To the Editor:

The United States is the “richest” nation in the world, right? Well, not according to a new World Bank study. As reported on the National Public Radio program “Living On Earth,” Australia has now become the world’s richest nation. According to the program, the World Bank has a new method of determining how rich a nation is.

This new method “expands the definition of wealth beyond just money and investments by weighing what a country earns against what it spends.” This is accomplished by not only looking at GNP—as traditional studies have done—but also by incorporating human resources and the health of the environment into the equation as well. This is a welcomed change.

Despite the fact that this new process is not yet perfect and that the results are still crude, the reports chief principal author, John O’ Connor, said that they felt they “needed to get the message out, not just to Bank researchers, but to people who are concerned about the environment and sustainable development in general.”

I find this news to be very encouraging for it finally looks like powerful, influential people are getting the message that environmental degradation for the sake of “progress” and profits is not only a threat to sustainable development, growth, and “progress” itself, but also has negative, long-term economic repercussions as well.

Implicitly it also brings into question the traditional U.S. concepts of development,growth, and “progress” and leaves open to debate the true social value of these concepts. In the words of Urbanist James Howard Kunstler, these concepts have resulted in an America which is “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading.” I would add, environmentally and culturally spent, self-centered, greedy and wasteful.

Also implicit in this new study is the sign that economists are finally learning how to subtract the costs of degradation—both cultural and environmental—from GNP, instead of the traditional approach of just adding the costs on.

Lucas Rockwell

Senior

Anthropology and Environmental Studies