Gross National Product has become an indispensable yardstick of overall economic activity in terms of industrial output, wages, salaries and profits. But there are many elements of the human condition that GNP cannot measure. Also, even in its own area, GNP is qualitatively color-blind: If a million-dollar construction project that had the side effect of defacing the landscape were followed by a million-dollar effort to clean up the mess, both expenditures would be added impartially to the sum of GNP.
Although current domestic policy emphasizes human welfare, the United States thus far lacks a counterpart to estimates of GNP as a guide to planning and budget making. Efforts to this end got well under way during the past year, largely in response to a 1966 Presidential directive to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop a set of social indicators and supporting statistics.
A new post—Deputy Assistant Secretary for Social Indicators—was created in HEW, and Mancur Olson, Jr. appointed as first incumbent. Leading social scientists, serving as consultants, were organized into a "Panel on Social Indicators" under the joint chairmanship of Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Columbia University, and William Gorham of HEW. Sub-panels were created to prepare preliminary reports in seven areas: poverty and levels of living, opportunity and social mobility, health and life, quality of the environment, participation in the organized life of the society, education, and crime and other social costs. The preliminary report on environmental quality, of particular interest to those concerned with natural resources, was written by Harvey S. Perloff of Resources for the Future, in collaboration with Joseph L. Fisher of RFF, and Robert Gold of the National Capital Planning Commission.
A bill, introduced during the year by Senator Mondale, called for a periodic Social Report of the President to supplement the existing Economic Report of the President. Hearings have been held and the proposal is under consideration.
The work thus far is tentative— an experiment to determine whether it would be feasible to report regularly on the quality of life in the United States. There are many pitfalls and difficulties: Some aspects of well-being can be expressed usefully in numbers—such indicators of environmental quality, for instance, as the sulfur dioxide content of air or the coliform count in water; but others—like participation in community life or natural beauty may prove more resistant to numerical treatment. And even in the relatively easy-to-measure field of environmental quality, physical indicators do not tell enough. There is need to find ways of weighing the economic and social costs and benefits of various levels of pollution abatement or prevention activities, viewed against a broad geographical background that includes the people and natural environment affected.
But the search for social indicators, which began in 1967 on a modest scale, will bear watching. The GNP, now so widely used in public and private planning and policy making, was forty years ago an untried concept being nurtured and tested by a devoted handful of theorists.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1968 issue of Resources magazine.
