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WATCH SENATE HEARING COVERAGE

Press Release – March 5, 2008

Senate hearing to examine inadequacies of GDP
Hearing marks 40th anniversary of landmark speech by Robert F. Kennedy

Washington, D.C. – Forty years after Senator Robert F. Kennedy famously challenged the Gross Domestic Product as a measure of our nation’s progress and well-being, a U.S. Senate subcommittee will take up the issue at a hearing next Wednesday.

Senators will hear experts testify about the GDP’s failure to measure environmental degradation, poverty, income disparity, health care outcomes and other quality of life issues.

Chairman Byron Dorgan (D-ND) will hold the hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce, Trade and Tourism.

      When: 1:30 PM Wednesday, March 12, 2008
      Where: Senate Russell Building, Room 253

The hearing comes a few days before the 40th anniversary of a speech by Kennedy in which he argued that the total rate of sales and consumption tells us everything about America “except that which makes life worthwhile.”

"Our gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage,” Kennedy said at the University of Kansas on March 18th, 1968. “It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.”

Senator Kennedy did not have time to finish his work. But the Seattle-based Glaser Progress Foundation, founded by RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, is carrying on a small part of it, by trying to educate people and policy-makers about the shortcomings of the GDP statistic.

“Whether the American economy is booming or in recession, the discussion focuses almost exclusively on the GDP,” said Martin Collier of the Glaser Progress Foundation. “Judging a nation by its GDP is like judging a book by its price tag.”

Expert witnesses:

Katherine Abraham, former Commissioner of Labor Statistics and member of the National Academy of Sciences, will discuss ways to improve and expand the GDP and the important role in this effort played by the American Time Use Survey.
Karen Davis, President of the Commonwealth Fund and author of Health Care Cost Containment, Medicare Policy, will discuss how health care spending, which is measured in the GDP, has no relation to quality of care or availability to those in need.
Robert Frank, Professor of Economics at Cornell University and the author of Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Hurts the Middle Class, will testify on how the GDP fails to count rising inequality.
Steven Landefeld, Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, will address efforts to modify GDP or supplement GDP with non-market accounts.
Jonathan Rowe, contributing editor of the Washington Monthly and a founder of the Tomales Bay Institute, will provide the history and original intent of the GDP.
For more information go to www.glaserprogress.org/GDP

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Contact: Martin Collier, 206-728-1050 - martin@glaserprogress.org


 
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