Changing societies
Keynote speech by Rutger Hoekstra
‘If we remain scattered, we will never have any power’
We are living in a time of worldwide protests, said Rutger Hoekstra at the opening session of Synergy 2020. People are taking to the streets to protest climate change, globalisation and inequality. How can researchers help to address these urgent economic, social, environmental and political challenges?
Hoekstra – who is trained as an ecological economist, and is the founder of consultancy firm MetricsForTheFuture.com as well as visiting researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science (Leiden University) – asked the audience to look at the success of the macro-economic metric Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Every country in the world uses GDP to measure economic growth in a harmonised way. ‘The term ‘economic growth didn’t really exist before the war,’ said Hoekstra. ‘Now it’s so common, if you refer to ‘growth’, people will automatically think of economic growth.’
Global approach
GDP has been a wildly successful metric for policymakers, but it has limitations. GDP only looks at economic growth and doesn’t consider other important factors such as the amount of leisure time, the environmental situation and the distribution of income. ‘We are now at the point where economic advice in some cases goes against what is best for society’, Hoekstra said.
‘We are now at the point where economic advice in some cases goes against what is best for society’
Hoekstra believes that, in order to have a positive societal impact, researchers from the social sciences and humanities need an interdisciplinary and globally coordinated approach. His proposed alternative to GDP is WiSE: a metric that considers Wellbeing, Sustainability and Equity. To ensure impact on policymakers, Hoekstra says we need an intergovernmental panel in the United Nations for WiSE solutions, comparable to the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC). ‘If we remain scattered, we will never have any power. We need some level of agreement to get our message across.’
Read more about an alternative for GDP in Rutger Hoekstra’s book Replacing GDP by 2030 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Rutger Hoekstra
Founder of MetricsForTheFuture.com and visiting researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science (Leiden University)
The panelists respond to Hoekstra’s keynote
‘WE NEED AN INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL VOOR WiSE SOLUTIONS’
‘An intergovernmental panel is part of the solution, a first step. But certainly not enough. The aim of such a panel would be to find a common language and purpose, but that too is not enough. What we need is a more fundamental change of society.’
Conny Rijken
Professor of Human Trafficking and Globalisation at Tilburg University
‘Should we go down the road of giving more power to metrics? Replacing a bad metric – the GDP – with a better, but still problematic metric? Or should we try to dethrone the power of metrics, and give more power to narratives and an exchange of arguments?’
Ingrid Robeyns
Professor Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University
‘What I like about an intergovernmental panel is that it forces us out of our comfort zone as scholars of social sciences and humanities, because we are not always as persuasive as we could be. That is to say: This could become – at this point in time – the best consolidated knowledge we have, and a better, more complete measure to base advice on.’
Claes de Vreese
Professor of Political Communication at University of Amsterdam