Guest “Let us end poverty by redefining prosperity!” By David Middleton
Everything that is proposed by UN General Secretary Guterres and supported by the nature conservation authority should be ignored with extreme prejudices!
- Editorial
- October 01, 2025
End of Bip Mania: How the world should really measure prosperity
The obsession with economic performance as a measure of human development brings sustainability into the background. Researchers can now help develop better indicators.
The United Nations General Assembly in New York City last week has not lacked headlines. However, a remarkable political initiative from the World Bedium was not discussed by the leaders of the world if it should have been. UN General Secretary António Guterres has put together a high-ranking group of specialists to propose new indicators of human and planetary prosperity that go beyond GDP.
[…]
Guterres’ project is referred to beyond GDP because the global indicator of economic progress comes by: gross domestic product (GDP).
[…]
The 14-member committee, which is considered by the economists Kaushik Basu at Cornell University in ITHACA, New York, and Nora Lustig at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, about a wide number of indicators, each of which should have the same weight to GDP. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking – and exceptionally complex.
Just as complex in a paper in nature this week 1 is shown. The economists Andrew Fanning and Kate Raworth from the Donut Economics Action Lab in Oxford, Great Britain describe a sentence of 35 social and ecological indicators that try to provide some answers to the questions examined by the committee. They report 13 ecological indicators that frame the planet borders developed by environmental scientists.
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This work expands Raworth’s original idea of a safe and fair space for humanity “…
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The latest study and the UN initiative offer researchers throughout the economics to deal with each other in order to achieve the best possible result for people and the planets. As Raworth wrote in Donut Economics: “We have economies that have to grow, regardless of whether they thrive to us or not. What we need are economies that are thriving at us, whether they grow or not.”
Nature 6467 (2025)
Doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03144-Y
Nature
If you replace GDP with “35 social and ecological indicators”, the cost of the quixotic struggle against climate change would be irrelevant.
Here is part of the very abstract summary of your paper:
- Published: October 01, 2025
Donut of social and planetary borders monitors a world out of balance
Nature Volume 646Pages 47–56 (2025) quote this article
Abstract
The Taghnuss -shaped frame for social and planetary limits (the “donut”) offers a precise visual assessment of progress to meet the needs of all people within the Living Planet1,2,3. Here we present a renewed donut frame with a revised sentence of 35 indicators that monitor trends in social deprivation and ecological exuberance over the period of 2000–2022. Although the global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled, our median results show a modest achievement in reducing human emergency, which would have to accelerate the needs of all people by 2030. In the meantime, the increase in the ecological surplus would have to accelerate immediately and almost twice in the direction of the planetary boundaries to Earth and the earth, which it exempted earth system stability, by 2050 after 2050.
[…]
Fanning & Raworth, 2025
Translation: “Although the global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled”, we don’t feel good and want GDP want to be replaced by something that feels better for us.
Here is the “donut of prosperity” …
“Fig. 1: Current global status of defense and swinging in the donut in social and planetary borders.” Fanning & Raworth, 2025
The inner ring of the donut is its arbitrary estimate as a “social basis”. The wedges in the inner ring are their arbitrary deficits under this foundation. The outer ring of the donut is its arbitrary estimate of a planetary “ecological ceiling” … a “pre-industrial holocene landline”. The wedges are arbitrary estimates of how much capitalism has caused over the “pre-industrial holocene landline”.
Obviously, the costs for climate change, the biological diversity, the land conversion, the freshwater disorder, the nutrient pollution (WTF?), The chemical pollution and support of the “social foundation” will be irrelevant if we simply start to measure the wealth with its “donuts of prosperity” and not with good US dollar. Or maybe no new meaning. Donuts are considered worthless in this rhetorical device … although donuts often cost more than 1 US dollar.
Anyway, I would bet money for donuts that George Orwell would say this about the “donut of prosperity”.
reference
Fanning, Al, Raworth, K. Donut of social and planetary borders monitors a world out of balance. Nature 64647–56 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09385-1
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