Breaking Free from GDP Trap

The existing economic model has been widely criticized for prioritizing GDP growth over environmental sustainability and social equity

- SHOVANLAL CHAKRABORTY

Let us face some facts first. Global governance has nearly collapsed. Geopolitical governance is broken. Global financial systems and global supply chains are breaking. The United Nations is unable to stop the genocidal massacre of women and children in Palestine because the most powerful country in the world is unwilling to do it. Countries are harming nature's systems with their ambitions to climb GDP rankings, which are supposed to be indicators of their level of development. Even within the richest, so-called democratic countries, citizens do not trust their governments to govern them equitably. The pressure of economic exploitation is breaking the ability of nature's system to sustain itself. Humanity is facing an existential crisis with depleting fresh water sources, degraded soils and runaway climate change.

Powerful nations are empowering their armies with more technologies and artificial intelligence. The present danger is that more wars in the future will kill people even faster than climate change will. The bottom-up paradigm of cooperative change does improve the lives of everyone in the community. Do we need more evidence that top-down solutions for global problems have failed? As Albert Einstein and others said, continuing to solve problems with the same way of thinking that has caused them is madness. Let's think scientifically for a moment.