Measuring Genuine Progress

[Mike Nickerson]

What Really Counts

A film by Kent Martin  

What Really Counts is a visually stimulating film about enabling people and governments to look beyond monetary accounts and consider other conditions that affect the health and well-being of people and the environment we depend on.

Based on Ron Colman’s book: What Really Counts; The Case for a Sustainable and Equitable Economy (2021), this feature-length film presents the impressive efforts that have gone into opening society’s eyes to the spectrum of circumstances that affect our world today.

Ron Colman has spent decades working on better ways to measure well-being.

“Indicators are powerful.” he says.  “What we count and what we measure reflects our values as a society and literally determines what makes it onto the policy agenda of governments.  As we proceed in this new millennium, these indicators tell us whether we are making progress, whether we are leaving the world a better place for our children, and what we need to change.”  

At present, looking primarily at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) when making decisions risks serious unintended consequences.  While GDP, the sum of all money spent, has its place, it mixes up positive expenditures like housing and education with regrettable expenditures like cleaning up natural disasters and murder scenes.  A billion dollars spent making war isn’t as good for society as it would be if spent on education and tools.

Ron Colman was inspired by the October 1995  article in the Atlantic Monthly titled: If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?  He and a team of volunteers in Nova Scotia proceeded to develop ways to measure the state of forests, water and air quality, volunteer time, income distribution, population health, the cost of crime and other factors that affect well-being.  Their reports showed how those things were changing over time and were used extensively to raise awareness of the issues.

After years of working on the GPI Atlantic, a Genuine Progress Index for Atlantic Canada, Ron was asked by the Prime Minister of Bhutan to help develop ways to measure the health of their natural environment and the well-being of the people.  The measures developed provided substantive information to back up Bhutan’s indicator of Gross National Happiness.

Later, when called on to help with a GPI project in New Zealand, Ron found that the basic premise was already understood, in part because the indigenous Maori have always seen social, economic, cultural, and environmental phenomena as indivisible aspects of living.

This work and other GPI efforts culminated in 2012 with a high-level meeting at the United Nations in New York where over 800 participants, including the UN Secretary-General and top political, economic, and civic leaders including Nobel laureates, met to propose a new global economic paradigm based on measures of progress that focus on the well-being of people and ecosystems.

  

It was exciting to think that the world might accept a sustainability-based economic paradigm, and collect updated information on issues of concern!  The mood, as the conference proceeded, was enthusiastic.  Participants could feel the possibility of the world opening its eyes to, and acting on, the full spectrum of conditions that affect well-being.

What became of these efforts?  Watch What Really Counts to find out, and to refine your sense of how our societies can focus clearly enough on important issues to deal with them.  Then, share the possibility with someone else.

We need to get this sorted out.  There is much to do.

Link to Trailer:   https://vimeo.com/833395099

Link to Film:   https://vimeo.com/875998215 

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