Using GDP as a measure to relieve poverty is an experiment that has failed, world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week are being told.
Chair of Christian Aid and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams accuses global elites, particularly Christians, of a 'serious failure' to address poverty and said economies have stopped asking what the purpose of wealth is.
In a hard-hitting report Christian Aid branded current levels of inequality as 'morally repulsive' as it called for a new model to tackle poverty.
'The elite debate at Davos has been beset by quibbles over whether this or that policy increases or lessens inequality, while missing the most important point: this level of global inequality is morally repulsive. Extremes of inequality have very real human consequences for billions of people and the relationships between them that would be evidently unacceptable if they were not clothed in the jargon of economics,' said one of the report's authors, Sue Richardson.
'This report casts a critical light on the decades-long experiment in using measurement of GDP and other economic indicators as a proxy for human wellbeing. We conclude that this experiment has failed.'
The report, 'An Unquenchable Thirst for More: faith and economic growth, says using GDP to measure growth 'makes very small adjustments to the well-being of the very poor, but increases the prosperity of the already wealthy and makes huge demands on the environment'.
It calls for businesses to boost local markets and for a 'decoupling' of our use of resources from our consumption through technological innovation and reduced energy and resource use.
Dr Rowan Williams, in a forward to the report, said: 'We have stopped asking what wealth is for. Lacking a coherent picture of what a good human life looks like, we have filled the gap with quantified measures that tell us little or nothing about how far flesh-and-blood human beings are flourishing in all aspects of their experience.
'For Christians, in particular, this is a serious failure: we are in danger of not thinking about what is involved in our belief that we are made in God's image, made for creative engagement in the lives of others that will build them up as they build us up. Wealth is instrumental to this, never an end-in-itself.'
