I attended an interesting event in Berlin yesterday on the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission’s “Report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress”. This is not quite a Foreign Policy topic, you might argue. But interestingly, the debate was a lot more about politics than about statistics.
The Bertelsmann Stiftung (Bertelsmann Foundation) invited Jacques Le Cacheux to present the findings of the report published in September at Bertelsmann’s Berlin representation “Unter den Linden 1″. Quite an address. Le Cacheux is one of the rapporteurs of the high-level Commission around Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen that was convened on the initiative of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy in January 2008 (i.e. well before the economic and financial crisis started). 
I am not an economist and I won’t go into the details of the report. Its core message is however quite simple, and it has gained a momentum against the background of the economic and financial crisis. The unifying theme of the report is “that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well being”.
Speaking to an audience of economists, journalists, statisticians and politicians, Le Cacheux admitted that the report’s main message was not innovative, as similar concepts have already been discussed for a while. But he underlined that there was a real window now for the report to have an impact.
This is a question that I always find particularly interesting: How and why do certain ideas succeed at certain points in time, and others don’t?
On this question the discussion that followed raised my level of attention. Joachim Fritz-Vannahme of Bertelsmann Stiftung, who moderated the event, invited a young analyst of political economy to comment on Le Cacheux’s presentation. Hendrik Enderlein is a Professor of Political Economy at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin (another institution berlinbrief will get back to).
Enderlein expects the Stiglitz report to become a reference point in the debates for the coming one or two decades: “It goes beyond statistics and economics, it is about politics; and it brings back into the focus that economics is about policy choices.” Enderlein thinks that the most interesting question related to the report is what politics will do with it. And he came up with an advice: The German Social Democratic Party (SPD), that has just been defeated in the general elections, should carefully look at the report. It might contain some interesting thoughts that could become a basis for the re-organization of the political left.
Download the full report on the website of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission.
Take a look at what the Hertie School of Governance is about.