It's time for a game change. Because increased profits and GDP growth aren't making lives better.
For as long as modern economics has been around, the name of the game has been GDP growth.
There's this assumption among economists that when you increase GDP, or even per capita GDP, that the whole country benefits. If nothing else, the past 30 years of economic data have proven this assumption is dead wrong.
It's time we stopped looking at so-called aggregate data, which simply look at the overall increase with no concern as to how that increase is distributed among the population. Per capita GDP is especially misleading, as it makes the implicit assumption that GDP and increases in GDP are shared equally by all citizens. (LOL!)
What is needed is a fundamental change in how we define success. We need to discard aggregates in favor of statistics that reflect how well (or poorly) actual individual citizens are doing. Moving to median statistics would be an important first step. If the median income were increasing, at least we would know that at least 50% of the population is doing better, and because of the statistical bell curve, we would know that probably a good deal more than 50% were seeing some improvement. With the current aggregate statistics like per capita GDP, if everyone were slowly seeing their incomes decline, but the Top 1% saw their incomes go through the roof, it's quite possible for the per capita GDP to increase, thereby masking the slow decline of the 99%. And this is exactly what has been happening.
Which is why we need to change the rules of "the game."
= new reply since forum marked as read
(From Inequality.org website.)
