Episode 69 - Stories for Life - Mike Benson - GDP Seems kind of Gross
Welcome to this first Stories for Life minisode from The SpaceShip Earth Podcast.
The intention with these mini episodes is to serve up short form sonic offerings - poems, stories, readings, meditations and musical gifts.
These offerings will either be riffing on 'love stories', helping us relate to ourselves, to each other and to this more than human world that we inhabit in more entangled, mysterious, interconnected and life sustaining ways.
Or drawing our attention to 'horror stories' in our modern cultures that through their deeply ingrained pervasiveness keep us trapped in the destructive and divisive story of separation.
This first offering comes from writer and poet Mike Benson, a poem entitled - GDP: seems kind of Gross.
Written during a Stories for Life hack in London in 2020.
The poem was a response to the question, how has GDP, gross domestic product, (a made up story of how to measure economic success which the inventor himself warned governments never to use as a sole indicator of economic success) become the single organising story that all nations on Earth now use to calculate their economic success ?
As Robert Kennedy said in 1968 “ GDP measures everything except that which is worthwhile'
We hope you enjoy and please do share with other if this speaks to you
Links
https://theopenspace.substack.com/