Face To Watch
The Blues by the Numbers
Opinion polls show many Americans feel lousy about their economic circumstances and pessimistic about the future, despite the apparently healthy economy. Ted Halstead '90 agrees with the public. He says the economy really is worse off than it was ten or even 20 years ago. The problem isn't with public pessimism, he maintains; it lies with outdated measurement.
As the founder and executive director of Redefining Progress, a greenish think-tank based in San Francisco, Halstead is fighting to update government's traditional measure of output. In a cover story in Atlantic Monthly, in the pages of USA Today and the Washington Post, and on Nightlinc, Halstead advocates a hew index—the "gen nine progress indicator"—to replace the 50-vear-old gross domestic product. The GDP figures all monetary transactions as progress, including those stemming from crime, divorce, and natural disaster. Halstead's GPI differentiates between those transactions that add to well-being and those that diminish it—such as unequal distribution of income, neglect of the non-market economy of household and community, and such environmental nightmares as the multi-billiondollar Superfund toxic cleanup. By Halstead's index, the coun try is in a dismal state, with the per-capita GPI falling dramati cally over the past two decades and the country in recession since 1989
Halstead says indicators don't.
