What we’ve done in our western civilisation – this is not just Europe but the whole of western civilisation – is become so fascinated with GDP growth, we’ve traded everything [ for it], including the stability of our economies. We’ve been selling stability in order to buy back growth, which we succeed- ed at and we have now created economies which are extremely fast-growing but also very, very fragile.
So it’s the pursuit of growth rather than the constant measuring of it that’s the issue?
Yes, exactly. It’s also interesting philosophically speaking, that what you measure creates the dividing line. For example, GDP really has an appearance of a fact, a hard number; there is a lot of debate going around whether we should change it to something softer and all these happiness indexes. A lot of economists argue: “No, GDP is hard, it’s solid, it’s a fact, it really is objective.”
I would like to attack this notion, because just imagine that we in Europe measured GDP not in national terms, but by region. If we measure it in regional terms, some areas of Greece would be making fiscal transfers to some regions in Germany as they are richer than some in Germany – especially East Germany.
At the end of the day the result could be the same, but the debate would be completely different. The fact we measure the GDP of Greece against the GDP of Germany creates the debate and the dividing line.
Similarly, we have this north/south divide which is complete baloney and artificial: “The lazy south and the hard working north.” Ireland isn’t in the south last time I checked and they went belly up the same way. Iceland I don’t really think of as a southern country either, but these dividing lines are created. That’s why it’s not an objective measure and it’s not fact, because it creates facts rather than shows them.
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