Mahbub ul Haq

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GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantyne Books, 1992; originally published 1969). Khadija Haq and Richard Ponzio, Pioneering the Human Development Revolution: An Intellectual Biography of Mahbub ul Haq (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). Mahbub ul Haq, The Strategy of Economic Planning: Case Study of Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Mahbub ul Haq, The Poverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). Mahbub ul Haq, Reflections on Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). John P. Hardt and Vladimir G. Treml, Soviet Economic Statistics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972).

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Sir Richard Jolly, email communication with the author, November 30, and December 2, 2015. In a separate email dated December 4, 2015, Bill Draper also confirmed the lunch with Mahbub ul Haq and General Zia on August 17, 1988, the day of Zia’s death. 5. Bill Draper, telephone interview with the author, May 2013. 6. Mahbub ul Haq, “The Birth of the Human Development Index,” in Reflections on Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 46. 7. Bill Draper also tells his story of meeting Mahbub ul Haq and publishing the Human Development Index in his memoir, William H. Draper III, The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership Between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 121. 8.

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Haq, Strategy of Economic Planning, 1. 19. Ibid., 174, 181. 20. Economy of Pakistan, 119. 21. Though delivered without a text, the speech was later published as Mahbub ul Haq, “A Critical Review of the Third Five Year Plan,” Management and National Growth: Proceedings of the Management Convention Held at Karachi (Karachi: West Pakistan Management Association, April 24–25, 1968), 23–33. 22. Khadija Haq was the author of the work on which Mahbub ul Haq’s data was based and he credited her in his speech to the West Pakistan Management Association though perhaps a little ungenerously. He said: “Since my wife was associated with some of these studies, I hope this does not make them less reliable!”

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Prime exponents of the wrong-headed approach are Paul Hirst and Graham Thomson, Globalisation in Question. Libération, 14 August 1996. Financial Times, London, 22 October 1996. An Evaluation of the Tobin Tax, Paper presented by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer at the London Business School, September 1996. For a rehearsal of all the arguments, see The Tobin Tax, ed. Mahbub ul Haq et al., 1996. See The Independent, London, 2 September 1996. Auerbach et al. in Tax Policy and the Economy, ed. Summers and Bradford. Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press 1993. Printed in Managing the World Economy, ed. Peter Kenen. In Kenen, op cit. In The Virtual Community. Chapter Nine.

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Paul Gregg, ed. (1997) Jobs, Wages and Poverty, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, London. Lawrence Grossman (1995) The Electronic Republic, Penguin, London. Ben Hamper (1992) Rivethead, Fourth Estate, London. Charles Handy (1989) The Age of Unreason, Arrow Business Books, London. Charles Handy (1994) The Empty Raincoat, Hutchinson, London. Mahbub ul Haq, ed. (1996) The Tobin Tax, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Nigel Harris (1996) The New Untouchables, I.B. Tauris, London. Paul Harrison, (1983) Inside the Inner City, Pelican, London. David Harvey (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Blackwell, Oxford. John Heilemann (March 1996) ‘The new economy, stupid’, Wired magazine, San Francisco, CA.

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

.: Princeton University Press, 1974); James Tobin, “A Proposal for International Monetary Reform,” Eastern Economic Journal, 4 (1978): 153–59; and Barry Eichengreen, James Tobin, and Charles Wyplosz, “Two Cases for Sand in the Wheels of International Finance,” Economic Journal, 105 (1995): 162–72. Mahbub ul Haq, Inge Kaul, and Isabelle Grunberg have edited a volume (The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996]) of papers commenting on the Tobin proposal. 23. Lawrence H. Summers and Victoria P. Summers, “When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A Cautious Case for a Securities Transactions Tax,” Journal of Financial Services Research, 3(2–3) (1988): 163–88. 24.

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Foot, David K., and Daniel Stoffman. Boom, Bust & Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift. Toronto: McFarlane, Walter & Ross, 1996. Frankel, Jeffrey. On Exchange Rates. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. ———. “How Well Do Foreign Exchange Markets Work: Might a Tobin Tax Help?” in Mahbub ul Haq, Inge Kaul, and Isabelle Grunberg (eds.), The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 41–81. French, Kenneth R., and Richard Roll. “Stock Return Variances: The Arrival of Information and the Reaction of Traders.” Journal of Financial Economics, 17 (1986): 5–26.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

It is a thankless task to try to estimate the total amount of development aid paid by the taxpayers of rich countries to the governments of poor countries, but the figure would be in the trillions of dollars. The amount donated privately through international nongovernmental organizations dedicated to fighting poverty is another large figure. Yet GDP has not grown much for most of the postwar era in sub-Saharan Africa, and poverty remains widespread. Mahbub Ul Haq, a Pakistani economist working at the World Bank in the 1970s and 1980s, and later (after a stint as Pakistan’s finance minister) at the United Nations, introduced an alternative approach to measuring poverty and welfare. The indicator he launched, the Human Development Index (HDI), built on the idea of measuring capabilities rather than income.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Developing nations, or­ga­nized as the Group of 77 (G-77), over the course of the 1960s grew from being less than half of the contracting members to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to being over two-­thirds.1 Neither a seat in the UN nor a voice in GATT equaled automatic power. Yet national in­de­pen­dence made new po­liti­cal strategies pos­ si­ble. Emboldened by the “commodity power” flexed by the Arab oil-­ A W o r l d of S ig n als 219 producing countries in the oil embargo of 1973–1974, Global South nations came together in what economist Mahbub ul Haq called in 1976 a “trade ­union of the poor nations.”2 They wielded state sovereignty “as a shield and a sword,” using the forum of the UN General Assembly to pass resolutions on a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO) and a “Charter of the Economic Rights and Duties of States” in 1974, demanding redistributive justice, colonial reparations, permanent sovereignty over natural resources, stabilization of commodity prices, increased aid, and greater regulation of transnational corporations.3 Neoliberal thinkers saw the Eu­ro­pean Economic Community’s (EEC) “Eurafrican” trade preferences for postcolonial nations as evidence that colonialism had not ended cleanly.

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Gerard Curzon and Victoria Curzon Price, Global Assault on Non-­tariff Trade Barriers (London: Trade Policy Research Centre, 1972), 3. 7. A WORLD OF SIGNALS 1. Robert E. Hudec, Developing Countries in the GATT / WTO ­Legal System, rev. ed. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 31. NOTES TO PAGES 219–221 345 2. Mahbub ul Haq, The Poverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World (New York: ­Columbia University Press, 1976), 169. 3. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Re­sis­tance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79, 82. For the earlier UN history of the demand for permanent sovereignty over natural resources, see Nico Schrijver, Sovereignty over Natu­ral Resources: Balancing Rights and Duties (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chaps. 1–3.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

Or, as Gertner puts it, in a green accounting context, ‘a heightened focus on environmental indicators, for starters, could give environmental legislation far greater urgency’. Amartya Sen has arrived at a similarly pragmatic view. Sen’s involvement with alternate approaches to national accounting goes back to 1990, when he formulated the Human Development Index (HDI) with friend and colleague Mahbub ul Haq. The HDI incorporates into a nation’s accounts GDP modified by education and health. Sen and Haq met at Cambridge University in 1953, where they found they shared an interest in national development and agreed that it was wrong to equate development with economic growth. Haq began to consider measures other than the GDP, mostly in health and education, which he believed might lead to government policies that would massively improve life in countries like his native Pakistan even without large increases in the GDP.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The man who came up with the Scandinavian put-down is Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia. He was having a go not at the twenty-six-component GPI, but at the far simpler three-component Human Development Index. The HDI was one of the first serious attempts to invent an alternative to GDP. It is the brainchild of Pakistani development economist Mahbub ul Haq, who once wrote of GDP, “Any measure that values a gun several hundred times more than a bottle of milk is bound to raise serious questions about its relevance to human progress.” Haq’s index, drawn up in conjunction with Amartya Sen, was launched in 1990. It was simplicity itself, combining three elements: income, literacy, and longevity.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Why should we care whether individuals are capable of being healthy or educated, and so forth? Surely what matters is that they are actually healthy and educated. But taking a public stance on what it means to be healthy and educated would be dictatorial. ‘Capability’ preserves the autonomy of individual choice.26 Sen realised that an alternative index was needed, so, with Mahbub ul Haq and others, he produced the Human Development Index, which includes indicators of a country’s income, education, and health. Other indices include the OECD’s Better Life Index, which contains eleven components, the King of Bhutan’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ goal and the OPHI and UNDP’s multidimensional poverty index.27 The International Labour Organization (ILO) says that social justice – not growth – should be the goal, but acknowledges that there is ‘no objective notion of social justice’.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

These arguments were set out most clearly and early in a public exchange of letters between Representative Villanueva Nunez in Peru and Microsoft's representatives in that country. The exchange can be found on the Web site of the Open Source Initiative, ‹http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php›. 113. A good regional study of the extent and details of educational deprivation is Mahbub ul Haq and Khadija ul Haq, Human Development in South Asia 1998: The Education Challenge (Islamabad, Pakistan: Human Development Center). 114. Robert Evenson and D. Gollin, eds., Crop Variety Improvement and Its Effect on Productivity: The Impact of International Agricultural Research (New York: CABI Pub., 2002); results summarized in Robert Evenson and D.

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These arguments were set out most clearly and early in a public exchange of letters between Representative Villanueva Nunez in Peru and Microsoft's representatives in that country. The exchange can be found on the Web site of the Open Source Initiative, ‹http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php›. 113. A good regional study of the extent and details of educational deprivation is Mahbub ul Haq and Khadija ul Haq, Human Development in South Asia 1998: The Education Challenge (Islamabad, Pakistan: Human Development Center). 114. Robert Evenson and D. Gollin, eds., Crop Variety Improvement and Its Effect on Productivity: The Impact of International Agricultural Research (New York: CABI Pub., 2002); results summarized in Robert Evenson and D.

Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

For his reflections on the East Asian crisis, see his WIDER Annual Lectures 2, UN University, 1997; “An Agenda for Development in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1997, IBRD, 1998. 15. David Felix, “The Tobin Tax Proposal: Background, Issues, and Prospects,” Working Paper No. 191, Washington University, June 1994; see his and other papers in Mahbub Ul Haq, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility (Oxford, 1996). 16. Argentine political scientist Atilio Boron, “Democracy or Neoliberalism?,” Boston Review, Oct.- Nov. 1996; see his State, Capitalism, and Democracy in Latin America (Lynne Rienner, 1996). 9. “Recovering Rights” This is excerpted from an address given at the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, “Globalizing Rights,” Feb. 9, 1999.

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Even those who think everything was better before, and progressives wrecked everything, probably want ‘development’ in the sense of going back to a better time, whenever that was. I cannot muster too much enthusiasm for a rose-tinted past. The United Nations has a whole agency devoted to Development, the UNDP. I find their reports invaluable. Pioneered by Mahbub ul Haq, and influenced by Amartya Sen, UNDP recognises that development involves much more than economic growth. It uses a Human Development Index, HDI, that includes measures of national income, of education, and of life expectancy. Further, rather than divide the world into developed and developing it ranks countries on their HDI.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

The spread of so many low-cost ideas to improve health and education means that wider human progress today depends more on how well countries exploit these ideas than on how fast incomes grow. If, instead of concentrating only on income, we look at life expectancy, years of schooling and income together—a combined statistic that its Pakistani creator, the late economist Mahbub ul Haq, dubbed the Human Development Index (HDI)—then by this measure virtually all countries for which data exists are better off since 1990, and poor countries are clearly converging upon the rich.¶ At present rates of progress, by 2050, more than three-quarters of humanity will attain the same score on the development index that the United Kingdom enjoys today.101 The biggest leaps are happening in countries we don’t talk nearly enough about—like Rwanda, which since 2008 has risen faster up the HDI—17 places—than any other country.102 * * * We see humanity’s potential more clearly now, because we suddenly stand so much closer to it.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The deluge of materialism confounded the image of Keralans enjoying dignified lives on very low incomes. Kerala’s progressive social development and miraculously low fertility had been frequently extolled by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen. In the 1990s, the “Kerala Model” became an inspiration for the UN’s Human Development Index that Sen developed with Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq—an alternative to GDP as the measure of healthy development. Kerala was cited repeatedly during formulation of the UN’s current Millennium Development Goals as a world-class example of gender equality, women’s empowerment, reduced maternal and child mortality, and universal health care and education.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on. Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include: the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number; the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI); the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated); the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability; the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries; and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

The very fact that so many dimensions of well-being are correlated across countries and decades suggests there may be a coherent phenomenon lurking beneath them—what statisticians call a general factor, a principal component, or a hidden, latent, or intervening variable.43 We even have a name for that factor: progress. No one has calculated this vector of progress underlying all the dimensions of human flourishing, but the United Nations Development Programme, inspired by the economists Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, offers a Human Development Index that is a composite of three of the major ones: life expectancy, GDP per capita, and education (being healthy, wealthy, and wise).44 With this chapter we have now examined all of these goods, and it’s an appropriate point to step back and take in the history of quantifiable human progress before we turn to its more qualitative aspects in the next two chapters.