Indicators: It Matters What We Measure

James R. Karr, University of Washington Humans measure things to understand the past, to document the present, and sometimes to predict the future. But humans neither measure everything nor measure things at random. Industrialized humans measure some things because they give pleasure—batting averages of favorite baseball players, for instance—and they measure other things because they are assumed to reflect individual or collective well-being—a person’s cholesterol level or annual income, a community’s crime or unemployment rate. In short, we humans measure what matters to us, and, conversely, we come to value the things we measure. The natural world—including seasons, weather, growing patterns of food plants, animal migrations, locations of water sources, and so on—undoubtedly mattered to early humans, and so they likely monitored these aspects of their surroundings. For the past century, however, economic growth has been the overarching priority and dominant idea (McNeill 2000), and so the dominant measures, or indicators, for monitoring societal wellbeing have been measures of the economy. Closely watched economic indicators like the Dow Jones industrial average, gross domestic product (GDP), or gross national product (GNP) dominate the news. But the focus on these economic indicators has masked social, moral, and ecological ills that also matter to societal well-being (Davidson 2000, Manno 2000). Although people may be aware of such ills, the relentless dominance of economic indicators allows policymakers to make decisions that ignore those ills. As a result, humanity now faces a paradox. The economic indicators we watch most closely suggest that all is well. Yet less-watched indicators show that the state of the biosphere is worsening. If we picture the key components of Earth’s living systems and their relationships to one another as a layer cake, human social systems rest atop the foundation layer of the natural, or ecological, system (Figure 1), and the human economic system is the