generations.
Indeed, the dangers posed by global warming have become a major worry for the next generation of youth these past few years, as they start to demand more urgent climate action. Inspired to a large degree by peers such as Swedish school student Greta Thunberg, hundreds of thousands of climate activists have been hitting the streets, giving speeches to whomever would listen and changing their own habits where possible. We understand their concerns and for this reason invited Greta Thunberg to speak at our Annual Meeting in 2019. Thunberg's foremost message was that “our house is on fire”86 and that we should act with an utmost sense of urgency.
We hope we will heed the next generation's call to create a more sustainable economic system with more urgency than in 1973. Since Aurelio Peccei's speech, decades have passed. Since then, we failed to act with sufficient results and have, in doing so, worsened the economic, health, and environmental outlook for future generations—and still left many people behind economically. It was Kuznets’ final curse. He had never suggested that our economic system was indefinitely sustainable.
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We did not listen to Simon Kuznets’ cautious warnings: he told us GDP was a poor measure for broad societal progress, as it was more geared toward measuring production capacity than any other signs of prosperity. He wasn't convinced that the declining income inequality during the 1950s would be a permanent feature but rather saw it as a temporary effect of the specific technological advances that favored inclusive growth at the time. And he never subscribed to the notion of any “Environmental Kuznets’ Curve,” which hypothesized that harm to the environment would decline as an economy developed. We are now paying the price for it.
But before we try to make up for those errors in our economic development though, we must first ask: Is another development path already available? And to what extent can it be found in the East, in the rise of Asia?
Notes
1 1 Kuznets was born in Pinsk, then part of the Russian Empire. Nowadays, Pinsk is part of Belarus.
2 2 “Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics”, Chapter 5: The Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets, Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, Nathaniel Grotte, University of Chicago Press, p. 105, https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c12917/c12917.pdf.
3 3 A direct quotation of Kuznets’ autobiography for the Nobel Prize committee. The Nobel Prize, “Simon Kuznets Biographical,” 1971, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/biographical/.
4 4 “GDP: A brief history,” Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, January 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/gdp-a-brief-history/.
5 5 Ibidem.
6 6 “Beyond GDP: Economists Search for New Definition of Well-Being,” Der Spiegel, September 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html.
7 7 Phone interview with Diane Coyle by Peter Vanham, August 18, 2019.
8 8 Measured in constant 2010 US dollars.
9 9 World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), 1961–2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG.
10 10 “What's a Global Recession,” Bob Davis, The Wall Street Journal, April 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/22/whats-a-global-recession/.
11 11 United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, September 2018, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/informationGateway.php.
12 12 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, Updated July 2019, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/07/18/WEOupdateJuly2019.
13 13 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, April 2019, Appendix A https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WEO/2019/April/English/text.ashx?la=en.
14 14 This concerns GDP growth based on market exchange rates (see corresponding row on table cited in footnotes 11 and 12).
15 15 “World Bank Country and Lending Groups,” World Bank, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups.
16 16 “The Great Emerging-Market Growth Story is Unravelling,” The Financial Times, June 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/ad11f624-8b8c-11e9-a1c1-51bf8f989972.
17 17 See the IMF estimate of 2019 above. For the IIF estimate of Q1 2020, see https://www.iif.com/Portals/0/Files/content/Research/Global%20Debt%20Monitor_July2020.pdf.
18 18 “Coronavirus Lifts Government Debt to WWII Levels—Cutting It Won't Be Easy,” The Wall Street Journal, August 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-lifts-government-debt-to-wwii-levelscutting-it-wont-be-easy-11598191201.
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