Engage Your World: Moving Beyond GDP: Telling the Real Story of National Progress - A Talk by Robert Smith

Join the FSU The College of Communication and Information, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy and the Center for Global Engagement for an Engage Your World event. It will take place on Thursday, February 2 at 5:30 p.m. in The Globe Auditorium.

Politicians, investors, business people and the public around the world look to GDP as the primary judge of how well their countries are doing. For most of the post-World War II era, GDP growth has been taken as an absolute necessity for progress. This is changing, however. World leaders increasingly agree that countries need to move beyond GDP as their central measure of progress. This talk will explore some of the avenues “beyond GDP” currently under consideration. It will argue that only one of these avenues - expanded measures of national wealth - has any real hope of displacing GDP from its place in the center of the decision-making radar screen.

Robert Smith, founder of Midsummer Analytics in Ottawa, Canada, is an experienced investigator and a consultant with an international reputation for his work on environmental and economic issues. He has a broad knowledge of the science, policy and economics related to natural capital, climate change, natural resources, ecosystems, wastes, environmental technologies and environmental expenditures. In addition, he has deep knowledge of official statistics, including the national accounts. He is especially known for his work developing and promoting the concept of natural capital and its use as a basis for measuring sustainable development.

This event also counts toward one of the intercultural event requirements for the Global Citizenship Certificate.