"Gross Domestic Product has now become a fetish," according to economist Raj Patel. Many undesirable things end up adding to GDP: wars, disease, and environmental destruction, for example. And GDP fails to measure many desirable indicators of community health. It has led us to live in an ecologically and socially unsustainable fashion. "No one wants to live in the Stone Age, no one wants to live in a time with bad medical care, no one wants to live in a time of poverty and wide-spread illness and disease, but what I'm suggesting is that there are other ways in which we can get to that world, and other ways in which we can track our progress other than the fetish of Gross Domestic Product." Raj Patel offers observations of what is and isn't working our current, unsustainable system. He believes better ways of organizing our economy are being developed and demonstrated today; we just need to open our eyes. Photo Credit: Sheila Menezes
