0.21 Cultural and aesthetic considerations

Cultural and aesthetic considerations

Introduction

The world’s industrialized countries are undergoing many changes as they move to the later stages of the Industrial Revolution. Economies are becoming more information based, and capital is being measured not only in terms of tangible products and human workers, but also in terms of social and intellectual assets. For example, the makeup of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the United States has gradually changed from being mainly manufactured goods to one with services predominating. Computer software and many other services, which are not easily categorized under the old economic system, now represent the largest sector of the United States' economy.

This change in economic thinking has brought about a deeper awareness of the natural processes and ecological assets found in nature. Society is slowly shifting to an industrial model that includes recycling. Such closed-loop production encompasses the principles of waste-reduction, re-manufacturing and re-use. Conventional industrial economics considered air, water and the earth's natural cycles to be "free" goods. However, such thought led to considerable external environmental and social costs. With the rise of environmentally responsible economics, there is a movement to change to full-cost pricing of goods, which includes the social and environmental costs of production.

Attempts have been made to overhaul economic indicators such as the GDP to take into account intangible assets and intellectual property. In 1994, the Clinton Administration attempted to integrate environmental factors into the GDP. The World Bank in 1995 redefined its Wealth Index. A nation's wealth now consists of 60 percent human capital (social and intellectual assets), 20 percent environmental capital (natural assets), and 20 percent built capital (tangible assets). These green GDP figures are intended to provide a better measure of the quality of life in a country than the traditional GDP, which looked only at tangible economic factors. However, such methods fail to take into account other areas that affect the quality of life in a country, such as human rights, health and education.

In attempts to develop a better measure of the quality of life of a region, separate sets of economic, environmental and social indicators have been devised. The reasoning of this is that it is better to consider several separate indicators, rather than try to create a single, catch-all index. This approach does not require the difficult, if not impossible, attempt to place monetary values on all factors. The Calvert-Henderson Group chose twelve separate quality of life indicators: education, employment, energy, environment, health, human rights, income, infrastructure, national security, public safety, recreation and shelter. Although separate, each indicator is related to the others, and all are based on readily available demographic data.