there is another larger, elephant in the room, problem. The US experience demonstrates that you can’t, to use the economists’ elegant term, “decouple” growth from earnings forever, without eventually destroying growth as well (in industrialised, western countries at least, the experience of developing, exporting countries like India seems to be different). Earnings are purchasing power, in economics-speak ‘demand’, and growth cannot survive indefinitely without purchasing power.

The economic vista in front of us is that of a tsunami of bank debt inexorably making its way to shore. At the same time, earnings power which could lift countries out of recession, is exhausted. The level of personal borrowing is huge and, as we have seen, earnings stagnated or declined even before the recession.

That last factor cannot be wished away, or undone by governments even if they were inclined to. The reasons for stagnating earnings are analysed by a Resolution Foundation report. Technological change has obviated the need for low-skilled workers, firms have given precedence to share dividends over the pay of ordinary workers, outsourcing has increased, and the bargaining position of workers has been diluted. None of these factors will be reversed given current trends and the balance of power politically and economically.

The globe stops warming

It doesn’t have to be this way, you cry. And you’d be right. The Resolution Foundation report, Painful Separation, finds that in some European countries, namely Finland, Sweden and Denmark, there has been only mild divergence between economic growth and median pay. It is no accident that in Scandinavian countries, they say, “Recession? What recession?”

They haven’t killed the goose that lays the golden egg. They, if it isn’t stretching the metaphor too far, nurture their goose. They have effective countervailing powers like strong trade unions. They haven’t left successful capitalism behind. But there is a catch.

Amid all the deleterious social effects of the great recession – the homelessness, the riots, the suicides, the divorces – there was one undoubtedly progressive, though unintended, result. The sudden drop in economic activity achieved something international protocols and protesters invading airport runways had failed to. The rate of global warming was arrested. For only the fourth time in 50 years, carbon emissions fell.

It is clear that the kind of capitalism that Anglo-Saxon societies have been living through for the past 30 years is an ineffective form of capitalism. Growth rates have been unimpressive, financial crises have become more frequent and earnings have been held down. Too much power has been given to or taken by corporations and the rich. Capitalism has become too successful for its own good.

The South Korean economist, Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, argues convincingly that what we call “free market economics” has been shown to fail spectacularly. He puts the case for more assertive government control, different forms of ownership, the outlawing of financial products like derivatives, and the rebalancing of the economy away from finance and into the long-term production of manufactured goods. Capitalism can work if the harnesses are placed back on and it is guided in the public interest.

In other words, a return to successful capitalism, a capitalism that is in rude health. Chang eulogises the “miraculous” performance of South Korea in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which grew at an average of six per cent year. China today, he says, illustrates what can be done if free market prescriptions aren’t followed.

The problem isn’t the economic reasoning. The problem is that the world, ecologically, cannot cope with the replication of the Chinese or South Korean economic success stories. If earnings in the US had continued to track GDP growth, as they had done from 1945 to 1973, the average household would have earned $80,000 a year, not $50,000 as they in fact do. Even accounting for the spike in borrowing, consumption has been suppressed in US as capitalism has become too successful for its own good. It is revealing that Chang mentions the word “environment” just once in his entire book.

Chang, like John Maynard Keynes seventy years ago, wants to save capitalism from itself. 

Post-capitalism

But the truth is that neither successful capitalism, nor capitalism that is too successful for its own good, presents a remotely desirable prospect.

The latter leads, in Ann Pettifor’s words, to “dramatically higher levels of unemployment, the loss of savings, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, emigration, suicides, divorce, social unrest and political upheaval – to name but a few of the consequences.”  The former provides a swifter route to the dystopian future of global warming.

Awareness of the awful consequences of both alternatives leads to the realisation that the only rational option left is some form of post-capitalism. It doesn’t mean, in the caricature of one British government minister, everyone running around in Maoist boiler suits, but it does entail an end to the growth fetish and ensuring a secure standard of living for everyone. What “post-capitalism” is like in detail is what we should be concentrating on now.