The Road to Sustainability GDP and Future Generations

This book presents a view of sustainability that starts from the acknowledgment of physical conditions and limits that humans can no longer neglect. It also includes some epistemological foundations of the concept of sustainability and historical backgrounds. The view is optimistic to the extent that economics, the compass of our industrial society, is open to inputs and suggestions coming from outside orthodox schemes. Transdisciplinary science is one key element of such a change, and this book is a transdisciplinary project. In the field of the criticism of the GDP as an omni-comprehensive instrument, the book also describes the methodology of the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), proposed by H. Daly and John Cobb in 1989. They proposed some revisions to the System of National Accounts and GDP in order to add information for policy makers towards sustainability. Starting with consumption, same adjustments are proposed to allow for inequality of income distribution, environmental problems (such as pollution costs, long-term environmental damage, and depletion of non-renewable resources) and social issues (such as commuting costs and public expenditure for health and education). Advances in integrating different sustainability indicators (both economic-based and physical-based) are also presented along with many other topics showing their use under a sustainability viewpoint.