Edition 010: What Counts?— GDP, the Corporation, and the Materiality Standard

Every system decides what to count. That decision — which always looks like a technical choice — is also a decision about what to ignore. And a decision about what to ignore is, eventually, a decision about who the system can and cannot see ... Mississippi's GDP per capita is higher than France's, the United Kingdom's, and Italy's. By the number the world uses to measure prosperity, Mississippi outperforms some of the most developed nations in human history ... My step-grandparents lived in Forest, Mississippi. I lived in Paris. No number can make those places equivalent ... A corporation's moral compass, if it can be said to have one, points only at profit. In a person, we would call that greed. In a corporation, it is the law ... This is the system. It was built to count money and to serve the people who own it. It does that work with precision. Everyone else is invisible.