Marilyn Waring was only 22 when she was first elected to the New Zealand Parliament. Re-elected three times she soon became chair of the prestigious Public Expenditures Committee, the sole budget, appropriations, public accounts committee of Parliament. She was shocked and dismayed when she learned that all countries that are members of the UN, practically the whole world, are forced to keep their books and design their budgets under the system of National Income Accounting which only records monetary transactions as Gross Domestic Product.
Waring said in part one that the GDP system counts only cash transactions in the market - in other words it recognizes no value other than money. This means there is no value to peace to the preservation of the environment and no value to unpaid work. The system leaves out half the population of the planet and the planet itself she says.
This segment is about war. Under the GDP accounting system war is the biggest growth industry of all. When John Maynard Keynes and Richard Stone invented the GDP formula during WWII they explicitly designed is as a system of: "how to pay for the war" - end quote. This British system was imposed on the world in 1953. No country may be a member of the UN, deal with the IMF or World Bank unless they do their national accounting based on the GDP"
And some say that unlimited growth along with globalization has driven the wars and environmental destruction of the past 50 plus years. In spite of the magnitude of the problem with Growth and GDP accounting there is an encouraging aspect. If a global system can be designed by two economists, Mr. Keynes and M. Stone, and if it can get imposed - not so long ago - in 1953 - it is possible and necessary to design a different one and set a date for change in the near future.
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Jan. 1, 1996
New Zealand, New York City, Africa, Phillippines etc
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