I finally just read the NYT Sunday Magazine piece called ?The Rise and Fall of the GDP.? Even though I'm a week late, I can't help but comment. The story strikes at the core of economics and society, and it's also got a really interesting education angle.
The piece is about the perils of using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth as the be-all indicator of economic progress, and the current search for a new and better metric. The limitations of GDP are well known and the critique is not new: ?John Kenneth Galbraith made the same argument in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society. In short, once an economy has developed to the point where demand must be manufactured (by advertisers or derivates contracts writers, for example), then consumption has little to do with well-being. Extra production and consumption ? GDP growth ? often just lead to extra waste. At this point, a society should emphasize more direct quality-of-life improvements, while still, of course, proactively staving off any economic recession.
As reported in the NYT piece, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and the National Academy of Sciences have taken the critique of GDP seriously. In separate but related initiatives, they are working on developing a gold-standard metric of national prosperity that would include overall economic production but also other key indicators. In both cases ? and as Galbraith suggested a half-century ago ? education is prominently included. The idea is that education has fundamental value, like health, related to GDP and employment in many ways but also independently important.
As it turns out, the NAS-led initiative, called State of the USA, is funded by the federal government, through the recent health care reform law. Rather than produce a single number like GDP, though, it will devise a dashboard of key indicators. Done well, it could be enormously valuable public resource, encouraging politicians to set more tangible goals and making it easier for the public to hold them accountable.
State of the USA could easily fail, though, if the experts cannot come to consensus about which statistics deserve a dial on the dashboard. It's in anticipation of that that I pose the following challenge to my (three) readers: what are the five or so most critical indicators of our country's educational attainment? So far, economists have suggested using literacy and school enrollment, perhaps because they are the least ambiguous. President Obama has made college completion his most tangible education goal. But what about NAEP scores? The number of books that we read? What about the correlation between parent and child educational attainment (the lower the correlation, the less that demography determines destiny)? The number of scientific awards received by Americans, as a proxy for creativity?
My sense is that there is no single most important statistic, but that folks could come to compromise on five or so.
-Mickey Muldoon