The speech that Bob Kennedy made to the students of Kansan University on March 18, 1968, three months before he was killed, made history as one of the first speeches against the use of gross domestic product as an indicator of a country's well-being . “GDP includes air pollution, cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of weekend carnage,” said Bob Kennedy. “GDP measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our our knowledge. It measures everything, in short, except what makes life truly worth living. It can tell us everything about America but not whether we can be proud of being Americans”. Remember the Professor Leonardo Becchetti (full professor of political economy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, @Leonardobecchet), telling FIRSTonline about the birth of the Bes 2013 project.
FIRST online: Professor, where did the idea of Bes come from, measurement of fair and supportive well-being?
PEAKS: It all stems from the awareness, growing stronger over the years, that the gross domestic product is not an indicator of well-being. The GDP collects within itself all the operations that have a market value. But, let's think about it: there are many things that have no market value but at the same time give us happiness (for example voluntary work) and, conversely, there are other things that have market value and form part of the GDP but which they do not give us happiness. I think of prisons, weapons, reconstruction after earthquakes. All the examples made by Bob Kennedy in his famous speech. The only function of GDP is to measure the economic strength of a country; on the other hand, to understand the level of well-being of citizens, something else is needed. This is where we started from.
FIRST online: The debate over the inadequacy of GDP has been going on for decades now. At what point does Italy fit with the Bes 2013 project born from the collaboration of Istat and Cnel?
PEAKS: After Kennedy's speech, the matter was not talked about for a long time. Until, in 2008, the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission drew attention to the problem and underlined the need to shift the focus from measuring the production of an economy to measuring the well-being of people defined in a multidimensional sense. Material living conditions, health, education, social relations, environment, safety. Then we arrived: Italy is the first country to set up a project like Bes. The peculiarity of our work is that it is a participatory process.
FIRST online: In what sense, a participatory process?
PEAKS: The drawback of many of these indices is that they are often made by experts. Our Bes, on the other hand, is different because Istat - to get to the construction of areas of well-being - has involved various social partners: in addition to Cnel, the WWF, Legambiente, the National Consumer Council, the Third Sector Forum, the Women's Council and many others. Each of these realities was asked to create "domains of well-being" based on their skills. Domains which were then collected, analyzed and subsequently enriched with some indicators. I give an example. One of the twelve domains we have arrived at is the environment. Within this sphere of well-being, the indicators that have been chosen are: drinking water, quality of coastal marine waters, quality of urban air, availability of urban green areas, areas with hydrogeological problems, contaminated sites, protected terrestrial areas, areas protected marine areas, areas of particular naturalistic interest, concern for the loss of biodiversity, material flows (materials transformed into emissions or waste), energy from renewable sources and CO2 emissions and other alternating climate gases.
FIRST online: And after having created these domains? How did you arrive at the real data?
PEAKS: The design of the domains and indicators then allowed Istat to create a map on well-being. You can find it on the website www.misuredelbenessere.it. You can see for yourself how the data is collected based on the territorial scope. If, for example, you click on the "drinking water" indicator of the environment domain, you will have a map of Italy based on the census of water for civil use; if you click instead on the "availability of urban green" indicator, you will have information on the Italian regions based on the square meters of urban green per inhabitant.
FIRST online: Now what will be the next step? Will you arrive at a single numerical indicator, such as GDP?
PEAKS: No. Well-being is measured on the basis of various indicators, it is not a number like GDP. The idea we have is that the Bes is a sort of dashboard of the machine: a set of indices that measure the state of health of the country. It cannot be summarized in one figure. What we have now set out to do is transfer the data to even lower territorial levels (provincial, municipal) so as to have more information available.
FIRST online: Will the Bes replace or supplement the GDP?
PEAKS: The GDP indicator will not disappear. It is an important thermometer for the country; just think that one of the 12 domains of the Bes is economic well-being and GDP is a part of this area of well-being. Furthermore, let's not forget that the public debt must be paid with the gross domestic product because it is it that indicates how much economic value we create. But the wealth of nations, to put it to Smith, does not lie in a number or in an indicator of economic value. The wealth of nations is in the happiness of its citizens; happiness which is not separated from economic wealth but which goes, by now we know, well beyond it.
