Taking the Measure - A better way to score

What's the score on sustainability? GDP growth is worse than useless as an index of how we are doing. Roger East looks at the quest for a more telling measure – and grapples with the notion that 1976 was Britain's best year yet.

Remember that Doomsday Clock, its hands hovering somewhere frighteningly close to midnight throughout the Cold War? Even at the height of détente it never let us think we were more than 17 minutes from the brink of nuclear Armageddon. And two years ago the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset it to seven minutes before midnight – precisely where it started in 1947.

Hang on a moment. It started with just seven minutes left to run? There was I, fearing, all my life, that the sands of time had all but run out – when it was really just a dramatic metaphor.

OK, I can see that it wouldn’t exactly catch the headlines if they’d set up a Doomsday clock to tell the world it was nearly teatime, but was I the only one who believed it was measuring something a bit more real? It was much the same story with Gross Domestic Product – until I woke up one morning to find that a bunch of privatised bandits had towed away my car and thereby added £120 to GDP! Never again could I mistake that for a measure of progress.

But exposing the false gods of GDP, and what Clive Hamilton recently and rightly characterised as ‘growth fetish’, doesn’t take us far down the road to a better measure of where we stand. The government did seem to be making a brave start when it first trumpeted its new ‘core indicators of sustainable development’, Quality of life counts. But five years on, with a 2004 edition available for comparisons (and a handy Sustainable development indicators in your pocket version for those who won’t go anywhere without them), there’s a widespread feeling that it’s rather a random scorecard.

It’s scarcely plausible that the desire to improve reed warbler numbers is a lodestone for government policy. We can’t even get agreement on using one core national indicator set as the basis for all other SD scorecards at regional, local and sectoral level. It’s no real surprise that these indicators struggled to win credibility – or even recognition – with the general public.

The whole apparatus is too unwieldy for that. Too scrupulous about not adding apples and pears, it lacks, crucially, the headline single-indicator simplicity that gave the Doomsday Clock – and GDP – its totemic power. The New Economics Foundation, on the other hand, has caused quite a stir with its most recent brainchild, the Measure of Domestic Progress.

The MDP’s release was deliberately timed to precede the Chancellor’s last budget – with the author of NEF’s Chasing Progress report, Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, challenging Gordon Brown “to provide us with a credible politics of sustainability”. Here was someone brave enough to nail his colours to the mast and give us a figure, not just for economic output, but for ‘progress’. Taking due account of the costs of crime, pollution and environmental degradation, the MDP shows that social progress in the UK has become increasingly decoupled from economic growth over the last 50 years.

It even tells us when quality of life was at its highest – in 1976, of course. Taken in the round, we’ve never recovered the heights of that halcyon year, even if we’ve got the flared trousers back. MDP fell sharply in the 1980s, according to NEF’s calculations, and – despite improvements in the last decade – we’ve still not made up the lost ground.

The country may have had its share of dodgy car dealers with even dodgier haircuts in 1976, but hey, life was better then. Only on average, of course. How was it for you? Some people felt pretty stressed that year – after all, it was nine minutes to midnight.

Roger East is managing editor of Green Futures

8 July 2004

Roger East