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Hazel Henderson Interview
AUTHOR : Joe Flower
DATE : 3/9/97 10:40:34 PM
Is your community a healthy community?
Are you making it healthier? Or are you having no effect? Are you possibly even hurting the overall health of the community?
How can you tell?
Your margin does not tell you. You could be doing a great business, without making your community one bit stronger. The strength of the local economy -- jobs, retail sales, land values -- does not tell you. There are certainly local economies that prosper by eating their futures and stripmining their workforces.
This is what killed the Soviet economy: there was no way to intelligently manage it, because nothing had a true price. There were no yardsticks, so there was no way to tell what worked and what did not work.
In our economy, everything has a price -- but nothing, it seems, has a value. We find it hard to really tell whether the things we value are growing or dying.
For "anti-economist" Hazel Henderson, this is the exact center of the problem: the yardsticks we have chosen to measure our "progress" are economic ones: margin, GNP, jobs, the Dow Jones, the prime rate. Everything else -- the health of our children, clean air, the safety of our communities, the feeling of belonging, a sense of meaning -- has to compete on the same grounds, and the comparisons become absurd.
Environmental damage, stress on workers, or risk to consumers from the costs of things do not count at all in such economic measures, until they get turned into dollars by suits or regulatory action -- and then they get counted on the plus side.
A stabbing or a traffic accident actually adds to the GNP, because of the value of the emergency and medical services expended on the victim. The damage done to the victim does not have a dollar value. Similarly, an environmental disaster contributes to GNP, as does a frivolous lawsuit, or an unnecessary surgery. A low-weight premie adds much more to the GNP than does the outreach and nutritional counseling that might have prevented it.
"[GNP] values, for example, bombs and bullets since they are things that are produced for money," says Henderson. "It does not value the environment. It values salaries paid to teachers, but it does not value what people know -- how educated they are. It places no value on human capital, meaning people. It does not even place a value on the public infrastructure."
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