Philobiblon

To a new book club last night, where the topic of discussion was
Capitalism: As If the World Matters, by Jonathon Porritt.

It is an attempt, we concluded, to reframe “green” thought going back to the seventies into a form and vocabulary with which economists and businesspeople might be comfortable.

In the discussion I managed to make some economists very uncomfortable (sorry!) by suggesting that GDP was a “fiction”, which another commentator later modified to “fairytale”. That might sound a bit extreme, but the point I was making is that it has as a measure no absolute value – it is just a collection of figures that everyone has agreed means something. (A bit like money.) Of course the obvious feminist example of this is that it doesn’t count unpaid (but clearly valuable) outputs of labour such as caring and housework.

We were discussing the difficulties of creating/agreeing a “green GDP measure”. My view on this is select a few sensible figures, produce a formula to plug them into and push it hard; don’t try to get a “perfect”, exactly balanced measure, because such a thing doesn’t exist.