On the 18th of March 1968, Robert Kennedy Jr. brother of slain president John F Kennedy, and campaigning for the Democratic nomination for that job himself, gave a speech in which he said
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman‘s rifle and Speck‘s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.
The context was one of growing concern about environmental problems. It would be interesting to find out where that speech came from, and if it’s been written about actually.
Why this matters
The fetish of growth and GDP as a metric that overwhelms all else is with us still today, and will be the death of us. If you measure the wrong thing, and you measure success by the wrong thing, you’ll get the wrong result.
And there’s that Bertram Gross quote, from his 1980 book “Friendly Fascism”
“If we just enlarge the pie, everyone will get more”. This has been the imagery of Capitalist growthmanship since the end of World War II- and I once did my share in propagating it. But the growth of the pie did not change the way the slices were distributed except to enlarge the absolute gap between the lion’s share and the ant’s. And whether the pie grows, or stops growing, or shrinks, there are always people who suffer from the behaviour of the cooks, the effluents from the oven, the junkiness of the pie, and the fact that they needed something more nutritious than pie anyway.”
What happened next?
Well, a couple of weeks later, Kennedy was giving a statement after the assassination of Martin Luther King, assassination of Martin Luther King. And two months after that, he himself was assassinated.