CCSS Meeting #66: GDP and well-being in the world economy since 1820

Dr. Auke Rijpma gives an overview of the relationship between economic growth and wellbeing over the past two centuries and discusses the promise and challenge of developing new measures of wellbeing.
Dr. Auke Rijpma is an assistant professor in economic and social history, at the Faculty of Humanities (UU). He is interested in long-run economic growth, but above all in how economic growth results in widely shared gains in wellbeing. To do this he takes a quantitative and computational approach to the historical record, and tracks how things like income, health, work, and inequality changed as economies grew and stagnated. He works historically because it provides the diverse cases we need, and the necessary long-term view at which many of these processes operate. A big-data approach is needed to make the most out of new large-scale historical microdata becoming available, and to be able to have a “broad wellbeing” perspective, which takes into account the multidimensional character of wellbeing. He constructs and analyses such datasets in a diverse team of historians, social scientists, and computer scientists in projects like the Historical Income Panel of the Netherlands, CLARIAH, and the Cape of Good Hope Panel.
Lecture Overview
Despite years of dissatisfaction, economic growth still dominates our thinking about the progress of nations. GDP is meant to measure economic activity but excludes important aspects of wellbeing such as the contributions of non-market goods and services, and it says nothing about the distribution of resources in society. While more resources expand our possibilities and we should expect per capita GDP and many wellbeing indicators to be correlated, it is a valid concern that measuring societal progress using economic growth might cause us to miss the mark.
In this presentation, I will give an overview of the relationship between economic growth and wellbeing over the past two centuries. It builds on the work done in the How was life? project (Van Zanden et al. 2014; 2021; Rijpma et al. 2018), tracing wellbeing in the world economy since 1820 along 10 indicators. The presentation will focus its analysis on the concept of decoupling-periods when the relationship between economic growth and wellbeing changed-and discuss possible drivers of this relationship. In closing, the presentation will discuss the promise and challenge of developing new measures of wellbeing.
References:
Rijpma, Auke, Jan Luiten Van Zanden, and Marco Mira d’Ercole. 2018. “A Long-Term Perspective on the Development Experience of Emerging and Industrialised Economies.” OECD Statistics Working Papers 2018/10. Paris: OECD Publishing. doi.org/10.178....
Van Zanden, Jan Luiten, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira D’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Conal Smith, and Marcel Timmer, eds. 2014. How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820. Paris: OECD Publishing. doi.org/10.178....
Van Zanden, Jan Luiten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Mikołaj Malinowski, and Auke Rijpma, eds. 2021. How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-Being and Global Inequality since 1820. OECD. doi.org/10.178....