{"text":[[{"start":6.88,"text":"The writer is an editor at Nature and author of ‘GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why it Must Now Change’"}],[{"start":13.6,"text":"Not yet 30 and already a veteran chief economist to Pakistan’s Planning Commission, Mahbub ul Haq wrote in 1963: “It is well to recognize that economic growth is a brutal, sordid process. There are no short-cuts to it . . . The road to eventual equalities may inevitably lie in initial inequalities.”"}],[{"start":35.04,"text":"At the time, he was an evangelist for a kind of “growth at all costs” philosophy, then at the leading edge of economics. Guided by economists sent to Karachi from Harvard University, Haq and his colleagues helped the fledgling nation grow at around 6 per cent during the 1960s. Pakistan came to be known as the “development miracle”."}],[{"start":58.08,"text":"Yet five years later, Haq had changed his mind. You did not need to be an economist to see that sustained growth had failed to eliminate the country’s structural poverty. The architects of Pakistan’s first five-year plan wanted to prioritise affordable housing, spending on public health and education. But their US-trained advisers put more emphasis on industrial policy, specifically on those that would boost a relatively small number of conglomerates. The economist Khadija Haq, who happened to be Haq’s wife, found that just 20 family groups controlled most of the industrial corporations, insurance companies and banks then listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange."}],[{"start":96.154,"text":"Writing later in The Poverty Curtain, Haq argued: “It is time to stand economic theory on its head, since a rising growth rate is no guarantee against worsening poverty.”"}],[{"start":105.92,"text":"Haq, who died in 1998, could have been writing today. From Tunisia in 2011 to Bangladesh in 2024, country after country has gone through a similar kind of cycle: billboard-worthy rates of economic growth masking unemployment — especially among the young — as well as high levels of wealth inequality and social unrest, which, in a few cases, led to revolutions."}],[{"start":130.717,"text":"More than ever, we need to rethink GDP as an indicator of economic growth."}],[{"start":139.04,"text":"Nearly six decades after Haq’s epiphany, the rest of the world now seems to be catching up. UN secretary-general António Guterres has made reform of global rules for economic measurement a priority for his second term. And it may well be his most important legacy."}],[{"start":151.36,"text":"In 2021, Guterres got the chief executives of the major multilateral agencies including the IMF and the World Bank to write a paper summarising what they thought was right and wrong with GDP. Their paper, “Valuing What Counts”, called for a political moonshot to decouple GDP from progress. Guterres then assembled a second group of independent academic economists who came to a similar conclusion. UN member states, led by Spain and Guyana, have begun an intergovernmental process to adopt new metrics — including possibly a new composite index — that goes beyond GDP."}],[{"start":186.941,"text":"Countries have essentially two choices. They can change what GDP measures, so it doesn’t just count the monetary value of all finished goods and services. Instead, it would also capture things such as unpaid housework, or misleadingly named “externalities” such as the natural capital and ecosystem services on which human life and future wellbeing depend and which are either threatened or have already transgressed safe limits. This, however, is proving fiendishly hard to achieve."}],[{"start":215.672,"text":"An alternative choice is that we all just stop using the GDP index as the main yardstick for prosperity — which just about any economic statistician will tell you is no bad thing — and start to run economies according to a dashboard of indicators instead. Many of these, including getting every child into school or universal healthcare, are already being measured in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. They just need elevating to the status of GDP."}],[{"start":241.75,"text":"In his later years, Haq went to work for the UN where he led the design of the Human Development Index, a calculated attempt at dethroning GDP. It would be just as vulgar but stand for better things, he told Amartya Sen, his friend and collaborator on the project. But the HDI team made the error of setting up their new index as a parallel indicator to GDP — but one that existed outside the UN system of national accounts. This enabled GDP to continue its reign for another three decades, untroubled by its new competitor."}],[{"start":273.627,"text":"As Guterres prepares to leave office, his successor must continue to champion the UN’s Beyond GDP work. They cannot undo history, but they can study what went before. To paraphrase Haq, the world can ill-afford being endlessly preoccupied with the refinement of the national accounts when not enough is being done on the real problems of mass poverty."}],[{"start":301.17,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786001628_4806.mp3"}