The role of women in our culture is all messed up and discombobulated.  From a very early age, girls are asked to carry themselves in a way that comports to societies expectations of them. And that society is patriarchal.  This is where the problem begins and persists.  At a young age, girls are expected to be kind, considerate, thoughtful and caring, giving and eager to please.  They are to be ‘obedient’.  Girls happen to be able to take instructions well, are team-oriented and cooperative, and academically-driven.  The graduation rates of women versus men in the U.S. is lopsided in their favor.  The median rate of women graduating from high school is seven percent greater than that of men.  This model of a good girl was true of myself from grade-school through high school.  I was a shy yet charismatic girl.  I excelled at school making the National Honor Society in high school four years running.  I was also gifted athletically.  I played three varsity sports; captain of two.

You Can Do Anything You Set Your Mind To

In college, women are feed a steady stream of positive ‘you can do it’ affirmations.  We are explicitly told and come to believe we are important, equal and respected. Through hard work, personal application, and fortitude we are told we can succeed.  Perhaps in a self-fulfilling prophecy, U.S. colleges are increasingly composed of women.  Fifty-six percent of all university students are female.  That percentage is expected to grow one percent more by 2026.  That is a role-reversal from the 1970’s when men were the majority college seekers by 58 percent.

The Foul-Taste of Patriarchy

It was during these independent, becoming adult years at college I first tasted the foul-taste of patriarchy.  I was by all accounts a successful, self-possessed, directed woman.  I attended an Ivy League college, maintained a respectable B+ average and was on track to graduate within four years of matriculation.  During my senior year, in my last semester of college, I decided to take an international trip with my boyfriend over Spring Break.  Although I had been dating my boyfriend for three years and he himself was an all-honor, academic scholar and graduate of Dartmouth, who held an envious and lucrative job, my dad was incensed at my decision to travel together with him. My father informed me that he considered the trip unsavory and unacceptable, essentially calling me a “street worker”.  He also threatened to stop paying for my college education. His reasoning was flimflam and absurdly extreme towards someone who had always followed the straight-and-narrow path of an upstanding and obedient child.  At 22, I was a responsible adult who could make responsible decisions.  I went on the trip.  My father stopped paying my college tuition and all miscellaneously-related charges.  It was an explicit take-down:  you do what I say and what I want or I roadblock the desired goals you seek for your future.  It was a brutal first lesson to be learned of many to come.

A Sense of Place in the Workplace

Next up:  the professional world.  The opportunity I had been waiting for to excel, achieve, and meet with success.  Oh, how the obedient lessons came punching back quick and fast.  It was during my three years working at a small strategic consulting firm located on the doorsteps of Washington, D.C., where the social strictures of how women professionals were expected to act were both subtly reinforced and explicitly articulated.   There was an openly aggressive tear-down of both my dedication to the company and my competency as a consultant in the first months at the firm to a mutual supervisor by a male counterpart, who clearly felt he had received an inferior education to my Ivy one. There was my annual review which had in writing and was discussed verbally of the need and benefit for me to “smile more” while conducting myself in the office.  I suppose seriousness and earnestness is not a pre-requisite to good work, amiability is.

Perceived and Assumed Notions of Appropriateness

At no point in my career path have I had access or been privy to non-work, recreational networking, say by playing a basketball pick-up game, tennis match or a round of golf with a higher-level executive, unlike most of my male peers, who were asked often by their superiors to participate in these activities.  You may ask yourself if perhaps it was because I was un-athletic.  The answer would be no.  In fact, both my male and female peers knew me to be an adept athlete who played varsity basketball for a consistently Ivy-League winning basketball team at Dartmouth.  At Wharton, I was recruited by the co-ed basketball team so they could have a better chance of winning games against other cohort teams.  So too, I was on the co-ed racing ski-team while at MBA.  No, my non-inclusion in this ritualized professional networking dance was because the perceived impropriety of having a single woman “canoodle” with executive-level men (whether married or not) was a breach of conduct that had to be abided by at all cost…and to much detriment when it came to quick promotions and corporate advancement versus my male colleagues.

Leadership: Assigned or Innate?

Even the qualities of leadership become distorted when applied to a woman versus a man.  I have had male peers openly read newspapers for the first 45 minutes of their work day, banter around the various “water cooler” office locations about current events, sports, and the like while always being perceived as strong, commanding, and projecting the qualities a leader possesses.   I found some of these men flabby in their industriousness and outright lazy in their daily business practices.  It so happened my office was situated just off the copy room where at any one time, projects were nearing completion or furiously readying for an in-person client presentation requiring reams of copying to be completed and decks built.  Because of natural circumstance, colleagues of mine often found themselves stepping into my office to chat.  This was a deliberate action on their part.  My desk faced away from the copy room.  And because my office was an open cubicle on a floor with a sea of cubicles, conversations were for all to see (and hear).  Now, I have got to assume that if I were not well-regarded by my peers, they would have resisted engaging me.  The actual opposite was happening.  At some point my VP mentor pulled me into his office to inform me that the organization found me to be a “trouble-maker”, who was causing havoc in the office by making people unproductive, and that this warning was a pre-cursor to a possible future firing.  I was flabbergasted since I did not court people coming to my office to seek my company.  Nonetheless, one could argue I was a natural-born leader:  charismatic, self-assured, disciplined, and respected by my peers. To give this situation perhaps greater context, I was at this point in my career, working dually as a consultant (my day job) and as the lead recruiter of undergraduate students to fill entry-level positions at the firm.  I did not seek out the recruiting position; the firm asked me to take that position because they found me to be compelling with a good sense at selecting successful candidates for the firm.  How quickly one’s standing can drop when power roles are not pre-determined, but naturally gifted.

Ahh, Sexism Rises Again!

As professionals progress, both men and women often look to higher-degrees to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace but also to make themselves more appealing and desirable to employers.  Unsurprisingly, women maintain their majority over men in gaining Masters and Doctoral degrees.

I did not lose my job.  I did matriculate at The Wharton School to gain my M.B.A.  From there I started a new chapter in my career in media and entertainment, managing digital platforms for traditional media assets (think:  magazines) as well as for a multibillion dollar start-up, XM Satellite Radio.  At the five-year mark, I scratched my entrepreneurial itch to write a business plan and launch a sustainable women’s active wear company.  Over the course of nine months, I heavily networked to raise funds for my new venture.

It was during this time I once again hit up against both the latent and blatant sexism I had experienced earlier in my career and as a striving young woman.  In pitch meetings with prospective Angel investors, almost always a wealthy, white male executive, I was indiscreetly asked when I was going to have children.  These were usually questions posed over documents and PowerPoint decks summarizing the competitive advantage of my business idea and the initial valuations one could expect if an investor determined to make a formal investment through a private placement memorandum (PPM).  My pat answer to these inappropriate inquiries was that I was not married and anyway, getting married and starting a family was not a current priority.

Horrifyingly, my own father told me point-blank that he’d invest in my business only if some man he knew peripherally but respected as a corporate executive, would run the company instead of me.  The implicit logic of the statement was:  only a man knows how to run a business and make it a success.

When Women Become DisObedient Is When the Trouble Begins

Obedient women are supposed to stay within their gender-specified, culturally-dictated roles:  that of someone who is kind, caring, thoughtful, listens (and takes orders) well. They are gals who are intended to do well by keeping to themselves – not creating any unnecessary waves – and accepting what they are given. On the other hand, “disobedient” women possess power and display it; are aggressive and use it; are risk-takers, change-makers, thought-leaders, and drive toward their goals without side-track.  If women decide to become entrepreneurs, their business ideas are negated more easily, their business drive questioned ceaselessly, and their access to capital and mentorship are denied more voluminously than men.  The majority of striving women must kowtow to men for their financial security, while holding their revolutionary ideas tenuously out on a platter to be tossed casually, and package their dynamism, vision, and great abundance of talent in a neatly-tied box that is pretty, well-considered, composed, and always, forever always, unthreatening.

Sexism and male-determined cultural norms around the appropriateness of women’s behavior and the roles in which they inhabit, have allowed the boogeymen to win.  It has not, however, stopped women professionals and entrepreneurs from rising up and succeeding in and of themselves.  But the unmistakable markers of turmoil and strife remain steadfastly a part of the landscape for women in business.  Women are striving, progressing, and earning accolades throughout their educational careers. Women are winning but without the rewards.  Women are succeeding but are asked to travel a longer, more arduous and land-mined filled professional career of working for less, being offered fewer and less lucrative promotions, dinged for starting a family, and forced to navigate and deal with the perceived “failings” of being, by all accounts, a successful and desirable company executive but through a pervasive lens that minimizes those hard-fought accomplishments.  This culture absolutely needs to change.

Bringing The Lessons Home to Be ReImagined and ReApplied

I bring my personal experience back-around to my two young children born from a loving, respect-filled relationship with a successful man, who values women and their valuable innate traits.  Obedience is not one of them.  Our children are split down the middle:  one girl and one boy.  Our daughter is now in third-grade and all the same traits of kindness, helpfulness, consideration and thoughtful application of oneself are there among my daughter and her female classmates.  My husband and I revel in her innate character traits but also recognize the need for her to be less amenable to others (if it impedes her personal needs unnecessarily), speak her mind more and more adamantly, and to ‘fight back’ when another (male or female) is aggressive, unkind, hurtful and generally, disrespectful of her person.  We are actively teaching her these more ‘male-attributed’ traits of interaction so that she may feel comfortable and right standing up for her beliefs and to help ensure her greater success in the often cut-throat world of business.

For our son, our daughter’s junior by four years, we seek to teach the near opposite traits we are driving to imbue in our daughter.  He already knows how to speak his mind – vociferously – is adamant, demanding, often aggressively so, and persistent with his wants and needs.  What my son needs to be taught are those nuanced, intuitive-brained traits we admire in girls but seem to try and take advantage of when they become adults.  We work diligently on various teaching lessons for him such as respect and care for others, control of one’s body and emotions, appropriate expression of behavior, valuing others input and opinions even when it is different from one’s own and the like.  Make no mistake about it:  respect is learned…for others and particularly for women.

Solution-Setting Around the #metoo Movement

The solution to issues surrounding the #metoo movement are multifaceted and diverse, need to be applied both top-down and bottom-up, and likely require a “re-learning” in how to speak constructively, act appropriately, and perceive rightly the value, efforts, and innate talents – however foreign and non-intuitive they may be – of women as they progress to adulthood and into professional careers.  Lessons of respect, valuing others and listening to differing opinions start early and must continue to be reinforced.  No amount of fakery around superficially “understanding the other” will result in lasting change in mindset.  Although corporate training is necessary given the awareness and widespread problems around respecting and valuing women in the workplace, training alone is a superficial, temporary salve.  Training must be buttressed with non-bendable, red-line enforcement of infractions that are openly communicated and widely disseminated to build trust around an institution’s ‘rule of law’.

As with any new habits we seek to build, we must throw-away the old, unconscious way of doing things, create a new process to replicate, and then get-to the hard, tedious work of consciously making new, more productive habits that serve ourselves and others better.  This transition is not easy, feels uncomfortable and may be downright scary, making us fraught with angst and uncertainty. However, at the end of the long, winding tunnel, greater respect and equality between men and women will be rewarded with broader contentment, freedoms now little understand and unrealized, and higher levels of prosperity among both sexes.

Contact Kate Gaertner today to see what Triple Win Advisory can do to help your business and industry increase sustainability to result in a “triple win” for company profit and long-term competitive advantage, societal well-being, and successful environmental pollution mitigation.

Kate Gaertner

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The impacts of climate change on our daily individual lives will be dependent on where we live within the U.S. but more generally, they will range from small to large.  Island residents and individuals living in or close to coastal communities within the 48 contiguous states have a strong likelihood of dealing with more frequent and more extreme storm surges and flooding events that are highly disruptive to the very economies and communities in which they live.  This means increasing intensity hurricanes, cyclones, and tropical storms have the very real potential to makes individuals’ homes uninhabitable, a lifetime of possessions destroyed, transportation inoperable, and jobs in office buildings temporarily meaningless when buildings are blown apart from high winds and rain.  Whole economies come to a halt as they strain over how to recover and rebuild from natural devastation enhanced by climate change.  People’s health suffers during these times for indefinite periods of time from increased risks of disease, mental suffering, and worst of all, untimely death for some.  During these landfall events where built infrastructure is compromised, the after effects of extreme storms compromise and cripple central municipal facilities to distribute energy services such as electricity, heat and air-conditioning to households, support the flow of safe drinking water and effective treatment of waste and sewage waters.  Storm event flooding not only risks riverbank overflows but often guarantees the commingling of industrial as well as urban contaminants into freshwater systems that support human health and safe drinking supplies.

When Wild Weather Forces You to Flee Your Home and Community

More unsettling to individual lives is the potential need (requirement, even) to resettle to a new town, city or even state, forcing individuals to literally start-over and reboot their lives from scratch.  This is not a far-fetched scare tactic or apocalyptic future-visioning scenario.  This “resettlement” idea is very real and very present-day.  Hurricane Katrina that hit Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005 forced 1.2 million people to evacuate their communities and homes.  Of the 100,000 people that remained to weather the storm in situ, nearly two percent (1,800) of that sub-population lost their lives to the direct or in-direct effects of the storm[1].  More than 800,000 homes were destroyed.  Twelve years after Hurricane Katrina, only half of the 14,000 lower 9^th ward New Orleans’ residents have re-inhabited the worst hit neighborhood of the city[2].

Climate Change is an Equal-Opportunity Challenge

Hurricane Harvey slammed into Houston, Texas in late August 2017, a sprawling metropolitan area of 6.6 million people, damaging more than 200,000 homes and destroying more than 12,000[3].  It also happens to be a rapidly growing city built on wetlands prone to overflow and flooding.  Questions continue to be batted around as to whether and to what extent some neighborhoods that have a conservative 10 percent estimate of flooding yearly – having flooded successively three years in a row from three 500-year floods in 2015, 2016, and 2017 – are worth rebuilding.  Climate scientists don’t mince words when they state that “climate change will increasingly require moving – not just rebuilding – entire neighborhoods…even abandoning [urban developed] coastlines”[4].  Hurricane Harvey outpaced the damage costs of Hurricane Katrina by 99 Billion, a 122 percent increase in total storm damage sustained by a metropolitan area.  One could rightly argue that human suffering and displacement due to extreme storm events facilitated by global climate change will increasingly be seen as “equal opportunity” disasters – the rich and poor, young and old, educated and non-educated, all races, and Republican- versus Democratic-leaning individuals face the same or similar level of suffering, economic turmoil, displacement, risks to health and uncertainty in the length of time it takes to rebuild their homes let alone their lives.

If you Think Human Migration Here in the U.S. is Hyperbole, Think Again.

No real-life example is more poignant in encapsulating the long-term, forced migration of individuals from climate change disaster than the residents of Puerto Rico.  The island was completely devastated and almost entirely flattened when Hurricane Maria made landfall in late September 2017 as it swept through the Caribbean hitting the island directly.  The Hurricane took out 100 percent of the island’s electrical power.  A month post-storm, still 80 percent of the island had no access to electricity, potable water or safe sewage treatment.  There are estimates that full restoration of energy to the whole of the island may take upwards of six to 12 months.  Houses have vanished.  Industries have entirely stopped operating.  Residents of Puerto Rico are literally in survival mode with no end in sight to their everyday miseries large and small.  It is no surprise, then, that large swaths of Puerto Ricans are abandoning their homes and lives on the island and take temporary but more likely, permanent residence on mainland U.S.  Of the 3.5 million Puerto Rican residents, nearly eight percent of the island’s total population have made their way to various cities in Florida, looking for permanent residence status, housing, and jobs.  Puerto Rican elected officials note that “Most islanders have moved in with relatives [on the mainland U.S.], and many have no plans to return home.”[5]

But Middle-America Is Better Protected from the Effects of Climate Change, right?

What about individuals not living near the coasts or on islands, but inland, say, in agriculturally-important regions?  They too will find their health, productivity and livelihoods challenged by the impacts of climate change.  Let’s take the 10 biggest and most productive agricultural states, which are listed below, and the key agricultural or feedlot products (highlighted in blue font) for cattle they produce:

• California: almonds, grapes, lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes, walnuts and hay
• Iowa: corn, soybeans, oats, hay, flaxseed, rye and wheat
• Texas: hay, sorghum, corn and wheat
• Nebraska: corn, soybeans, wheat, hay, sorghum, beets and potatoes
• Illinois: corn, soybeans, hay, wheat, rye, oats and sorghum
• Minnesota: corn, soybeans, peas, potatoes and corn
• Kansas: wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum and hay
• Indiana: corn, soybeans, tomatoes, wheat, and hay
• Wisconsin: corn, soybeans, potatoes and hay
• North Carolina: cotton, soybeans and corn, peanuts and sweet potatoes

These states are home to a great number of farmers but also cattle ranchers.  Four of the five key agricultural states above (i.e., Texas, Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa) supply the majority of feedlots to the cattle industry.  The fifth state is Colorado, which is rated as one of the top five cattle feed lot and one of the top 10 cattle producing (i.e., meat) states.  The top states that supply the globe with meat and poultry for human consumption are Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas.

The Challenges of Climate Change in Fertile America

Climate change impacts such as rising air temperatures directly affect crop productivity as optimal growing temperatures, length of growing seasons, and levels of moisture and/or aridity in the air and soils are altered and increasingly become less predictable to forecast.  So too, climate change is expected to exacerbate water availability, making water scarcer.  Crops rely on steady water irrigation systems.  Water quantity and pricing will strain farmers’ ability to optimize crop yields.  Higher air temperatures across all seasons invariably translate into higher disease rates and increasing crop pestilence jeopardizing maximum agricultural productivity.  In fact, some crops don’t fare well with variable and rising temperature conditions.  Scientists expect declining crop yields over the coming decades and late in the 21^st century for crops such as maize (corn), tomatoes, rice, wheat, cotton, and sunflower to name a few.   Many of these are staples in a large majority of products we find on our supermarket shelves and in the kitchens where we cook.

It should be noted that nearly all of the top 10 agricultural states produce food for both human cattle consumption.  With declining crop yields and increasing water scarcity, cattle production is also negatively affected by climate change.  Cattle rely heavily on constant water consumption and with decreasing feed lot yields, cattle are more susceptible to disease and death.

Farmers and cattle ranchers in these states face declining revenues, more expensive inputs (namely, fertilizers, pest-resistant seeds, and feed costs), challenged and potentially rationed water supplies, and less productive lands.  Farmers operate on thin profit margins to begin with.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that 69 percent of all U.S. farms (2013) operate in a “critical profit margin zone” which is a financial classification of a near-failing farm that is not-profitable enough to support ongoing operations for the long-term[6].  With the added challenges of climate change to already tough operating conditions, farmer’s livelihoods and the families that rely on them will be strained at the best, or might disappear at the worst.  We are talking about 3.2 million farmers in the U.S., operating more than two million farms by the 2012 Census of Agriculture.  With an average household of 2.6 people in the U.S., more than eight million farming household dwellers or 2.5 percent of the total U.S. population, will be directly affected by climate change challenges that will make an earnable living in farming very difficult.

Phew, I’m not a Farmer or Cattle Rancher So I’m Safe

Don’t be fooled though, by those seemingly low numbers. Indirectly, nearly all of the 324 million Americans who rely on fresh produce and affordable meat protein produced here in the U.S. can likely see various food product scarcities occurring in the future.  With scarcity comes rising food, meat, and poultry prices.  We have not begun to touch upon the depletion of marine organisms across the globe, a very necessary and valuable source of protein for human populations.  When fish become scarce or are no longer fishable, prices skyrocket.  We see this today in the exorbitant Bluefin and Ahi tuna prices but also in the rising prices for fillets of halibut, abalone and even wild salmon.  Fish catches in the wild and through aquaculture farms supply more than 20 percent of the world’s dietary animal protein or support the health of 1.5 billion people[7].

Climate Change Impacts Are Real at All Scales

You can see where this is going.  Climate change is a global issue but at every scale including at the individual level, it has the very real capacity and high likelihood of exacting negative impacts, both directly and indirectly, to our livelihoods, health, living standards, transportation means, and energy usage.  It is worth then, exploring what we can do – as individuals and households – to both mitigate the effects of climate change to ourselves and to support the broader global effort of decreasing our dependence and use of fossil fuel energy including oil, gas, and coal.  We are all in this massive effort together, don’t kid yourself.  And any and all changes we do ourselves have a definite and dramatic impact to decrease GHG emissions into the atmosphere, the main driver of global climate change.   

Contact Kate Gaertner today to see what Triple Win Advisory can do to help your business and industry increase sustainability to result in a “triple win” for company profit and long-term competitive advantage, societal well-being, and successful environmental pollution mitigation.

Kate Gaertner

[1] Hurricane Science.org.  Katrina Impacts.  Retrieved from http://www.hurricanescience.org/history/studies/katrinacase/impacts/

[2] Santana, Rebecca. (2017, April 10).  12 Years Post-Katrina, Hope but Concern in Lower 9^th Ward.  U.S. News and World Report.

[3] Amadeo, Kiimberly.  (2017, September 30).  Hurricane Harvey Facts, Damage and Costs.  The Balance.  Retrieved from https://www.thebalance.com/hurricane-harvey-facts-damage-costs-4150087

[4] Kimmelman, Michael and Hanernov, Josh.  (2017, November 11).  Lessons From Hurricane Harvey:  Houston’s Struggle Is America’s Tale.  The New York Times.

[5] Alvarez, Lizette.  (2017, November 17).  A Great Migration From Puerto Rico Is set to Transform Orlando.  The New York Times.

[6] Hoppe, Robert.  (2013).  Profit Margin Increases with Farm Size.  USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service and Economic Research Service, 2013 Agricultural Resource Management Survey.

[7] Noble, I.R., S. Huq, Y.A. Anokhin, J. Carmin, D. Goudou, F.P. Lansigan, B. Osman-Elasha, and A. Villamizar, 2014: Adaptation needs and options. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C.B., V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken, K.J. Mach, M.D. Mastrandrea, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L.White (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 839.

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Countries and economies are all assessed on how much incremental growth has accrued over the last analyzed period – usually quarterly and annually – to determine if an economy is growing, getting better, doing well, progressing, and being “productive”. That incremental growth is encapsulated in the analytic metric of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP has become the singular, dominant measure of the health of a nation’s economy as well as the well-being of a nation’s citizens. When Trump, the current U.S. President, says he thinks America’s GDP can grow at a rate of three percent annually to the current independent economic forecast estimates of 1% growth, the underlying assumption of the assertion is that his administration has the ability to drive economic growth and citizen prosperity faster than a more incremental growth rate. The problem is GDP was never created to be used in its present incarnation and it most definitely was never meant to measure economic or social well-being.

The History Behind the Creation of GDP

The GDP concept was first introduced in the early 1930’s by Simon Kuznets, the chief architect of America’s national accounting system. At that point in time, GDP was designed to be a particular measure of economic activity for the nation. Back then, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis described GDP’s purpose as being a way to answer questions such as, “How fast is the economy growing?”, “What is the pattern of spending on goods and services?”, “What percent of the increase in production is due to inflation?”, and “How much of the income produced is being used for consumption as opposed to investment or savings?”.1    The use of GDP as a measure of economic progress and stability as well as human well-being was further cemented at the tail-end of World War II at the Bretton Woods Conference (New Hampshire). The leaders of forty-four allied nations convened to set-up a “process for international cooperation on trade and currency exchange”1. The thinking behind the idea was improvements in economic well-being should be a strong catalyst for “lasting” world peace.1  Economic well-being was first and foremost achieved through continuous economic growth. The Bretton Wood Conference birthed key international economic and monetary governing bodies including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), now part of the World Bank.1   Of course, the financial might and world-view of the U.S. dominated both of these institutions. Thus, U.S. economic policy and measurement become the de facto standards for both. Over the course of the last three quarters of a century, GDP has become the primary measure of economic progress for nearly all nations on the globe.4

GDP as a Kitchen Sink Measurement

Equating economic growth with economic progress and human well-being is a problem. Money spent rebuilding from natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey) factors into positive GDP. Federal funding of adding nuclear warheads to existing arsenal grows GDP. Companies that produce products known to cause cancer, disease and death such as cigarettes, flame-retardants in children’s sleepwear, unknown ingredients in cosmetics, and the cocktail of harsh chemicals used to dye clothing worn by men and women all support a growing GDP, if company revenues and product sales increase. Urban sprawl, suburban growth, highway infrastructure development all contribute to a positive GDP while the downside of these developments is deforestation, soil degradation, air smog, water contamination (think: Flint, Michigan’s contaminated river water thought to be easily treated for human consumption), biodiversity loss, declining fish populations, coral reef bleaching, and untold human suffering from water and land contamination from unregulated or illegal industrial chemical dumping. These human tolls are not factored into GDP. What is included, fairly or unfairly, is the cost of taking care of chronically sick and dying individuals.

Natural Disasters Make for A Positive GDP

The cost of massive cleanups like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had innumerable and not sufficiently quantifiable negative repercussions to the natural environment, communities and individuals within the Gulf of Mexico, but is positively attributed to a growing GDP. By the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC)’s tally, 35% of the American Gulf Waters had to be closed to fishing, putting thousands of fishermen out of work. Thousands upon thousands of wildlife perished including dolphins, wales, fish, sea turtles and birds. Important and precious ecosystems were contaminated for many decades or altogether destroyed including wetlands and estuaries around the Gulf Coast.2  In the calculation of a nation’s GDP, both positive and negative market-driven economic production and services are included. What is not included is the long-term, devastating and ultimately, incalculable toll natural and human-induced disasters have on the economic and social well-being of a national community.

The Missing Factor in GDP

Continuous market-driven economic growth is a poor indicator for measuring increases (or decreases) in human suffering, mental well-being, educational opportunities, professional development, cultural enjoyment, contentment, good health, happiness, and supportive and in-tact family units, to name a few important factors that most people agree are important for a productive, constructive, and meaningful life. Constanza et al., 2014 (economists all) offer a compelling argument to stop the misuse of GDP to measure social well-being: “Because GDP measures only monetary transactions related to the production of goods and services, it is based on an incomplete picture of the system within which the human economy operates. As a result, GDP not only fails to measure key aspects of quality of life; in many ways, it encourages activities that are counter to long-term community well-being.”3

Rethinking GDP as “The” Economic Measure

Long-term human well-being should be equated to an economy that is operated sustainably. That means stopping the depletion of natural resources, reducing our use of ecosystem services that are detrimental to their long-term survival (i.e., deforestation, fishery collapse, topsoil erosion, groundwater aquifer depletion, salinization of surface waters), and mitigating pollution-inducing activities that threaten both the Earth’s self-regulating systems and our very survival on this planet. Endless, continuous economic growth should not and cannot be our singular national goal. Economic growth for its sole sake is a path toward certain destruction – to our way of life, to the natural environment as we currently know it, to species diversity, to resource availability, and to community vibrancy and resiliency. We need to start having more voluminous and varied discussions on the fallacy of continuous economic growth at all levels of government, and within every communities and organization large and small. One clear signal that constant, ever-increasing economic momentum is false and not the measure of good economic growth would be for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to change or drop its requirement of public companies to report quarterly and annual financial results to the financial markets (U.S.’s Wall Street). In this way, companies would be free of the burden to report growth for growth sake with all the negative costs actualized against their stock price and market cap, and instead, guide industry and organizations through responsible growth that supports economic activity and vibrancy (think: profit) alongside sustainable social well-being that inherently embeds environmental stewardship into the equation. Consensus around a new economic paradigm shift needs to be developed, agreed upon, and implemented (on a global scale) so that economic and social well-being is measured rightly, more accurately, and most importantly, fundamentally sustains human communities for centuries to come.

A suggested intriguing read: Naomi Klein’s book (2014), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. 

Contact Kate Gaertner today to see what Triple Win Advisory can do to help your business and industry increase sustainability to result in a “triple win” for company profit and long-term competitive advantage, societal well-being, and successful environmental pollution mitigation.

Kate Gaertner

References:

1) Costanza, Robert; Hart, Maureen; Posner, Stephen; Talberth, John. (2009, January). Beyond GDP: The Need for New Measures of Progress. The Pardee Papers, No. 4.

2) Suatoni, Lisa. (2011, January 11). The Evaluation of Deepwater Horizon’s Environmental Toll (Challenges of a Novel Oil Spill).

3) Costanza, Robert; Hart, Maureen; Kubiszewski, Ida; Talberth, John. (2014). A Short History of GDP: Moving Towards Better Measures of Human Wellbeing. Solutions, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 91-97.

4) The Kingdom of Bhutan is a singular country where the measure of GDP is not used but rather, Gross National Happiness (GNH). Since 2004, the Bhutan government has organized four international conferences to bring greater global awareness of the GNH index.

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