The Movement for New
Metrics
To assess the true health of our
society, we need to measure more than GDP, as Roosevelt Chief
Economist Joseph Stiglitz, French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, and
OECD Director of Statistics and Chief Statistician Martine Durand
write in their new book Measuring
What Counts.
“Getting the measure right—or at least a lot more precise—is crucially
important, especially in our metrics- and performance-oriented
society, where we judge ourselves by how well we do in certain
well-defined measures. If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the
wrong thing,” Stiglitz writes in the book’s introduction. “If our
measures tell us everything is fine when it really isn’t, we won’t
make the right decisions. And it should be clear that, in spite of the
increases in GDP, in spite of the 2008 crisis being well behind us,
everything is not
fine.”
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A global movement:
This week, Iceland Prime Minister “Katrin Jakobsdottir has teamed up
with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and New Zealand's PM
Jacinda Ardern to promote a ‘well-being’ agenda. Ms Jakobsdottir
called for ‘an alternative future based on well-being and inclusive
growth.’” Read
more from BBC.
The Price of Carbon
In 2017, a report
by the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices—chaired by Stiglitz and Lord Nicholas
Stern—called for explicit carbon price trajectories (rather than a
single price) in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. In a
new working paper, Stiglitz further explains the analytics driving
that report’s recommendation, providing “a better sense of the
circumstances under which a deviation from the ‘single price’ might be
desirable, and the form that such deviations might best take.”
Read
on.
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In other news: At the
two-week COP25 conference that began in Madrid this week,
representatives from over 200 countries are working to crystallize
climate targets ahead of 2020,
when the Paris Agreement will officially take effect. “Delegates at the conference will seek to
finalize outstanding elements of the Paris Agreement. Those include
the rules that govern nations’ abilities to ‘off-set’ carbon emissions
by paying for reductions of emissions in other countries, and how to
fund compensation for countries that are hit by severe climate change
impacts. Next year, with those rules in place, countries will try to
negotiate higher and more ambitious international targets than those
agreed in Paris in 2015.” Read
more from Time.
The Racial Rules of Corporate
Power
“About 40 years of rules written in
favor of the powerful and built upon long-standing, hidden
rules of race have
resulted in today’s high-profit, low-wage economy. As
corporations consolidated and
gained market power, they used this power to extract profits from
the most
vulnerable—specifically targeting communities of color for
exploitation, extraction, and
exclusion. The government has a moral responsibility to right the
wrongs of the past and to live up to its mandate to
promote economic inclusion and social equity,” Roosevelt Fellow
Darrick Hamilton and Roosevelt Director of Policy and Advocacy
Madeline Neighly write in a new issue brief. Read
more.
The Future of Prescription Drug
Policy
As
argued in a new Roosevelt factsheet,
curbing prescription drug prices requires a one-two punch of
restructured markets and expanded public power. Among the possible
solutions: more robust industrial policy, a public option for drug
manufacturing, and a federal entity for price negotiation. Learn more
in the full
issue brief from Roosevelt and the Great Democracy
Initiative.
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Overpatented, overpriced: As an exclusive report from I-MAK explores, patent and monopoly
power in the pharmaceutical industry are primary drivers of sky-high
drug prices: “. . . the top grossing drugs have on average 125 patent
applications, which are filed with a strategic intent to extend the
commercial monopolies far beyond the intended twenty years of
protection. Such filings allow drugmakers to a) increase the price of
the branded drugs by an average of 68 percent in six years, and b)
seek to stall generic competition by an average of 38 years.”
Read
on.
Who Benefits from Free
College
A New York Times
Debatable
piece on free college cites recent analysis from Roosevelt Fellow Mike Konczal, who
“estimates that families within the top 1 percent of the income
distribution would capture 1.4 percent of total spending on free
college—slightly regressive in relative terms, but
arguably not an exorbitant price to pay for the 98.6 percent of
spending that would benefit everyone else.” Read
more of Konczal’s analysis on
Medium.
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