(By Alan Durning, excerpted from This Place on Earth 2002)

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, even in the grip of the world's rage and grief, one of the media's most persistent questions was, What was the death toll? People searched for a frame of reference, for some quantification of the incomprehensible. In that way, the question was profoundly revealing.

Counting things is a deeply human impulse; it's one way we understand our world. From deaths to births, from economic growth to standardized test scores, measurement permeates contemporary life. Hundreds of measurements--or indicators--fill the news, shape public opinion, and inform the millions of actions that individuals and organizations take each day. They serve as proxies for larger, more complicated trends, telling us whether the state of the human enterprise is getting better or worse.

But many of the indicators we rely on, particularly economic ones such as the Dow Jones industrial average, are deeply flawed. They conceal what they purport to reveal and, in the process, systematically misinform us, misdirecting our actions on a grand scale. The Dow Jones industrial average, for example, is the undisputed king of stock market yardsticks. In popular consciousness, the Dow is the market; the NASDAQ composite, the S&P 500, and other measures merely color the news.

But the Dow is the least-accurate regularly published stock indicator. Not only is its roster of 30 companies assembled without benefit of any particular methodology--two people at Dow Jones & Co. simply pick them--the index is also mathematically spurious. The Dow averages stock prices without attention to the number of shares in circulation.

The Dow's odd structure is explained by its genesis. Charles Dow, first editor of the Wall Street Journal, created it in 1896, scribbling out the calculations by hand. A short list of stocks and a simple formula let him report his average easily and often. Incorporating market capitalization (the number of shares times the price of each) would have necessitated a lot of multiplying and adding, followed by one gigantic division problem. The world's most quoted economic gauge may therefore be erroneous because of a fear of long division.

If the Dow measures badly, another leading indicator, gross domestic product (GDP), measures well the wrong thing--or rather, it does not measure what we think. North Americans take GDP as the bellwether of national well-being, but GDP doesn't track how people are, only how much they spend.

GDP fails to distinguish between losses and gains, because it only adds and doesn't subtract. Gutting ecosystems for commodities--and leaving fisheries depleted, forests cleared, or rivers dammed--shows up as a plus in the accounts. So do expensive misfortunes: Whether money is spent on vacations or hospital stays, playground equipment or car wrecks, births or funerals, it's all the same in the GDP ledger.

Likewise, GDP goes up regardless of whether consumers may regret the purchase (such as spending on alcohol, tobacco, and gambling) or when consumers may regret the need for the purchase (such as spending on car alarms, firearms, gated communities, and private guards). Blind to services provided free by families, friends, and communities, GDP math values an hour of paid daycare more highly than an hour of unpaid parenting and a book from a store more than one from a library.

With its blinkered accounting, the GDP cannot see much of what is important. It tells only about the growth of economic production, not of economic satisfaction or quality of life. Since 1957, for example, US real GDP per capita has more than doubled, but the share of Americans who describe themselves as "very happy" has remained unchanged at about one-third. Even Simon Kuznets, Nobel Prize-winning economist and inventor of the GDP, warned against treating it as a gauge of progress; in 1962, he wrote, "Goals for 'more' growth should specify more growth of what and for what."

Just as the Dow and GDP deceive us, other indicators also give inaccurate readings. The consumer price index exaggerates inflation (because part of its rise reflects tastes that elevate with purchasing power); the unemployment rate understates unemployment (because it excludes those who have given up on finding jobs); and the poverty rate undercounts the poor (because the US poverty definition is the most miserly standard of basic needs in the industrial world).

The Northwest's chosen indicators should not be historical flukes, matters of convenience, or perquisites of power. They should spring from the region's values, its aspirations for the future. Financial security ranks high among those values, so it is fitting that the Northwest monitor its financial capital. But it is not fitting that financial measurements should overwhelm all others in how often they are tabulated; that stock quotes, commodity prices, and other yardsticks of the marketplace should crowd out indicators of community vitality, human well-being, and ecological integrity.

The Cascadia Scorecard is a step toward better indicators, indicators that measure what matters to northwesterners over the long run and that can thereby realign people's actions with their deeper values. Ideally, indicators of the Northwest's lasting progress--its sustainability--would measure to what extent northwesterners are secure and thriving, to what extent Northwest nature is thriving, and to what extent northwesterners' way of life is benign in its impacts on nature and cultures outside the region.

Until the Northwest begins measuring what it values, rather than valuing what it measures, it will not be able to seize the opportunity or to avoid the danger. When the region does regularly monitor its environmental and social, along with its economic, performance, however, this place on Earth may yet achieve a way of life that can last-one that nurtures human community while honoring nature's limits.