Upstream - Stop GDP with Martin Whitlock

Episode Date: May 16, 2016

In this interview we spoke with Martin Whitlock, co-founder of Stop-GDP.org and author of Human Politics : Human Value: Towards a society for people as we really are (not as governments, economists and big corporations would like us to be). We spoke about how GDP is a scam and how the money economy is a terrible idea.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hello and welcome to Upstream. My name is Della Duncan and today I'm in conversation with Martin Whitlock, a writer and campaigner, the co-founder of Stop GDP, and the author of Human Politics, Human Value, towards a society for people as we really are, not as governments, economists, and big corporations would like us to be. Welcome, Martin. Thank you very much, Ella. Martin, would you start by just telling us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to do the work that you do? Well, about myself, I've done all sorts of things in education, in business, and also in a lot of building work, actually, as it happens, which is sort of relevant to this, because building work is all about solving problems. And I see economics as fundamentally about solving

problems, politics also. So I came to this, I think, because I was so frustrated. And actually, I think I have been since I was really quite young. I think even as a teenager growing up, I thought, this is just crazy. Why is the world organized in such a way that it's so hard to do the sort of things that you want to do, to live the sort of life which you could easily lead if things were organized better? Why is that made so difficult for us? Why are we so focused on creating complexity in our lives when actually people's wants are comparatively straightforward, comparatively simple in terms of their relationships, in terms of their families, in terms of their communities, in terms of the things they need to consume or want to consume. It's not that hard,

it's not that complicated and we have made it unbelievably complicated. And that was clear to me from an early age. And I spent most of my life in the spaces between all the other things I was doing, puzzling about that. And finally, I decided, I've got to get something done on paper about this. It's interesting that you mentioned that you're a builder, because I have a friend who was interested in economics and politics

and actually gave that up to become a carpenter because they said I can actually see the progress of the work that I'm doing and actually start and stop so have you found now that you've kind of entered into this work that you're able to solve some of these problems or actually have some clarity through your writing well I think writing helps to bring clarity for me a building interestingly enough for me was never about sort of working out exactly what I was going to do and then and then doing it it's always about the process so yes I think there is a connection and I can well understand why somebody who'd worked in a sort of headspace for many many years might want to

get involved in something which is much more hands-on much more tactile because actually you need you need both and the great thing about construction is that it calls on both those sets of skills. There's a lot of thinking, a lot of working out involved, but then you've got to actually do it with your hands, and that's the great part. When I asked you how you describe yourself, you said a writer and campaigner. I'm wondering why not an economist? Why do you shy away from that term? Well, I think primarily because uh most professional economists would be very obsessed if i describe myself in those terms uh economics is a is a an academic field i suppose just as philosopher would be a linguist or something like that and i

think you do you do need to have a professional academic background of some sort in in a specialism in order to describe yourself in those terms so I think any of us can you call describe myself as a writer these days I think increasingly anyone can describe themselves as a musician or as a painter but I still think I'd be in trouble if I tried to characterize myself explicitly as an economist although I do think that economics is at the heart of politics, and any of us can characterize ourselves as being interested or involved in politics. So I don't think economics helps itself by being sort of identified as an academic field. I mean, as you know, the term

used to be political economy. That was the perception that economics and politics are fundamentally the same thing in these sorts of contexts. So I don't use the word, but economics is my interest as a way into politics, as it were. I think the two things are just totally combined. So how do you learn about the things that you write about? What's your method of research or what's your methodology? Well, obviously some reading, but the majority of my methodology is around thought thinking and observation seeing how the world works I've been involved as I say in business and education a lot in my life a lot of other things too but those sort of things those activities give you really insights into how the world turns how organizations work how business

works I've been involved in the retail industry which is extraordinary sort of space to be in when you see the sort of margins that are made and the way that deals are done and that sort of thing. I've been tangentially involved in the oil business at the retail end, so I've seen to some extent how the big oil companies operate. And similarly, negotiations with bankers and those sort of things, all these sort of experiences give you opportunities for observation to see how things happen and to question the fundamental principles of how things are going on. So mostly I would say observation, mostly frustration at what I've observed and experienced in my life. But obviously there's reading in there as well, there's research,

there's data. But my drive is by observation and my experience of life. And the subtitle of your book, Human Politics, Human Value, is towards a society for people as we really are and not how governments, economists and big corporations would like us to be. So if we could unpick that a little bit, what do you mean by how they would like us to be? How do you see through your observation, through your experiences, how do they want us to be? Well, I think the key to that is probably the word money, because we think the economy is about money. It must be. Surely that's what it's all about. And that's exactly how governments, economists and big corporations would like us to think about the economy, would like us to think about how we operate in terms of making our living and that sort of thing.

But if you look at how people are how they live their lives actually money is way way down the list of their priorities money is a is a requirement in order to be able to acquire some of the things that they need but most of the really useful things we do in our life we do for nothing so we look after our children we cook meals for ourselves and our families we clean the house we go for walks we do all sorts of sorts of things which are not directed in any way towards either making or spending money. And actually, I would say one of the most, well, the central of all of those is in our human relationships. People value their relationships

probably above anything else, and there isn't or shouldn't be any money involved in that. So people don't naturally live lives which are driven by money values and and yet we are treated as if we do we are treated as this uh this phrase some that economists use homo economicus or economic person as it were as if we all are driven by our financial self-interests our material self-interests always out to get as much as we possibly can for ourselves. And we'll always do the best deal. This was, for example, the principle upon which the denationalisation, the privatisation of electricity and gas and water and telephones and things in Britain was based on. The idea that if it was an open market, people had to compete, companies had to compete for customers, and the companies would be more efficient, and the customers

would always go where the best deal was to be had. Well, we know that's not the case. We know there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that people are good at finding the best deal and particularly interested in finding the best deal and that any of this really improves the efficiency of the companies. What it does is it makes the companies very efficient at competing with their customers to get as much money out of them as possible. It hasn't made them very good at competing with their customers to get as much money out of them as possible but it hasn't made them very good at competing with themselves so people aren't like that people don't operate in the way that governments and classical economists and companies want them to and i'm pointing that out and saying let's organize a society around the way people actually are

rather than the way in which we theorize that they should be. And that means organising it around what I've called human value, which is the things that bring real benefit and quality and value to people's lives, which could be something as basic as a good night's sleep. You know, working every hour that God gives in order to make ends meet. Sounds like great if you're the government and you're talking about we're creating more jobs, people working more hours, that's a good thing from the government's point of view. Actually, working too many hours means you don't sleep enough. It means you don't spend enough time with your families. It means you don't have enough leisure time. It's really bad for your life. So it's not an economic good at all.

But we think it is because we think it's more work, it's more hours, it's more GDP, it's more productivity, whatever it might be. So that's the key to that, really. I've always been clear that if you want to know what's going on in the world, look at what people do, not at what they say. And opinion polls are fairly useless from that point of view. People at the supermarket, they're not stocking their shelves on the basis of what people say they want. They're stocking their shelves entirely on the basis of what people actually want,

what they take off the shelf. The entire model is based on observation, and politics should be the same, but politics is not the same. Politics and economics are based on what people are expected to want, rather than what they actually want. So where did this separation or division come from? Or was politics and economics ever based on human value in your mind? Or is this something that we're just moving towards, ideally? Well, I wouldn't say it was that recent, but I would say that it's certainly been made a lot worse by the increased complexification of life and of the economy.

The complexity of the supply chain, the way in which the person who produces something is so far removed now from the person who consumes it means that there's tremendous number of opportunities for other people to try to create value or take money out of the process of buying and selling something and that has encouraged the financialization of the economy, the complexity of business. So to give you an example, in the old days you wanted to buy a pair of shoes, you would go to a cobbler or a bootmaker and you would be talking across the counter,

not to a shop assistant, but to a person who actually makes shoes. They would measure your foot and they'd make your shoes. And there would be no intermediary as such. So it was absolutely clear that what you were paying was what they were receiving. Of course they would have things they'd have to pay for like the shop and the leather and the tools but also their time was in there. That's a very very simple transaction in which money is involved but it's not a complex financial transaction. These days you buy a pair of shoes you go high street you buy a pair of trainers almost certainly

made in China or possibly Vietnam or possibly Bangladesh. They're probably coming out of a factory out there for about three pounds or something like that, possibly even less. They get to Felix Day Docks probably and that may cost another couple of pounds, so maybe five pounds by the time you get to Felix Day Docks. You might pay 80 pounds on the high street. So somewhere there's 75 pounds of complication, of complexity in the system, which is allowing people to take a cut until you pay your 80 pounds for your pair of shoes. And that, I think, is getting worse and worse the whole time.

So I wouldn't say it's completely new. If you think about the importing of spices into Europe from the Far East 500 years ago, you know, these things have been going on for a long time. But it's just getting progressively worse. I think we have reached a tipping point now i think certainly in um uh you know the big western economies i think maybe in the last 20 to 30 years uh we've really reached a tipping point where most of what we now do is unnecessarily complicated financial activity in the economy which doesn't benefit either the consumer or the producer so going back to my shoe analogy now if you as i say if you buy a pair of shoes you probably got i mean probably dozens quite literally dozens of people have got the finger in the pie before those those get to you and none of that or most of that is not adding to the pair of shoes pair of shoes is as it

is as it comes off the production line in Bangladesh, for example. That is not going to change before it gets to you. But the amount of money involved is going to change enormously. And all of that is transactional cost, effectively. Now, some of it is unavoidable. The transport clearly is unavoidable. Some sort of packaging is necessary. It's got to sit on a shelf in a shop for a while.

There are certain things which are necessary but undesirable. In other other words things that you'd like as little of as possible but nonetheless you're going to have to have some of them and that would also apply possibly to some of the accountant's fees that are in there some of the legal fees that are in there but you've also got a lot of things in there which are just straight profit margins and they're not just profit margins to the shopkeeper they're also profit margins to the wholesaler and to the importer. So all of that stuff is effectively transactional activity adding to the price of the item as it comes from the producer to the consumer. Now, I think the key to it is to understand the different sorts of work that there are. When we talk about that, we begin to get a sense of what's transactional, what isn't, and how there are plenty of grey areas in all of this.

of what's transactional, what isn't, and there are plenty of grey areas in all of this. So I'd like to identify four rough categories of work which we can use. So at one end would be something like currency trading or financial trading. People in the city of London who are turning over literally billions of pounds every day simply trading, trading money, trading shares, trading securities, and nothing new is being created to any of that. That is absolutely and totally unproductive work. It makes a profit for somebody because they are creating a margin out of the turnover of money in their activity, and they're able to keep that for themselves.

But anybody's profit in that situation is ultimately somebody else's loss. Let's break that down a little. Just give me an example. So you have £100. So I'm, say, a city trader, and I've got a sum of money here. You've got £100. And I invest it in shares, I don't know, BP or something, and I buy those shares, and don't know, BP or something. And I buy those shares.

And the price of those shares goes up. So I sell them. I've made a profit. I've made some money there. The people who profited also from that are the people who've actually done the transaction because there are intermediaries in these markets as well. So people have taken a slice. So if I say the shares have gone up, say, 10%,

so my £100 has become £110. Of that £10 that I've made, somebody else will have taken a pound at some point, somebody else will have taken another pound at another point. So probably I've only got £8 of that, but somebody else. But there's various bits of that being taken out. But ultimately, somebody has bought BP shares and then sold them at a loss.

Now, you might say, well, actually, if BP shares just go on up all the time, then that's not the case. But actually, if BP shares go up all the time, that's because something else is going down somewhere else in the market. There is some new money coming into the market, but actually, what is new money? New money's merely come from somewhere else.

But there's also some inflation in the market, but inflation doesn't necessarily add value. It just makes the numbers bigger. At the end of the day, it's the zero-sum game at the end of the day there are winners and there are losers but there's nobody who's actually say i've made something new that i can eat or drink or consume in some way it's ultimately it's it's it's a valueless activity it's a distributive activity it doesn't distribute money more equally distributes it less equally it's an extractive distributive activity distributes doesn't distribute money more equally, it distributes it less equally. It's an extractive distributive activity. It distributes money up the chain towards people who've got money to invest. So that's the sort of category of work where we can say there's really nothing of any

value being produced. And then there's another category of work which is sort of what I call necessary evils. Police force, for example. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need a police force because we'd all behave well and we'd all be nice to each other and we wouldn't need people going around making us do that and that would be true of all sorts of regulatory activities that would be true of accountants for example uh be true of a lot of legal activity but we accept that we that we do need these things we do need some sort of policing if you like of our activities but we could also see that we'd like as little as possible we don't actually want as much as as possible of that. We want as little as possible of that. And yet the number of lawyers, for example, in the UK has grown enormously much faster than the economy as a

whole has grown in the last 20 years. The number of accountants has also grown enormously much faster than the size of the economy. So we are actually getting more and more of those things, even though in an ideal world we'd have as little as possible. And that would also apply to physical things like packaging, for example. Packaging, I know if you buy an iPhone or something, then packaging is sort of part of the thrill, some people would say. But actually, packaging is just something you throw away. So although we see we can't have cornflakes without a packet, we can also see that we don't want that packet to be as much of the price as possible. We want it to be as little of the price as possible.

We want it to be as little as possible because we're going to throw it away. So that would be another area of something which is tangible, which we don't really want more than we can help with. And then moving sort of along, we come to another category, which is stuff that we make as part of our paid work. So this would be stuff we really do want. So this would be, for example, cars. People make cars. People want cars. Whatever we think about the environmental impact of cars,

there's no escaping the fact that people want them. People want mobile phones. They want food. These are things which people want and need in their lives. So we can see they do add real value. And there's a large number of them we can obviously think of, but actually it's still only probably a smaller part of the economy than all that transactional stuff we spoke about earlier. And this is the traditional manufacturing, if you like, and doing and making economy. But then there's a whole other area which we haven't even got onto yet,

which is what people do for free. People do for nothing in their lives. It's absolutely central to people's lives that they do things which are productive and creative, which they don't see as economic at all. So they are cooking meals, to people's lives that they do things which are productive and creative which they don't see as economic at all so there are cooking meals they are looking after each other looking after their elderly people looking after their children all of these things in fact some work was done recently written

published by the Office for National Statistics suggesting that this unpaid economy is worth about a trillion pounds a year now that means it's not quite as big as but almost as big as the money economy. The money economy is about 1.6 trillion. So if you put the two together, 2.6 trillion, it's about two-fifths of the entire economy is unpaid. And some of this economy is becoming monetized. Well, increasingly.

So you can put a value on childcare by saying, well, how much do people pay for it? And when it's paid for, it's part of the money economy. And when it's not paid for, it's just ignored. It's not considered to have any value at all. But you're right, it is increasingly monetized. And we're encouraged to monetize it as much as possible because when we monetize it, we grow the economy.

We do it for ourselves. We don't grow the economy. So that's the fourth category of work and what's interesting is if we place those in order of utility usefulness we find that almost by definition the most useful work is the work we do for nothing because it wasn't useful we wouldn't do it it's only done because it's useful so we can say for sure that's useful work otherwise we wouldn't bother with it because we're not paid then the next most useful is probably well clearly the creative work of doing and making the things people want to need in their lives

and then i suppose the next most useful is the what i call the necessary evils the stuff that we'd like to have less of but we still see we need some of it so that's a little gray area where some of it is very useful a lot of it is probably not useful and then we've got the stuff which is the least useful or potentially useless at the other end of the extreme, which is the financial markets and that sort of thing. However, just to finish this long and discursive answer, if we look at what the economy values, it actually values those four categories in completely the reverse order. Because the most transactional activity, the financial markets, generate the most GDP the most easily. So something like, well, between 20% and 30% of UK GDP is generated just by turning over money in financial markets

or in related activities, things that support those sorts of activities. And it's very, very easy to increase that activity. So, for example, with the quantitative easing we've had in the last few years to try to get the economy going, an awful lot of that money which has been given to the banks has flowed into those markets and has allowed them to turn over more, which has created GDP at that end of the spectrum. That's the easiest place to create GDP. The next easiest place is in the area where things are not particularly productive, but maybe necessary. So it's easy, for example, to generate more legal services or accounting services.

You just have to have stricter rules, for example. You bring in new accountancy rules, you get more activity. And we've seen a lot of that over the last few years and decades. The next easiest or hardest, as you look at it, way to generate activity is with real making. Real making and doing. Building a factory, that's really hard work. That's a big deal. It's not easy to do that. Much to open a shop for example a shop which is just going to turn over goods is much easier to start up than it is to start a factory it's going to make them certainly

in the uk to open a factory to actually make something i mean do people do that anymore it's increasingly rare and then of course the thing which is not hard to do but which which is least likely to generate any growth in the economy is the the free work. It's the work we do for ourselves. That's one that we value most, but which the economy values least. It doesn't value it at all. So you can see there's the old thing going on whereby if we look at what we value and what the economic system values, they're completely opposite. One is least interested in the things that we most value. And we as human beings are actually least benefiting from the things that the economy most values. So one of the big parts of this that you mentioned several times already is gross domestic product. Because if our measurement of success

as countries is tied into this idea that what grows the economy in terms of gross domestic product is the best for the economy, then these four categories make sense in light of that. So it seems like the work that you're doing, the stop GDP work, is if we target that, then maybe we can kind of unravel these other categories in terms of their value and kind of change it around. Well, that's the idea. I think many people working in the new economy are very aware now that GDP is a terrible measure of anything which is useful in economics. So it's a technical measure of the amount of money activity in the economy, but it doesn't measure, and it was never intended to measure, how useful

that activity is or to what extent it benefits people. And there are many organisations, the United Nations, the European Union, OECD, World Bank, these sort of organisations are very aware that this is a very deficient measure of useful economic activity. But it remains the only one which has widespread international acceptance at a sort of government level. And it remains the measure upon which the markets rely when they want to consider, for example, the stability of an economy, the interest rate they may charge to their money into the economy, the soundness of an economy. It's all based on GDP. Is it going up or is it going down? So we think about a recession, for example. It's triggered if you have two quarters of GDP decline. So GDP is really hardwired into the way we think about the economy,

but it's acknowledged as a really, really bad measure. If we measured the economy differently, if we measured what people value in their lives, and if we factored in many of the things which GDP measures as having value, if we factored them in as actually being costs, which is what they are, then we would come out with a measurement which would favour looking at the economy in a different way. So a particular example of that, we talked about child care earlier. There's no reason in principle why a parent at home looking after a child is not as valuable as a childminder being

paid to do it. But for so long as we only value the childminder, because the childminder is paid, we have a situation where the parent will have to travel to the childminder to leave their child. They then have to travel to work to do the work that they're going to do to earn the money to pay the childminder. The childminder may or may not have to travel to the place where they do their childminding. All that travel, incidentally, generates more GDP, but it has an environmental impact, which we're not even talking about yet. There's an awful lot of time being lost in this. Time that could be quality time, that could be good time, is spent travelling around.

And at the end of the day, nothing more is being achieved than if the parent stayed at home with the child and the childminder went to do the work that the parent did, so to speak, as it might be. Now, of course, that's not always the case. It's very rarely the case that you get that simple situation. But in sort of macro terms, it is the case that just having more people working,

paid to work, I should say, doesn't necessarily, in fact, often does not generate additional value in the economy. I saw a statistic only the other day saying that a woman in Britain, instead of woman it would be true equally of a man, I guess, who is looking after two children or has two young children. They have to earn £40,000 a year gross before they make any money at all because they're spending, roughly speaking, the first £10,000 of that on tax and then the next twenty thousand believe it or not on full-time child care for

those two children and then you've got a bit of transport involved a lot of people spend a hundred pounds a week on their travels so that takes care of the next five thousand pounds it's not long before you've actually eaten through your entire gross income by having two children looked after through that sort of framework so So it just makes no sense at all. But the GDP economy can only value the childminding. And it also values the transport. It values the fuel that's being burnt. So another example, if we think of rainforests, the rainforest is a really useful thing that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere,

which we know is a good thing. It is also home to to great many biological resources most new drugs for example originate one way or another in nature and are discovered in sort of odd parts of the world such as rainforests if we think of a rainforest as having value unfortunately none of that value is recognized by gdp until we cut the. We cut it down, we turn it into logs, or we put cattle to graze on the land or whatever, we start generating a money income, we start generating GDP. But the rainforest itself has no value at all. So GDP is weird in that way. It only values things when we start to destroy them. It only values the environment when we start to consume it and use it it has no value

for the good things in our lives that don't have money transaction attached to them so that's a little insight into how gdp is a disastrous measure but i mean there's many many more things that can be said about that and part of it is the introduction of money right because if i can if i can say that you know an an hour of childcare is worth this much, a haircut is worth this much, then we can start to, I mean, we're putting money as the value, and then we can kind of know and then that's, it makes it easier for us to consume, then I know how much this is worth, I can do that. So part of it is, I mean, I'm hearing you're not arguing that we should try to monetize all the things that are unmonetized right now. We shouldn't. So what are kind of the alternatives then? Is it just

to kind of know the quality of value that these other types of work have and that the rainforest has? Well, I think the key to that is to understand that money is only a tool. Money is not wealth. It's only a tool to allow people to exchange the things they do that create wealth. So if we talk about monetising, now it is statistically interesting and useful sometimes to talk about the money value of childcare or the money value of cooking a meal for example. But that's not the interesting thing from the human point of view clearly it's we couldn't say that the unpaid economy is worth one trillion pounds if we hadn't on some level tried to monetize it so it's statistically interesting to do that exercise it doesn't solve any problem to know that what you need to know is that that work is is useful and valuable and is

contributing to the quality of people's lives which is after what the economy is there for economies they support people's lives to make them able to function and acquire the things that they need and want whether it's as basic as food shelter clothing or whether it's a bit more exotic like an iphone or whether it's the time to go for a walk in the park or whatever it might be or as i say a good night's sleep the time to foster relationships absolutely central to that so time is another economic good that we could perhaps talk about isn't time is we always say conventionally time is money but actually that's that's part of the problem just seeing it in those terms time has value in its own in its own right monetization you're quite right but we don't want to monetize everything we want to put what we want

to do is put money in its place and give people access to the money that they need in order to allow the economy to function but not make money the object of the of the process so i mean a couple of things a couple of examples i could talk about in relation to that one would be the housing market and the other one would be the basic income. Now, many people now know about this concept of the basic income, sometimes called citizen's income, other terms have been used. But the concept is that if you give everybody a chunk of money, effectively paid for out of the wealth that the economy produces, but you distribute it in that way, then that gives them the space and time in their lives to create the real value that they want and need. Now, some of that will be what we think of as

conventional economic goods like food and drink and clothing and stuff. And some of it will be the less conventional, but equally valuable, more valuable economic goods, such as time to cook a meal, look after your own children, spend time with your partner or whatever. Educate yourself also, time to go to school, time to do all sorts of things which you might otherwise not be able to do. So that framework puts money in its place. It says money's just a tool. Give everybody enough of it that they can get their basics,

that they can operate with the basics of a money economy, and then people can start living. That is a way of putting money where it belongs, which is simply as a tool of liquidity which allows the economy to function rather than becoming an object in its own right. Now, I mentioned the housing market because that's where we can see that other version of money, that high house prices have become an object of policy, pretty much, because so many people have got money tied up in a house so we have this crazy situation where the cost of housing is now a very very large part of people's incomes in many cases it's more than they can they can afford and we think of that as a good thing because we've

sanctified money we've said that the money in that house is the object rather than the housing so if my house is worth half a million the housing so if my house is worth half a million pounds for example if hypothetically i think that i've got a half a million pound house rather than somewhere to live now if i just thought i've got somewhere to live it would be much more useful to me if i could only have it for a quarter of a million pounds and these are already a huge numbers we're talking about let's face it because then i'd have a lot more money to spend on something else so the housing market in a sense captures the essence of how the economy has gone wrong and how money has become the end

in itself that the housing market is one end of a system that's failing where the opposite extreme if you like in terms of money would be the basic income citizens wage the principle that you take the money out of the economy every year and you redistribute it and allow people to use it as they need to get through that year. You're listening to Upstream, and we're in conversation with Martin Whitlock, and we'll be back in the second half of our program. Thank you. I am a man of the mind. Terima kasih telah menonton! I am the light of the world Terima kasih telah menonton! Thank you. That was It's Not Unusual by Tapes and Topographies. And you're listening to an upstream interview with author and founder of StopGDP, Martin Whitlock. Welcome back. So let's go to StopGDP. So you're the co-founder of StopGDP, and I can totally see how all of this is related to that. So what do you do with StopGDP and what type of work? There's a lot of work done at the high level on this. As I said earlier, we know that even the United Nations, the European Union, they're all aware, the OECD,

all these high-level organizations are very aware that GDP is not a good measure of economic progress. It's not a new idea in any sense. It's been around for 30 years or more. So I'm thinking, why is nothing changing? All these people are aware this is a problem. know heaven state the european union the european commission is aware it's a problem the united nations it's aware it's a problem the world bank um the imf the oecd everyone knows it's a problem and these are all powerful organizations so why are we not doing it differently and the conclusion i came to was that there's no there's no political campaign to change so you haven't got it's not an issue

on the hustings it's not something that politicians are talking about nobody's campaigning for it so the people who know that it needs to change have no first of all no incentive and secondly no political backing to try to make those changes happen that's part of the problem i mean the other i suppose part of the problem would be that there's probably massively in the interest of big corporations that it shouldn't change that's of who's dependent upon the money economy but the most important thing to me was that it wasn't a public question it wasn't an issue people were sufficiently aware of so that was the starting point and then thinking well you know how do you go out there and campaign somehow it's pretty difficult actually to go out there and just start a campaign to

change the way in which we measure the economy because it's really quite technical stuff it's not the sort of thing you can easily get people onto the barricades about so what we figured was the way through this would be to try to interest existing campaigning organizations for whom a change in the way that GDP is measured or a change in the way the economy is measured would be a big bonus so for example if you're campaigning for social change, if you're campaigning for the environment, it's massively in your interest as an organisation that we measure the economy differently. I mean, particularly the environment, for example,

it's massively in the interests of the whole environmental movement that we start measuring the economy in ways that devalues pollution and values things like rainforests, values things like clean air, values things that come from not doing things rather than from doing things in the money economy. So hugely in their interest, hugely in the interest of anybody campaigning, as I say, for social justice. If your interest is in inequality, for example, then you need to start measuring the things that people really value in their lives. Because if you can see that money in the hands of somebody who's already got loads of it is much less valuable than money in the hands of somebody who hasn't got enough, then you can begin to make progress. So if you think it's all the

same, then you go on generating money for rich people. It's easier to do. So then there's the whole trade movement. I mean, the TTIP or TTIP movement or anti-TTIP movement in Europe. What does that stand for again? It's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This is this massive trade deal being negotiated between the European Union and the United States. It's all about free trade, but it has many, many implications for ordinary people because it seeks to generate economic activity in GDP terms through trading more, but that can lead and likely will lead to much greater job insecurity it can lead to lower wages it can lead to greater environmental damage for example I calculated that

about half of the benefits of TTIP as projected by the European Union would come from an increase in the trade in cars between Europe and the United States. Now what they reckoned was that vastly more cars would come into Europe from North America and vastly more cars would be sold out of Europe into North America by virtue of this trade agreement because the standards for the production of cars in both areas would be the same. Well that sounds great but actually what that means is that quite literally millions millions more cars will be shipped across the atlantic in one direction or the other every year to achieve this outcome

and that means millions of tons of fuel being burnt on those ships to achieve that it also means that at the end of the day there are no more cars it's all the same number of cars so the only benefit to any of this is in the shipping and if these cars are actually going to be cheaper as we're told they will be that means probably that someone's being paid less to produce them. And that almost certainly has to be the case, because someone's paying for all that shipping. If you're paying for all that shipping, and the cars are cheaper, then someone's getting less. And that's almost certainly the producer at the end of the day. The person actually put the spanner in their hands. So there's many things about TTIP which people understandably object to. But the connection here is that the argument for these trade agreements,

it's also true of the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It's true of CETA, which is the Canadian-European agreement. They're all predicated on increasing GDP. That's their raison d'etre, if you like. That's their starting point. So if you start from the the wrong place if you start from the premise you want to increase GDP you will end up with a bad treaty so our view was look if we could get the three and a half million people in Europe who've signed up a petition to stop TTIP if we could get them to understand that stopping GDP would be an even more powerful tool in terms of achieving these sort of outcomes and if we could link those three and a half million people to the people who are campaigning for the environment and people who are campaigning against poverty and all those sorts of other all those issues that are out there

then you'd have an enormous number of people who all had an interest in campaigning collectively to stop gdp and create a new form of value in wealth so it's early days it's reaching out to build partnerships with existing campaigning groups not easy thing to do everyone's very focused on their own piece of work but it's kind of like if we change the end goal then the means in which we get there can change as well absolutely if you if you're if you're aiming for the wrong outcome you're almost certainly going to do bad things on the way so it's stop gdp and then it's what instead? What is the alternative that you're suggesting? Because I know there's many.

Well, that's a very fair question. And I think one of the things about our campaign specifically is that we didn't want to get involved in the question of what would come next, because we knew that there were so many alternatives. And they're all good. One of the great things about GDP is we can say almost anything is better. GDP is about as bad as it gets when it comes to measuring well-being in the economy. So there's a word, well-being.

There are specific measurements of well-being being developed. And well-being is broadly seen as the things that make people's lives better. I'll put it in those sorts of terms. And that sort of means things that allow people to function in the world in ways that they feel good about. Autonomy, for example, a really important aspect of well-being, that you feel in control of your life. You feel that you can decide to some extent how you live your life, how you add value to your life and other people. Be in some control of your activity, not always at the beck and call of somebody else whom you're working and running around and trying

to do too much in too little time so autonomy is really important and that's a key part of well-being usefulness another factor here people want to feel useful that they're contributing and so much work doesn't do that so much paid work doesn't do that and the economist david graber i think has talked about bull bullsh** jobs and how many of those there are in the economy, and he's absolutely right. So much paid work is actually useless, and people doing it sort of know that. They don't feel they're contributing anything other than the money allows them to live their lives. So that's another thing that I think it's important to look at. I think capacity is another thing.

Many people are working below their capacity, and I don't mean the number of hours they can do in a week. What I mean is many people have talents and abilities that they're not able to make use of. Fulfilling their potential. Fulfilling their potential. So for me, those sort of core components of well-being, the ability to work in a way which allows you to feel autonomous, to feel useful, and to feel you're using your potential. Those would be the sort of things I'd be looking to measure in some sort of way. To say, to what extent are those things happening for people? And if they're happening, then we know

that we're doing something right in the economy. But one of the issues, one of the bigger things that I'm noticing is, I feel like you can't measure everything. So, you know, you were saying, what if we dropped in something instead of GDP, some other measurement? But I go back to maybe the problem is that we're trying to measure in the first place. Some of these things are immeasurable. How can you measure that which is immeasurable or its quality? You absolutely can't. And all these conversations, one is having to compromise somewhere between where you would like to be and how you could possibly get there. And we're not going to win an argument which says let's not

measure anything and let's not use money as a measurement of anything because people will keep on doing that whatever we think ideally would be good people are already trying to measure in money terms things like happiness and measure relationships in money terms and say you know sort of how much is it worth to have time with your family i remember being very struck many many years ago reading in the newspapers that department of transport would had a value for people's downtime if you like and they would use it to measure the value of a traffic jam so if you're sitting this was many years ago you're sitting in a traffic jam on the a303 each hour you spent there was two pounds worth of cost apparently they decided your leisure time was

worth two pounds an hour in those days yeah people will try to measure everything i'm not saying that you can you can or should try to measure all these things i'm simply saying that if we don't acknowledge that measuring things differently is a good first step to getting to the point where we don't actually need to measure the quality of our relationships or measure the value of our transactions in quite the same way. It's going to be a while before we get there. Ultimately, we'd like to get to a place where people don't count the cost of everything. When you exchange vegetables with your neighbour, it'd be great not to have to think too much about who did better out of the deal. It'd be nice to think over the course of a lifetime and over the course of many, many exchanges that things would broadly speaking work out,

roughly speaking, fair, and let's not spend too much time worrying about it. But we're so far away from that, that to posit that as the outcome you're trying to achieve and say, let's go there, I think is maybe a step too far. And maybe we need to acknowledge that there are compromises, there are half good systems that we need to introduce on our way to the place that we want to be in terms of the new economy. And I wonder, the personal is political, that quote, or the economic is political, this idea. And I noticed that you work on both the individual, you know, your relationship to your house, but you're also working on this political level. So would you say that people listening should try to think about this in all levels, you know, GDP and what it means in their own life about the value that they have on the work that

they do, but also try to do something politically or economically about this as well? Well, I think absolutely. I think that one of the things that I'm most conscious of i mean i've been working with these ideas for sort of at least 10 years now and it's very easy to get focused on the ideas and we have endless conversations you know as people interested in the new economy sort of area about these ideas and it's quite easy to engage people conversation actually with these ideas i mean they're not so complex that people won't say i see that you know i see the transaction economy i see that a lot of what goes on in the world actually is fairly pointless um it's much harder to offer people sort of tangible things that they can do to improve the situation and we saw this with our recycling movement for example we can recycle our tins we can recycle our bottles

we can recycle our paper all of that is sort of helpful but it doesn't it's first of all enormous lorries charging around the lanes of devon picking up people's bins you know of recycled materials you don't quite know whatever happens to it some of it may get recycled some of it may not you don't even know that but the point is it's relatively small deal in the context of recycling paper in your local community it's a relatively small deal in the context of millions of acres of rainforest being chopped down across the world and actually people would say well there's a connection but actually there isn't a connection because people aren't making paper out of rainforests on the whole paper is in europe at least it's relatively self-sustaining

lots of trees are planted lots of trees are cut down it's much more that the whole framework is the problem and so while we're busy doing our recycling are we challenging the framework are we changing the whole concept of the thing and if we are what are we doing about that and the conclusion that i've sort of reluctantly almost come to is that it is only a political question and however much we might think the political system is a complete stitch-up and our votes are completely worthless, in reality we have to find a way to elect governments that will do things differently, that will challenge this totally failed model of an economy that we have.

So for all the good things that people do and wish to do in their lives, both sustaining value in their lives and that of their of their families and their communities never lose sight of the bigger political picture i mean it's tragic that so few young people vote for example i mean something like 60 of the electorate vote in this country maybe a bit more depending on how exciting the election is but although many local elections and smaller elections it's far far less than But among young people, voting is still not normal. It's considered to be pointless. It's considered to be something which can't make a difference. The whole system is against them. So I'm increasingly thinking that that's the problem we need to look at.

It's not just getting people to vote. It's actually providing alternatives for them to vote for. So how can we recast a political environment is it conceivable in britain with such a completely moribund political mainstream is it conceivable we can introduce a new strain political activity you know a new party even into the conversation which will really want to do things radically differently that i think is where i'd like people to start thinking now, because I think that, great, we can do a lot at a local level, but it's so easy for central government to undo that good.

As I said, we've seen it with education. Education was a local concern in the UK ever since public education came in, and now it is a national concern. Local communities are being squeezed out of educational policy. That can happen across the piece. So we won't be able to sustain our local initiatives unless we have a voice of the national political conversation.

So I feel that that's the sort of core message, if you like. And it's not one people really want to hear. It's actually quite unpopular. But the core message is, let's not lose the big political picture let's re-engage with national politics let's really question what we've been lumbered with in terms of the mainstream political agenda and see if we can challenge that on some level that would be that would be what i would ask people to do yeah and i i hear you and i think for me when when I when I hear that, especially the young person, I feel very powerless in terms of politics. And, you know, I can sign petitions, I can call my senators, I can, you know, campaign for presidential candidates that I prefer, but I can't really see any potential, like getting involved in politics just feels like completely daunting. getting involved in politics just feels like completely daunting. So I don't know, I feel that powerlessness and that hopelessness. And I think even people who then I can see friends and

peers who don't even vote because they do feel this. So I don't know what advice would you have to get involved into politics? Well, you would say you've got to vote for the right people. But then they say, well, who are the right people? And in a sense, there are no right people. Because what's so interesting is that the Green Party, which you think might for many people be the right people, have become so sort of, in my view, sort of co-opted, as it were, by the current system. They sort of said, well, we have to behave like the current system in order to be accepted like the current system. And so, for example, they came forward with a tentative basic income policy at last election. But they were far too

frightened to make it big enough that it could possibly have any impact on the economy in fact people immediately said well if you pay that it's nowhere near enough it's not even you know enough to live begin even begin to live on you know so when that it won't be enough for anybody um so it's and it's going to cost a lot of money so it's all very foolish and they made it look a bit silly with that particular policy but in fact it's a great policy and if it's put across in the right way and it's a really radical policy put across in the right way, a lot of people will get very interested and engaged with it. So I felt disillusioned in a sense by the way in which the Greens approached that particular issue.

And I think that they have sort of become slightly co-opted partly because they are associated with a specific environmental agenda so for example we know that some vast sort of in the 90s percentage of journeys are made by car many many because people like to travel by car you know they choose to so it's always going to be a problem for a party that's associated with you know trying to encourage people to take public transport to get mainstream support in that way this is a long answer to your question um i hope you don't mind but it's important because things which have become the baddies of the environmental conversation like driving like mobile phones if you happen to be opposed to telephone masks for example

like international short-haul flights so those things are valuable they are things people want and to try to demonize them is a huge mistake politically but also economically because they do have value and if we could eradicate vast swathes of the economy that doesn't have value then we could afford in environmental and economic terms these things that have become the sort of shibboleths if you like of the environmental movement so i think therefore it's a long way saying i think there is a gap where people who understand that things are not working, there's a gap for those people in terms of the political marketplace, if you like.

Horrible phrase, political marketplace, but you know what I mean. In terms of what's out there, what you can vote for, people who want to carry on living in, so far as possible, comfortable, peaceful, well-organised, dare I say the word, conventional lives are actually now finding that very, very hard. But they're not attracted to the sort of alternatives which stop them doing the sort of things they want to do. They want to know how they can organise their lives in such a way that they're not prevented from doing the sort of normal consumer sort of things

that they want to do, because that has become so impossible and so complicated. The mainstream parties, I think, have all become obsessed by the idea that wealth can only be created by wealth. So all the focus is now on big business. It's on the corporate economy. It's on creating jobs. It's on trying to create money wealth that will filter down to other people and solve the problems in that way. And for more and more and more ordinary people, that simply isn't working and isn't going to work and isn't going to happen. So what is not available, if you like, in politics is an argument which says we can more efficiently provide these sorts of economic frameworks for

ourselves. We can work in a way which will support each other, which is collaborative rather than competitive, but the outcome will still be the sort of life that we recognise and that we want in our lives. And that, to me, doesn't seem to be on offer among politicians at the moment. I think the Conservatives are completely hooked on the corporate economy. I think the labour movement, more generally, is still stuck in a place where it's all about jobs. And realistically, it's stuck in a place where it's all about jobs and realistically it's not all about jobs it's all about it's all about creating value in our lives and as the economy becomes more mechanized becomes more automated and we talk about self

driving cars for example bound to happen one day it won't be about jobs it'll be about how you create value in your life and that don't mean having an employer that means having access to the wealth that allows you to create value in your own life and doesn't mean having an employer. That means having access to the wealth that allows you to create value in your own life. And I don't think the Labour Party have spotted that yet. It doesn't seem to be there in their conversation. So the two main streams of British politics are still stuck somewhere in an old model, and nobody is really flying the flag for the new model. So I'm full of sympathy for young people who say there's no one to vote for, because they have no one to vote for. and the only question of interest here is how in this stultifying political environment particularly with this terrible voting system

that we have how do you create a space for a new political model to emerge that's the question that's the question and i don't have an answer to that except to say that the more people who are aware of that as a question the more chance there is that that thing can happen because they'll start making connections with each other and gradually something can build around around that question well thank you for asking that question and for all the other questions that you're exploring as well and if people want to find out more about your work and read your blog and other things that you're involved in, they can go to martinwhitlock.co.uk and that's martinwhitlock.co.uk and if anyone wants to listen or hear more about the Stop GDP work, you can go to stopgdp.org. You've been listening to an

interview with Martin Whitlock, and I'm Della Duncan, and thank you so much. The sun keeps rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our hopes that fray To the morning we run To shoreline Calling us to speak the sound Waves under the earth and close Crossing ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds As we set fire to the sea

As we set out to the sea