Finding a Meaningful Path to Prosperity

The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income. The volume of output an economy can produce, import, export, or finance sketches only the crudest outlines of literally how well human exchange causes people, communities, society, and future generations to fare.

Simon Kuznets, 1971 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Umair Haque (among the Top 50 Thinkers) the author of Betterness* is making a great analogy between the first car was ever build and our economic system. The first car didn’t have the speedometer, but the rev counter to check whether the engine was working. In fact there was no interest to measure speed limits in a time when reaching the destination at all was the main priority. Something similar happens to our economic rev counter which is measuring "how furiously” the engine of global commerce and business is pumping, but without the speedometer we have no indicator that tells us whether all this movement that sucks both human and planet resources is generating “the motive force that lifts people from penury to prosperity”. * you can find this quote about S. Kuznets on page 12 of Betterness.

Umair Haque interviewed by Thinkers50 from HavasMediaLabs on Vimeo.