KACHARAGADLA

It’s been described as one of the  most important numbers in economics . It’s also one of the   most controversial . For while gross domestic product is great at measuring the goods and services produced by a country, it does a pretty shoddy job of capturing the things that actually matter to most of us. After all, what good is a booming economy if very few people benefit from it? But while  most experts  agree that GDP has its limitations, nobody quite knows what to replace it with. If GDP is a poor assessment of the things that matter, what could be a more accurate measure? How can we determine which countries are not only thriving, but also managing to convert this economic growth into well-being for their citizens? A new way of measuring progress Researchers at the Boston Consulting Group  have found an alternative: the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment. The index tracks 160 countries across three elements: economics, sustainability and investment. T

You might disagree with Milton Friedman’s famous claim that the sole social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. But you can’t deny that it sounds simple and straightforward. Here’s the full Friedman, as originally expressed in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom , then exposed to a larger audience in a 1970 New York Times Magazine article : There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. Elegant, no? Same goes for the theories of corporate governance that it inspired. Any other theory of how business ought to behave is going to sound muddled and inconsistent in comparison. Even if it’s closer to being right. That thought kept coming back to me as I read John Taft’s new book Stewardship: Lessons Learned from the Lost Cult