Éloi Laurent and Jacques Le Cacheux, Un nouveau monde économique, Mesurer le bien-être et la soutenabilité au 21^e siècle, Odile Jacob, 2015.

Introduction: Measuring the possibles

“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here!”

Inscription over the doors of Plato’s Academy in Athens

 

We live under the reign of gross domestic product (GDP) – 2014 marked its seventieth anniversary. Created by the American economist Simon Kuznets at the dawn of the 1930s, GDP was adopted as an international standard for sovereign accounting at the conference held by the WW2 Allies in July 1944 in the small town of Bretton Woods, in the middle of nowhere. GDP is used to measure monetizable market activities and is the benchmark of economic growth and living standards, and as such over the decades it has become the ultimate measure of nations’ success – precise, robust and comparable. Lire la suite de « A new economic world. Measuring well-being and sustainability in the 21st century » →