But that’s the world we’re in. And so people invent other indexes to try to come to grips with this issue. In fact we have seen a real proliferation of them.
Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on.
Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include:
the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number;
the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI);
the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions;
the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated);
the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability;
the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries;
and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.
All these indexes are attempts to portray civilization in our time using the terms of the hegemonic discourse, which is to say economics, often in the attempt to make a judo-like transformation of the discipline of economics itself, altering it to make it more human, more adjusted to the biosphere, and so on. Not a bad impulse!
But it’s important also to take this whole question back out of the realm of quantification, sometimes, to the realm of the human and the social. To ask what it all means, what it’s all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.
21
We were on the lakefront in Brissago, on the Swiss side of Lake Maggiore, partying on the lawn of Cinzia’s place, just above the narrow park between her property and the lake. She had a celebrity chef there who cooked with a welder’s torch he used to fire at the bottom of big frypans he held in the air, and a band with a brass section, and a light show and all that. Altogether a righteous party, and lots of happy people there, skewing young because that’s the way Cinzia likes it.
But the narrow stretch of grass between her lawn and the lake was a public park, and as we partied we saw a guy down there on the shore, just standing there staring up at us. Some kind of beachcomber dude, holding a piece of driftwood. Nothing Cinzia’s security could do about him, they told us. Actually they could have if they wanted to, but they didn’t. The local police might make trouble if someone were objected to for just standing on a public beach. This is what one of them told us when we told him to make the guy go away. The guy was skinny and bedraggled and he just kept staring, it was offensive. Like some kind of Bible guy laying his morality on us.
So finally a few of us went down there to do what the security team ought to have done, and send this guy packing. Edmund led the way as usual, he was the one most annoyed, and we followed along because when he was annoyed Edmund could be really funny.
The guy watched us come up to him and didn’t move an inch, didn’t say a word. It was a little weird, I didn’t like it.
Edmund got in the guy’s face and told him to leave.
The guy said to Edmund something like, You fuckers are burning up the world with your stupid games.
Edmund laughed and said, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
We laughed at that, but then this guy hit Edmund with the chunk of driftwood he was holding, so fast we had no time to react. Edmund went down like a tree, didn’t get his hands up or anything, just boom. He had been cold-cocked.
The guy held his piece of wood out at us and we froze. Then he tossed it at us and took off right into the lake, swimming straight out into the night. We didn’t know what to do— no one wanted to swim off after a nut like that, not in the dark, and besides we were concerned about Edmund. It just looked bad, the way he went down. Like a tree. Cinzia’s security finally joined us, but they only wanted to hold the perimeter, they didn’t chase the guy either. They took over checking out Edmund, and when they did that they quickly got on their phones. An ambulance showed up in about five minutes and took him away. After that it was a couple of hours before we got word. We couldn’t believe it. Edmund was dead.
22
Adele Elia and Bob Wharton were at a meeting of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, an international scientific organization formed to coordinate Antarctic research after the 1956 International Geophysical Year
