When it comes to economic growth, bigger is better. Or so says the mainstream wisdom. But more and more people -- including, increasingly, governments -- are realizing that equating growth with quality of life is to follow a broken compass toward a host of social and ecological problems. The state of Maryland recently announced the launch of the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an alternative economic indicator that will allow the state to keep track of which activities actually contribute to quality of life -- and which detract from it. The GPI will take into account 26 different quality of life indicators, putting price estimates, in dollars, on the negative and positive impacts of economic growth. The indicator considers, for example, the future costs of climate change and the strain of income inequality on social services; it also accounts for the value created by volunteerism and forest preservation. Already, the GPI is telling a very different story about the connection between economic growth and quality of life.
