Fred Curatolo

On your commute home tonight, imagine you pass a multiple-car accident. A distracted driver, eating a fast food burger, chain-smoking, and yelling into his cellphone at the lawyer handling his divorce, misses a red light and a huge accident occurs.

Under the current economic system, he’s a hero. All his socially counterproductive actions — the smoking, the divorce, the gas-guzzling car — result in monetary transactions and growth.

That’s the scenario Edmonton economist Mark Anielski uses to explain just how ineffective our current methods of measuring societal well-being really are. The author of The Economics of Happiness has been working on different ways of measuring overall societal health since the 1990s.

The main method currently used to measure growth, Gross Domestic Product or GDP, includes all kinds of destructive behaviour and events as a part of growth. “We always hear the same old line about getting back to growth,” Anielski says. “That’s like saying ‘Let’s get back to cancer.’ If we have an economy of well-being, it doesn’t have to have the same level of production and consumption.”

People who don’t generate a lot of monetary transactions, meanwhile, don’t contribute to growth, and so their actions are considered negative in a GDP model. “I’m a villain,” Anielski says. “I could be making a lot more money. I could have an office that I rent for a $1,000 a month, but I don’t need to. I ride my bike instead of owning a second car. All my choices are going against the growth model.”

Beyond these individual actions, governments are also starting to question how economic well-being is measured. And with Anielski’s help, the City of Edmonton is taking a step towards a new kind of comprehensive balance sheet, one that would include Genuine Progress Indicators, or GPI, which measures quality of life and happiness as opposed to just growth. By the end of the year, SEE Magazine has learned, the city will release a report tracking these indicators from 1981 to the present. 

The report will essentially look at whether the quality of life in the city has improved, says David Faber, executive director of Strategic Management with the city.

“Wealth is more than the money in your pocket,” he says. “Do you feel safe? Do you have access to transportation? Access to parks? Do you have leisure time?”

The report’s findings include both positive and negative signs. There’s an improved trade balance, with exports exceeding imports — a 45.5 per cent improvement over 1981. On the other hand, transportation costs per capita are up 167.8 per cent. As for social well-being, educational attainment was up 38 per cent since 1981, but reported family disputes also went up 127.5 per cent. And under the environment heading, the quality of water in the North Saskatchewan River went up 77.2 per cent, but greenhouse gas emissions are also up 13 per cent.

Intangible Goals, And Practical Decisions
Bringing this kind of data to city council is the critical part of Anielski’s work. “I can tell council that the average commuting time is going up 30 seconds every year, regardless of what they do,” he says. “You put up a multimillion-dollar overpass like 23rd Avenue, or another lane on Groat Road, and it begs the question — what was the expected return on well-being for the tax dollar?”

Coun. Karen Leibovici has been calling for a more comprehensive bottom line for years. Although she hasn’t seen the new report yet, she’s looking forward to the additional information from administration that will provide a broader base on which council can make decisions.

“Dollars and cents are immediate,” she says. “But when we are projecting 10 or 20 years down the road and looking at the impacts of our decisions, that’s when other things like the environmental and social factors come into play.”

The new indicators should help bring long-term goals and the city vision (such as increased use of sustainable transportation or environmental preservation) into council chambers in a more practical and concrete way, Leibovici says. It will also help the city track the progress it’s making towards these goals.

Coun. Kim Krushell also welcomes the additional information, but she cautions that the GPIs are not a science, that council decisions are complex, and these indicators will be taken in context with a lot of other information. She points out, for instance, that the 23rd Avenue interchange wasn’t all about commuting times, but rather the liability issues for the city. “Quality of life indicators are not the be-all and end-all,” she says. “They are just another tool that can be applied to help politicians or corporations make better decisions.”

While Anielski agrees that GPIs are only part of the equation, he says it’s crucial for governments to at least begin asking these kinds of quality of life questions. He cites the example of local farmers looking to preserve agricultural lands in the northeast as an example.

“The truth is, we run this enterprise called the city without a balance sheet,” he says. “There’s no balance sheet, so you can’t tell me how much agricultural land there is in the city boundaries, because they don’t have that data. How can you have a conversation about food security when you don’t even know what your assets are?”

Big Questions For Alberta
Edmonton is not the only government trying to get a better handle on quality of life. Anielski is also working on the province’s land-use framework, which will look at the regional environmental and social repercussions of development. “You read the stuff in the newspapers,” he says, “and you think we’re just dinosaurs, but we are doing some leading-edge stuff.”

In fact, as far back as 1992 under then-premier Ralph Klein, Alberta was looking at ways of measuring outcomes for tax dollars, and Anielski did a GPI report for Alberta. Unfortunately, Klein didn’t do much to respond to the report, Anielski writes in The Economics of Happiness, other than to say that its writers were entitled to their own view of progress. The Pembina Institute also did a GPI study for Alberta’s 2005 centennial, which showed GDP gaining while GPI decreased.

Anielski poses the province a moral challenge: if the overall happiness of the province is indeed optimized at a certain GDP level, and Alberta is making three or four times that amount, could Alberta accept a lower level of economic growth? The province needs to have that conversation, he says. How much oil can be extracted without compromising the Athabasca ecological system? Or are Albertans willing to sacrifice the region’s happiness for more oil? 

He’s not prescribing any one course of action, he says; he just wants to challenge conventional thinking about the intrinsic benefits of economic growth. And he’s certainly not trying to tell anyone to get rid of their cars, stop smoking, or spend more time with their families.

“We can quibble about what we consider bad,” he says. “We are never going to resolve those issues, but we can agree that a car crash or a hurricane is undesirable. We can all agree on that.”

Mark Anielski will be speaking at the Parkland Institute’s fall conference, Crisis And Opportunity: It’s Time for a Progressive Economy (Nov. 20-21). For more information, go to www.parkland.arts.ualberta.ca.