Apr 29, 2020
"Economists' forecasts for GDP growth in 2020 vary
widely," says The Economist. "Algeria's GDP growth falls to 0.8% in
2019," one Reuters headline reads. "GDP — the broadest measure of
economic activity — grew at an annual rate of just 1.9% during the
third quarter," NPR warns. Everywhere we turn for economic news,
the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is held up as the key proxy for
prosperity and sound fiscal policy.
Since
its codification as the new gold standard for measuring prosperity
at the Bretton Wood conference in 1944, the GDP has been the most
popular metric used by American and British media when measure a
nation’s prosperity. The GDP, and its close cousin, the Gross
National Product, have not been without its critics for decades,
but prying it from its top position as The Most Important Policy
Goal has been an impossible task. Despite many labor activists,
environmentalists and economists leveling critiques at its myopic,
capitalist ideology, the metric has remained central to how the
media and lawmakers determine fiscal policy.
But
what is the GDP exactly? How did it become the go-to proxy for
prosperity in Western media? What are its ideological inputs, and
how did post-war notions of colonialism and extractivism helps
cement its place in our collective mindset? And what, more
importantly, do activists argue we should replace it with? On this
episode of Citations Needed we will explore these questions and
examine how centralizing Gross Domestic Product––by its very
design––obscures climate crisis, labor abuses, racism, drudgery,
and a whole host of society's ills.
We
welcome economic anthropologist Dr. Jason Hickel back to the
show.