SFSU Limitations of Using GDP as a Measure of Well Being Essay

Articles to choose from for your Article Assignment:  The limitations of using gross domestic product and per capita gross domestic product to measure a country’s level of well-being.

First, you can choose any article from “Agenda in Focus:  Beyond GDP:  – is it time to rethink the way we measure growth?”:  https://www.weforum.org/focus/beyond-gdp

OR, one of the following articles:

1)United Nations Women Policy Brief No. 2:  GENDER EQUALITY, CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND JOB CREATION, http://www2.unwomen.org/~/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/2015/unwomen-policybrief02-genderequalitychilddevelopmentandjobcreation-en.pdf?v=1&d=20151216T170713

2)“The Work that Makes Work Possible,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic, March 23, 2016

3)“Valuing Unpaid Work Matters, Especially for the Poor,” Nancy Fulbre, Economix:  Explaining the Science of Everyday Life, September 21, 2009, https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/valu…  (The “report” mentioned in the blog post is the “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” found here http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/118025/1181… – No need to read this, but if you’re interested the executive summary is about 10 pages long).

4)Income Inequality Hurts Economic Growth  https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2014/12/0…

5)How inequality affects growth:  In moderation, redistribution seems to have benign effects 

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/…

• https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/06/economist-explains-11
• 6)  UNPAID WORK – SOME BASIC FACTS, APROACHES AND DISCUSSIONS, at http://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/1999/esa99dp4.pd… (pp. 11-16 of the .pdf)
• 7) Hiding in the Shadows:  The Growth of the Underground Economy,
  by Friedrich Schneider with Dominik Enste, International Monetary Fund, March 2002, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/issues/issues…

8)  “Measuring the Underground Economy Can Be Done, But It’s Difficult,” by Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria, The Regional Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis,   https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-e…

9) “How Well GDP Measures the Well-Being of Society,” The Kahn Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/macroeconomics/gdp-topic/circular-econ-gdp-tutorial/a/how-well-gdp-measures-the-well-being-of-society-cn

• 10) Additional Article Choice: Read the preface from the Kindle version of The Value of Everything, by Mariana Mazzucato (the Introduction is filled with mostly microeconomic references, but there are a few interesting macroeconomic statistics in the preface).Request a free sample of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy Kindle Edition: https://www.amazon.com/Value-Everything-Making-Taking-Economy-ebook/dp/B01NBQMXPT/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541447466&sr=8-1&keywords=the+value+of+everything 

11) “To GDP — or not to GDP?,” by Gillian Tett, Financial Times Magazine, October 23, 2019.  A .pdf download of this article is available in the “News Article Assignments due in iLearn” module on our iLearn home page.

• Instructions (same as before, but repeated here for your convenience):

Choose an article, and read it. I will provide you with a specific topic and list of articles from which you can choose..

After reading and studying the article you’ve chosen, on a separate sheet of paper, hand write or type:

1.The name of the article, the author, the date, and the publisher

2.Three key points from the article, stated in your own words (no copying and pasting the three key points)

           Use full sentences.

Your three key points must be full sentences, and in list format.

You can number them (1, 2, and 3), or you can use a bullet list (this bullet list is a good example).

Do not list your three key points in paragraph form.

3.Add a five to ten sentence paragraph telling me, in your own words, what you have learned or what you found interesting about the article.