From GDP to GLP – Understanding Language as a measure of economic and societal growth.

This article introduces a new concept to measure the economy and society – any academics or journalists who use this concept – must attribute it back to me. Please read the footnote.

Economists measure almost everything: output, prices, productivity, employment, debt, trade and growth. Gross Domestic Product remains the headline number. It tells us how much economic value a country produces. But it tells us little about the quality of the society doing the producing.

Imagine two countries with identical GDP per capita. In one, children read widely, citizens can distinguish evidence from opinion, political disagreement remains articulate, and people possess the vocabulary to describe emotions without immediately turning them into accusations. In the other, public language has collapsed into slogans, obscenity, humiliation and outrage. Children read less, political opponents are routinely dehumanised, and words such as “evil”, “trauma”, “fascist”, “genocide” or “narcissist” are thrown at radically different phenomena until moral language loses resolution. I am thinking of countries like the US (under Donald Trump) & China vs Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany here. Countries like India also fall under it, however less so under the Modi government where public discourse has taken a sharp “nationalistic” turn. Israel would also fall under this in the Netanyahu government.

Economically, these societies may look similar. Civilisationally, they are not.

We therefore need another measure: GLP — Gross Language Product.

The Alternative Big Mac Index

The Economist’s Big Mac Index works because of its simplicity. A hamburger cannot describe an entire economy, but comparing a similar product across countries gives an intuitive window into purchasing power.

GLP could do something comparable for social health. Instead of asking, “What does a Big Mac cost here?”, ask: “What does the average 15-year-old understand here?” This is not simply measuring the maths scores and overall education levels, but simply seeing the output the education produced in what I would term are linguistically and morally “real” terms. Their ability to discern truth from falsehood, look through propaganda, and course correct their governments through the ballot in a functioning democracy.

Give students the same concepts: dignity, remorse, resentment, ambivalence, causation, evidence, uncertainty, proportionality, integrity, compassion, justice and vengeance. Can they define them? Distinguish them? Use them properly? Can they explain the difference between criticism and humiliation, correlation and causation, certainty and probability, justice and revenge?

That would not measure intelligence. It would measure conceptual equipment.

These don’t need to take the form of qualitative surveys. They can be discerned using social media platforms such as Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Reditt etc.

Language as Social DNA

Language may be the closest thing society has to DNA. DNA carries biological information across generations; language carries cultural information.

There is also some evidence from Islam for this. The below Hadith provides a view of a “nation” in a Islamic context :-

Narrated An-Nu`man bin Bashir:

Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said, “You see the believers as regards their being merciful among themselves and showing love among themselves and being kind, resembling one body, so that, if any part of the body is not well then the whole body shares the sleeplessness (insomnia) and fever with it.” (Sahih Bukhari 6011).

https://sunnah.com/bukhari:6011

A child repeatedly hears: “Tell the truth.”........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)