The Dasgupta review urged the world’s governments to come up with a different form of national accounting from GDP and use one that includes the depletion of natural resources.
It should be net national income, not gross domestic product. This is well known enough that – for I think it was he – Dan Davies was making jokes about it more than a decade back.
Off topic and FAO Bongo
I see Murphy realises he was made a fool of and is now blustering away.
“I returned from a robust riverbank walk on Sunday to discover a comment on the blog from what purported to be a solicitor suggesting this piece was potentially libellous if I could not evidence my claims. As it happens that evidencing was not difficult. But, whenever such suggestion is made the first, cautious, reaction is to take the post down whilst the claim is investigated. So, this I did.
I completed my investigation of the claim yesterday by phoning the solicitor whose name, address and email were given in the comment posted to the blog (which will not be published). It transpired he knew nothing of it. The comment used his identity, but falsely. He now has the information and is considering whether to refer the matter to the police, I understand.”
I have often thought we should look also at a measure I would call Debt Adjusted Growth. In the days of Gordon Brown I started to get annoyed that we were borrowing gajillions to spray around and then gleefully reporting ‘yet another quarter of growth’. I thought we should report DAG instead of GDP (= closing GDP minus growth in debt, all over starting GDP). Keeping this positive would require a proper recognition of the nature of borrowed growth vs real productive growth.
“ I returned from a robust riverbank walk ”
An interesting euphemism for I checked out Tim Worstall’s blog.
BiND-He must have hit the L instead of the N key.
Patrick–that is a very good idea. It would have to be done by a private group as no political or bureaucratic scum would ever switch to so truthful a statistic. If we had the figures to hand each year it would be a wonderful counter to so much lying BS.
“to hand”????
I should have blasted my brain with mindbleach after the first paragraph.Some images are dangerous.
Some discussion of this here:
https://twitter.com/clim8resistance/status/1356533569783496704?s=20
About depleting natural resources. You deplete them by using them, if you want to stop depleting them you have to stop using them. If you don’t use them that is much the same as not having them. So why not carry on using them until you have depleted them and then stop? I understand that stuff can in some cases be recycled or replaced but, for stuff that can only be used once, surely the basic logic here is unassailable.
Stonyground,
Because you want your competitors to consume their resources until you are the only one that has any, then you can charge what you like for it.
One wee problem with this idea is that many resources have an annoying habit of not running out when the experts said they would, like oil. So all the suffering they wanted people to undergo wasn’t actually necessary.
One wee problem with this idea is that many resources have an annoying habit of not running out when the experts said they would, like oil.
Yep. Fifty years ago the left was gloating we only had 30 years of oil left. Peak oil was their mantra before they discovered climate change/global warming as their moral high ground.
We have a mechanism for ensuring that either we bring forth more supply, or some form of substitution, if we’re going to run out of something, its called a price signal.