Green Options

With a New Economy starting to emerge, how should we measure it’s strength? Using the old fashioned Gross Domestic Product, or the more holistic Genuine Progress Indicator?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A businessman is showing a potential investor around his factory. The investor is very impressed and likes the businessman’s figures. These show that the factory produces $5.2m worth of goods.

“And what about your expenditure?” he asks the businessman. The businessman looks back at him blankly. “You know: raw materials; transport costs; staff wages; loan repayments…..”

The business man starts to dribble from the corner of his mouth. In the end the investor storms off muttering darkly about how the gene pool needs to be reduced.

Last week, while poking around a few dusty corners of the internet, I came across a small business future group which one person had left because of disagreement about the prominence of sustainability in the group’s charter.

This is a shame. Those who are facing up to the current challenges in business need to work together to find the solutions, not argue over the relative importance of their preferred approaches.

Then a post on World Changing caught my eye. “The Two Faces of Economic Reporting” points out that last week’s growth in US GDP growth was underpinned by the largest drop in personal income for over three years.