(GASPS)
I'm fascinated by a question and I know I'm not the only one.
That question is, what should economies be aimed at?
I studied economics at university 20 years ago
and we never actually asked that question,
even though it seems like a fundamental one.
The answer was a given. It was "economic growth".
Over the past years, though, economic growth has had a good ride.
Since 1970, it's quadrupled.
(CHEERING)
If you believe mainstream predictions,
it's set to quadruple again by 2050 on the global scale.
So, economic growth has been doing nicely in the long-term big picture,
and yet there are things that we fundamentally care about
that aren't coming along with it.
There are three I want to highlight.
More and more social commentators are talking about
the rise of inequality and the importance of tackling it.
Two-thirds of the world's population today
live in countries that are more unequal than they were in 1980.
Taking one country as an example, in 2010,
the top richest 10% of people in the United States
captured 93% of the increase in national income that year.
So, inequality is really quite extraordinarily
at the heart of the way economies are growing.
Our politicians know it.
We're hung up on talking about economic growth,
but because they know that this one lever
doesn't really capture everything we care about,
they're increasingly trying to qualify what they're calling for
with extra terms.
Merkel has called for "sustainable growth",
David Cameron for "balanced growth",
Barack Obama for "long-term lasting growth".
Barroso wants the EU to have
"smart, sustainable, inclusive and resilient growth".
All these terms! Sometimes, I feel like I'm in a New York deli bar.
So many different terms are being added to this idea.
It's clear that we want something more than growth.
The fact that we want something more shouldn't seem like news.
When the very idea of national income and its growth was conceived,
its inventor warned us that we needed something more than that.
In 1934, when Simon Kuznets wrote the first report to the US Congress
describing how you could measure national income, he said,
"The wealth of a nation can scarcely be inferred
"from a measure of its national income."
He gave us that caveat on day one.
No wonder our politicians are grasping for the language they need
to describe where we're trying to go.
Growth isn't enough, as an idea, of what we're trying to achieve.
What if instead of starting with economic growth,
we start with the fundamentals of what we care about -
everyone meeting their human rights,
living within the means of this planet - and then we ask,
what kind of economic system would help to take us there?
One thing is true - we need to widen our concept
of what economic development is, far beyond growth alone.
We need to think about investing in the wealth that sustains us -
the human wealth, the natural wealth and the social wealth.
It's from these that everything that we generate in our economy flows.
(DING DING)