June 11, 2008

But foremost we need a new direction for our growth

Sir Martin Wolf writes that “Sustaining growth is the 21st century’s big challenge” June 11 but as the article is set in the perspective of the environmental and energy limitations that the world now faces and that Jeffrey Sachs has written a book on a better title would have been “Re-direction growth so as to make it sustainable is the 21st century’s big challenge”.

Now how do you do that? First of all by measuring growth in terms that makes more sense. That a dollar used to buy the family’s third car in a developed country should count as much as the dollar used to pay for the vaccine for a child in Africa does somehow not seem to give us the right compass bearing we need.