Evening Must-Read: Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker: Capitalism Redefined

Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker: Capitalism Redefined:

For everyone but the top 1 percent of earners, the American economy is broken…. Our economic policy discussions are nearly always focused on making us wealthier and on generating the economic growth to accomplish that…. Kuznets and other economists highlighted that GDP was not a measure of prosperity…. Moses Abramovitz cautioned that “we must be highly skeptical of the view that long-term changes in the rate of growth of welfare can be gauged even roughly from changes in the rate of growth of output.”… Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems… prosaic, like a crunchier potato chip, to the profound, like cures for deadly diseases. Ultimately, the measure of a society’s wealth is the range of human problems that it has found a way to solve and how available it has made those solutions to its citizens…. This all implies that we must find new ways to measure progress. In the same way that no good doctor would measure the health of a person by just one factor—her temperature, say—the economy shouldn’t be measured with just GDP…