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ARTICLE
What is Genuine Progress?
by Kerry Tynan Fraser
The dangerous Enlightenment era idea that social order is not decided by supernatural forces, but that humans can
make their own situations better, has been in and out of fashion in the last 200-300 years. At the time I write this, early
in the 21st century, the “progress” meme is strongly championed by various techno-fetishists and capital seekers,
and strongly criticized by various post-postmodernists, left-leaning conservationists and right-leaning religious
literalists. Progress is still a pretty upsetting idea, it seems. And why not? Hasn’t it been industrial era progress that
has filled the biosphere with dinosaur gas; hasn’t it been progress that has injected cows with antibiotics; hasn’t it
been progress that has slashed and burned rainforests? Wasn’t it progress that led to the Great War, the erosion of
religion, the atom bomb, and now the decadence that chokes the West? If we learned anything from the end of the
20th century it was that that the clicking of billiard balls in our perfectly ordered universe was an illusion, and no
amount of careful note taking would ever free us from chaos.
But… There are other things that are really hard to deny. If you could choose between getting gangrene of the leg
treated with today’s medicine or having gangrene of the leg treated with the medicine of the dark ages, which would
you choose? No one likes taking Aspirin but when you’re in a lot of pain you take it, don’t you? Technology sucks but
do you wash your clothes by hand? Would you choose blindness over eye-glasses? Ever been in a city without closed
sewage? What about social progress? Can you imagine what our world would be like without the jury system or the
limited liability institution? Want to take away the right to vote from women; it’s such a progressive idea after all. There
are extended life-spans, crop-rotation, birth control, and soap.
So we face a dilemma. We must have progress, but something we’re doing isn’t working.
Not only does this author believe in the possibility and importance of progress, but he even wonders about the
possibility of progressively defining and approaching the goal of progress.
For example, an economist employed by any government in the world will measure a country’s health by the growth of
that country’s economy. The logic here is that the government doesn’t make any money off of community spirit or
beautification projects or other forms of social capital; it makes money off of taxes. The statistic that represents this
growth is the dollar value of all produced goods and services (and information and purchased experiences) produced
in one year called the Gross Domestic Product or sometimes Gross National Product.
Well, all the above mentioned stuff minus inflation.
Actually, to be honest, a true measure of economic growth would also have to consider population expansion
because the greater the number of people, the smaller the slice of pie for each person. So that’s it: dollar value minus
inflation minus an adjustment for population growth.
Of course growth by itself doesn’t consider how tasty each slice of pie is. If the pie is growing because nobody is
consuming but only stockpiling their dessert, or if each slice is bad tasting because in order to get that slice, each
person has to toil 4 times as hard, then you could say that the overall quality of pie (or life) is less for the same slice.
(This pie example belongs to author/economist Susan Lee.)
Pretty soon we begin to see the problem with measuring progress by financial growth alone. That’s where the GPI
comes in.
GPI sometimes stands for Genuine Progress Indicator and sometimes for Genuine Progress Index. The simplest
way of explaining GPI is in this scenario: if you hire a moving company to move your furniture, then they take the money
you gave them and buy beer after work, those transactions are measured and taxed and added to the Gross
Domestic Product. But if you ask a friend to help you move and then share your home brewed beer with them, it isn’t
considered wealth by the government. Exactly the same wealth is transferred between friends, but it can’t be taxed,
therefore it doesn’t exist. In another example, if people are buying crutches and asthma medications, it contributes to
increasing the GDP, but those people are unhealthy and living with a low life standard. A GPI would measure growth
and standard of living and environmental health and things like access to the political process, as well as hidden
labor by marginalized groups.
Hazel Henderson has said of the GNP “measuring human progress by indicators such as the Gross National Product
(GNP) is like trying to fly a Boeing 747 with nothing on the instrument panel but an oil pressure gauge!” She also
suggests several alternate systems including the United Nation’s Human Development Index and her own Country
Futures Indicators. These alternate scorecards for progress include literacy, infant mortality, life expectancy, human
rights, resource depletion, and other non-monetary capital.
ENRON: The Little Company with the Big Ideas
There are 2.5 million accountants in the world.
In an exactly upside-down version of common sense, each time one of these accountants bills a client for the
immaterial transfer of numbers, the Gross Domestic Product goes up even though no real-wealth has been
produced. One of my heroes, Buckminster Fuller, wrote at length about the danger of mistaking the practice of
accounting, and account systems, with real wealth. He argued that many, if not all of the problems we face in the
world are not scarcity problems, or technical problems, or in some cases even human problems, but accounting
problems, and Fuller did not mean that metaphorically. Many factors contributed to the implosion of the energy
company Enron, but one key certainty was the misuse of its Kabalarian accounting system. This system should have
been a way to measure the progress of the corporation, but because it was essentially based on shell games and
misinformation, it drove the company into bankruptcy.
“Six hundred years ago,” wrote Michael G. Zey in Seizing the Future, “any observer would be hard put to predict that of
all societies, Western Europe’s would be the one to lead the world into the future. China, India, and the Islamic world
were more advanced than Europe. Why, then, did France, England, Spain and eventually America come to dominate
the globe and shape its future? …The West succeeded because it envisioned the world as one in which improvement
is possible and growth is inevitable. In other words, the West evolved a cultural system based around the concept of
progress.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we’ve been hearing quite a lot about the leapfrog nations of China, India
and the Islamic world in the last ten years.
Defining the progress of our culture by the Gross Domestic Product alone is no different from Enron defining its
progress as a business by the “mark to market” accounting that led to its disgrace and implosion. Both systems are
designed to inflate investor perceptions and soak wealth away from the consumption side of the economy at brake-
neck speeds. Enron, Arthur Anderson, and Worldcom should serve as clear barometers to the results-oriented that
we need to redefine our success as a culture with full-cost forms of accounting like the Genuine Progress Index.
Biography
Kerry Tynan Fraser’s CV is Byzantine in its complexity and his long work history has been strange and involved. He
has worked as everything from a Sheep Herder to a Ferris Wheel Operator. He can be reached at
www.kerrytynanfraser.com