A few days back, in a post about the gradual collapse of our financial systems, I wrote the following:
I for one wouldn't mind the trade-off implied above in bold. Why must everything give way to higher levels of economic growth? I realize this will sound heretical to most of my US readers, but economic growth in and of itself is not the be all and end all of civilization. For the past half century or so we have surely acted as if it is, but that doesn't answer the question. Perhaps it is time once again for us as a nation to rethink our unending obsession with economics. Aggregate growth tells us nothing about the lives of individual citizens. It tells us nothing about the lives of the families that make up this nation. Dollars and cents are part, but only part, of what makes our nation a success.
It slipped my mind at the time, but there was at least one very important instance where for a brief moment we as a people did in fact question our unending obsession with economic growth. It was almost 40 years ago to the day that RFK gave a now far too often forgotten speech on the ways GDP fails to measure the things that are most important about our nation. Here, via Tapped's Kate Sheppard, is a YouTube excerpt of that speech:
Amazingly, the Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade and Tourism recently held a hearing on precisely this issue. Who knows... maybe we are in the early stages of reconsidering things?
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