Hu Jang Hu, China. Shezau Khun, a 15 year-old boy, and his farming family live near an Apple factory. As BBC’s Panorama found out, Shezau wanted to help his Dad out, and begged him to let him work in the factory. The father, reluctantly, let him go. They needed the money. Shezau became a factory worker, making iPhone 6s for consumers in the rich nations such as ours. There’s not much money in it, as it turns out. The factory bosses keep the production of an iPhone at $5. They sell in the West for $650. Apple makes nearly $300 profit on each phone.

 

 

When I was 15, there was no need for me to work. When I was 15, thousands of pounds were being poured into my education each year. When I was 15, my parents bought me my second Apple product. At age 15, Shezau felt a duty to help his poor family. At age 15, Shezau worked 280 hours in 4 weeks. At age 15, he died. In China, as across the world, the profit motive is having unspeakable effects. The profit motive is killing. Some die of fatigue. Some are ordered to work until they fall asleep, and die at the hands of machines, or fall onto live wires and are electrocuted. This is happening throughout China. Poor working conditions, overworking, and coercive practices are killing workers.

 

London, UK. In Parliament, our MPs are debating a statistic. Elections are fought over it. Political careers depend on it. Newspapers write about it. People complain about it. This statistic – GDP growth – is deemed the King of Statistics, the way to measure a government’s success, and the way to measure a society’s success.

 

What is the connection between Chinese child labour and worker deaths and the British parliament? In this country, as in most in the world, our political discourse is dominated by GDP growth. We want more and more of one thing, which is having calamitous consequences worldwide: wealth. GDP combines government spending, consumption, and investment into one figure. But around 70% of GDP is consumption. So what our MPs are debating, and what makes and breaks election campaigns, is often how much stuff we’re consuming. So if our 15 year-old boy works even more deadly hours to give us more and more iPhones, and Apple more profit, GDP rises. If a millionaire decides not to give to charity but to buy a sports car, and burns gallons of petrol driving it, GDP rises. If we go to war, GDP rises. If advertising campaigns manufacture even more desires, if every few minutes of our lives we’re told we’ll be happy with the next and newest gadget, GDP rises. And if independent stores close and supermarkets expand, GDP rises.

 

The ideology that reigns supreme in the UK would have it that all these things are great. All these things define success in our society. Now I am not denything that GDP has been a good thing, or that it can be a good thing. GDP growth was essential in the past and, as it measures consumption, can sometimes reflect increasing living standards or government spending for the poor.

 

I have three problems with our present obsession with GDP. Firstly, we seem to have forgotten how rich this country is. We are confusing wealth with what it once was – something which improved our lives and was pretty much essential – with what it is now, a phenomenon that is making us no happier at all. Eugene Proto of our own economics department, amongst others, has raised this issue.

 

Secondly, our preoccupation with GDP growth is a bit like trying to collect as much wine as possible. Instead of focusing on obtaining good or drinkable wine, we are guzzling corked wine and vinegar alongside the claret. GDP rises when the government spends more money on the NHS, or when someone is lifted out of poverty and is now able to afford basic necessities. But, as we have seen, GDP also rises when workers like Shezau are not legally protected, but are squeezed for profit, overworked, and killed. It rises when all sorts of awful things happen. And this is not just a small fraction of GDP; much of our consumption fails to bring happiness and has awful effects worldwide. That is to say, GDP rises as the result of good and bad things, so why is it GDP that we’re chasing and not those good things? Why not measure those things that we want: more education spending, less poverty, better protection and fulfilment for workers etc., directly, rather than lumping in all this good stuff with the iPhones made in awful conditions, the unnecessary aeroplane tickets, and the wars, and counting that?

 

We are in the grip of an unchallenged metric. The stale, clumsy, and useless measure of “success” is giving us the wrong policies. It’s justifying the wrong approach. In fact, those who have managed to institute GDP growth as the key measure of success have been incredibly powerful in shaping our politics. What we need is a fresh evaluation of what we want in society.

 

Maybe, surprise surprise, we cannot condense everything we want in society into one statistic. We need to ask more than one question. We need more than one metric. We need to ask who is benefitting from this GDP growth? What parts of GDP growth do we care about? And what parts do we not? And what are the costs associated with it? Only then can we take off the blindfold and stop guzzling vinegar.

 

William Gildea, January 13 2015