Genuine Progress Indicator Vision
Genuine Progress Indicators are an alternative way to measure the health of our country compared to conventional indicators such as the GDP. Where the GDP measures all economic activity as positive (including the medical costs of epidemics, the cleanup of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centers, and the rebuilding of New Orleans), the GPI subtracts destructive costs and adds in social and economic benefits ignored by the GDP.
As part of my economics course at Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) in 2002, I wrote this fictional newspaper article account of what Genuine Progress Indicators might look like if implemented in Oregon. It was a popular essay among my fellow students and the BGI faculty. The paper provides a positive vision of what we might accomplish if we had such a measurement system in place.