Many of us have suffered, one way or another, from the agonizing traffic on EDSA. As thousands of us look at an endless sea of brake lights, inching toward locations we would reach later than anticipated, we would have already wasted what should have been productive work hours and burned liters of expensive fuel.
Everyone — motorists and commuters alike — pays for the hidden cost of traffic jams. Paradoxically, this gridlock boosts our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Wasted fuel, rising toll fees, and the myriad transactions that happen in daily commute are factored in the country’s GDP as an additional income to the economy.
Growth is reflected in the metrics while we suffer from traffic exhaustion, but no richer.
Through the years, GDP growth has been consistently presented as the best indicator of economic success. Politicians exult in it, economists project it, investors scrutinize it, and governments construct whole narratives around it. GDP statistics cited in headline after headline, quarter after quarter, either sing praises about robust growth figures or sound alarm bells about slowing expansion.
Somewhere along the way, we have stopped referring to GDP as a useful measurement tool and have begun treating it as the destination itself. A recent essay published in The Guardian by Olivier De Schutter, a former United Nations expert on poverty, together with several economists and development thinkers, argues that the world’s obsession with endless economic growth is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
