The insanely specious and myopic reliance on GDP as an unqestioned metric of well being is skewered by David Korten at Yes! Magazine
“as a measure of economic activity, GDP is what it says it is: a gross number. It doesn’t measure how money and wealth circulates through a system, what use it is put to, how the rewards of its use are distributed. It just counts how much comes out of the spigot at the end of the pipe. This completely avoids taking into account what may be the most important indicator of economic health: equality.”
Personally, poverty bothers me perhaps above all because the misery it engenders is so unnecessary. I am OK with accepting that some people have more money and some less except when it gets grotesquely imbalanced into extreme disparities of have and -have-not. I believed growing up that situation principally existed in what we used to call third-world societies, the ranks of which our nation has now joined. I mean, my parents always used to send some money OVER THERE, via one of those long-distance adoption charities. Of course I was then naive.
My parents’ generation was the first to grow up amid the true middle class. Their parents had seen life become so much more economically just that they, as well as their kids, as well as their grandchildren, i.e. me, didn’t realize how thoroughly economic justice here could be reversed.