The Last Border Is the Mind

The Moral GDP “There is an economy beneath the economy. It produces nothing the market can price, and everything the market cannot survive without.” The Index of Dignity, described in the previous chapter, is a measurement instrument. But measurement, by itself, does not change behaviour. Measurement creates visibility. The transformation of visibility into action requires a further step: the re-anchoring of the economic conversation around a new conception of value. This is the work of what I will call, in this chapter, the Moral GDP. The Moral GDP is not a separate index. It is a reconceptualization of the existing economic ledger to include, as first-class entries, the categories of value that the conventional ledger has historically treated as externalities. It is a proposed rebuilding of the foundations of economic accounting itself, undertaken not by abandoning the discipline of economic measurement but by deepening it. The Moral GDP is the conversation about what should count when we count what we produce. To grasp why this matters, consider how the existing GDP behaves. When a forest in the Amazon is cleared for cattle ranching, the cattle production is counted as a positive contribution to GDP. The destruction of the forest, and the carbon it had been storing, is not counted as a negative contribution. The net effect on the ledger is positive. The actual net effect on the planet’s capacity to sustain civilization is negative. The ledger and the reality are pointed in opposite directions. This is not an exotic edge case. This is the standard behaviour of GDP across many sectors and many decades. When a community in a wealthy city loses its civic associations, its religious congregations, and its informal mutual-support networks, and as a consequence its citizens spend more on therapy, on medication, on private security, on emergency healthcare, on substance abuse treatment, on subscription services that simulate companionship — all of these increased expenditures are positive contributions to GDP. The underlying erosion of the social fabric that produced the increased expenditures is not a negative contribution. The ledger looks healthy. The community is, in any honest measurement, sicker. Again, ledger and reality, pointed in opposite directions. When a young person in a poor country emigrates dangerously, the smuggler is paid, the transport is paid, the resettlement processing is paid, the emergency rescue is paid, the detention facility is paid, the eventual repatriation or naturalization is paid — and all of these payments are positive contributions to one GDP or another. The collapse of the chain of because that produced the migration in the first place generates no negative entry. The total economic activity around the migration looks like a stimulus. The actual underlying condition is a failure. Ledger and reality, pointed in opposite directions. The Moral GDP, as a reconceptualization, would require that the ledger and the reality be brought into alignment. How the Moral GDP Would Work The Moral GDP, as I propose it, is not a parallel statistic. It is a modification of the conventional GDP through three classes of adjustment. Class one: subtractions. Economic activities that, on net, destroy public goods are subtracted from GDP rather than added to it. The cleared forest, the depleted aquifer, the polluted river, the eroded social fabric — to the extent these can be valued, their destruction enters the ledger as a cost, not as a stimulus. This is the principle, already familiar in the discussion of “negative externalities” in standard economics, applied with the seriousness the contemporary moment requires. Class two: additions. Productive activities that occur outside the formal market — unpaid caregiving, community organizing, volunteer civic work, peer mentoring, religious participation, neighbourhood cohesion — are estimated and added to GDP. This is the principle, already developed in feminist economics for the case of unpaid domestic labour, generalized to the broader category of unpaid social production. The estimates are imperfect. They are, however, less imperfect than treating these activities as if they had zero value, which is the current default. Class three: weighting. Economic activities that contribute disproportionately to the conditions of dignity — the construction of vocational training centres, the provision of accessible healthcare, the maintenance of public infrastructure, the funding of independent journalism, the support of independent artistic production — are weighted more heavily in the ledger than activities that contribute disproportionately to the erosion of dignity. This is the most controversial of the three classes, because it requires explicit valuation choices that conventional economics has preferred to disguise as neutrality. The Moral GDP makes the valuation choices explicit and submits them to public deliberation, on the principle that hidden valuations are more dangerous than explicit ones. These three classes of adjustment do not, by themselves, transform an economy. They transform the story the economy tells about itself. The story matters. The story is, in the end, what political coalitions form around. A society that publishes a Moral GDP will, over time, organize its political coalitions around different priorities than a society that publishes only the conventional GDP. The reform of the metric is the reform of the imagination. The reform of the imagination is the reform of the political possibility space. The Peace Economy The Moral GDP makes possible a further reconceptualization that I will develop more fully in Part VI of this book: the Peace Economy. Briefly stated, the Peace Economy is the proposed reorganization of economic activity around the production of peace as an output. It is the recognition that peace is not the by-product of economic development. Peace is the output whose production justifies the development. In a Peace Economy, the goods and services that are valued highest are those that produce, directly or indirectly, the conditions of peaceful human flourishing — education, healthcare, infrastructure, cultural production, ecological restoration, conflict resolution, mental health support, vocational training. The goods and services that are valued lowest, or actively disvalued, are those that produce, directly or indirectly, the conditions of conflict — predatory finance, arms manufacturing in excess of legitimate defensive need, addictive consumer technologies, exploitative labour arrangements, extractive ecological practices. The Peace Economy is not an abolition of markets. It is a reorientation of markets. The reorientation is achieved through a combination of tax policy, public procurement, regulatory frameworks, and — most importantly — the cultural status that a Peace Economy society confers on different forms of productive contribution. A society whose most prestigious careers are in vocational training, peace artistry, dignity engineering, and civic construction will produce, within a generation, a different distribution of talent than a society whose most prestigious careers are in derivative trading, attention engineering, and the optimization of consumer manipulation. The current distribution of talent in the wealthy world reflects the current distribution of prestige. The Peace Economy proposes a different distribution of prestige and, therefore, in time, a different distribution of talent. This is not a fanciful proposal. It has happened before, in human history. In Renaissance Florence, the prestige of artistic patronage was sufficient to draw a disproportionate share of available talent into artistic production, with civilizational consequences that are still visible five centuries later. In nineteenth-century Britain, the prestige of engineering was sufficient to draw talent into the industrial revolution. In late-twentieth-century Silicon Valley, the prestige of software entrepreneurship was sufficient to draw talent into the information revolution. Prestige is allocable. A society that chooses to allocate prestige toward peace production will produce talent for peace production. A society that chooses not to, will not. Investment Implications For the practical-minded reader — the investor, the policymaker, the entrepreneur — the Moral GDP and the Peace Economy framework imply a set of investment categories that are, by my estimate, under-priced in the current global capital markets relative to their long-term yield to civilization. Vocational Renaissance Centers in regions with broken chains of because are, in my estimate, the highest-yielding single investment category on the planet, measured by their effect on human dignity per dollar deployed. They are also, by my estimate, among the lowest-funded categories in the current development portfolio. This mismatch is an investment opportunity, both for governments and for private capital with patient horizons. Civic infrastructure in wealthy cities — community spaces, public libraries upgraded as third places, intergenerational housing, civic associations — is, by similar reasoning, an under-funded category with high long-term yield to the conditions of dignified life. The wealthy world has been over-investing in private consumption infrastructure and under-investing in public civic infrastructure for several decades. The reversal of this imbalance is among the most consequential reforms available to wealthy-world local and national governments. Independent journalism, ethical artificial intelligence, peace-oriented cultural production, and ecological restoration are each, in their own ways, under-funded categories with high yield to the Moral GDP. They are not, in the conventional ledger, recognized as such. They will be recognized as such only when the ledger is reformed. The reform of the ledger is, therefore, in part, the unlocking of these investment categories at scale. I close this chapter with an observation that has, over my years of work, become one of my organizing convictions. The economic system we have is not a force of nature. It is an artifact — designed, over centuries, by particular human beings making particular choices, embedded in particular institutions that can be reformed by other human beings making other choices. The conventional GDP, the conventional financial accounting, the conventional definitions of growth and productivity, are not handed down from heaven. They are engineering decisions of the past. They can be modified by engineering decisions of the present. What stops us from modifying them is not the difficulty of the modification. The methodologies exist. The data exists. The institutional capacity exists. What stops us is the political and cultural inertia of the existing categories — the habit of using the categories we inherited, the prestige of the institutions that publish them, the convenience of the conversations they enable. Inertia is real. Inertia is not, however, immortal. Inertia yields to deliberate, patient, sustained effort by coalitions that have decided to redirect it. The renaissance this book argues for is, in part, the formation of such a coalition. The coalition’s first task is the measurement reform of the previous chapter and this one. The coalition’s second task — the building of the institutions that the new measurements imply — is the subject of the remainder of the book.