I did not contribute much to Australia’s gross domestic product or gross domestic consumption on Saturday.
As days go _ according to the measures of economists _ I had a pretty miserable day. My standard of living was equivalent to _ well, not quite a Bangladeshi _ but certainly no higher than an Egyptian, Thai or Peruvian.
Let me add it up. One home-made salmon sandwich. The bought ingredients must have put 80 cents on the national account.
But it was a memorable day. On an isn’t-it-good-to-be-alive scale (as distinct from the economists’ standard-of-living scale) it was a ten in a scale of one to ten.
On Saturday, five of us skied/climbed to the top of Mount Kosciusko, each contributing about 80 cents to gross national consumption, though I suppose there was depreciation on the value of the 15-year-old cross-country skis and some of us helped Mr Kodak a tad.
Fourteen others climbed Kosciusko that day. I know, I counted them. Eight had skied 50 kilometres over eight days from Mount Selwyn. We lunched upwind of them.
The other three parties of two did the day trip from Thredbo where perhaps three thousand downhill skiers were contributing huge amounts to the national account _ the $56 day ticket, the $4 cups of coffee, the $6 hit of schnapps etc etc. I don’t want to belittle downhill skiing; far from it. It is a glorious sport of thrill and skill and you easily get your money’s worth. People risk their lives in minus 10 degrees at night driving snow-grooming tractors (a bit like tractor grass-mowers on caterpillar tracks) and tending to snow-making jets while the skiers scurry back to their warm lodges.
No; my point is we do not, and perhaps cannot, measure the intangibles in the national account or in standard-of-living tables.
Standing on top of Kosciusko looking at a thousand square kilometres of snow with virtually no-one on it _ the downhill resorts are on the outer edge out of sight _ cannot be measured in dollars.
A few years ago some lunatic wanted to put an downhill skiing resort on Mount Twynam right in the main range. It would have increased employment, gross national product and exports (with international tourism). But would Australia have been a better place? We would have taken away something we could not replace _ mountain wilderness _ and merely added a little to something we already have _ downhill skiing resorts.
The trouble is that in the past decade or so political leaders, commentators, policy-makers and so on have increasingly measured out national life in economic terms. Every monthly blip put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics is on the front pages or in the main electronic bulletins. We measure ourselves against last month. Is employment up or down? Is the current account up or down? If it creates employment and growth it is a Good Thing. Downhill skiing is good; wandering over the wilderness not spending money to create employment is bad.
It is no use trying to fight the importance which people attach to these measurements. It is better to join it. We need a series of new indexes to run alongside the current account, the CPI, unemployment and so on.
The wilderness account; the clean air account; the water account; the national health account; the space account and so on could be created. Bizarrely, the amount of money spent on repairing bad health goes into the national account and increases what the economists call wealth.
Bizarrely, if you pay $100 to play golf on a horrible urban course surrounded by traffic you add 10 times more to national product than if you pay $10 to play on the glorious Narooma or Tuross course next to the bush and ocean. Less space equals more wealth. If we set up these intangible capital accounts, we might get a better idea of what we are losing.
And while we are at it we can better monitor unpaid work that adds so much to people’s real standard of living _ work in the home and charities, for example.
The Bureau of Statistics has done some work on this, but my sometimes-blinkered profession does not weigh in with it every month with gasps, oooohs and hand-wringing saying how much better or worse off we are as the monthly tally of charitable work and work in the home ebbs and flows. If we do not measure we cannot mete.