VITAL SIGNS

1. Ratio of average income of CEOs ($,000) to average income of manufacturing workers ($,000), selected countries:

2. Ratio of percentage of wealth owned by the richest 20% to the percentage of wealth owned by the poorest 20%, selected countries:

These two tables suggest that income disparity does not correlate at all with democracy or capitalism. The first table shows just how obscenely out of whack US executive salaries have become in recent years, bearing no connection whatsoever to productivity or performance. The second table ratios are the inverse of the ‘Gini index’. These ratios correlate closely to crime and incarceration rates, validating recent studies that show that wealth inequality, rather than poverty, determines crime rate.

3. Global annual grain and meat production, millions of tons

This chart shows that not only is the world continuing to produce more food than it needs, resulting in more overweight people on the planet than underweight, and more deaths from obesity-related diseases than malnutrition, but that the mix of food production is getting much more inefficient — meat production consumes 10 times the resources per calorie produced that grain production does, and most of the grain production now comes from non-native grains on heavily irrigated, heavily fertilized land that costs more in energy to grow than it produces in food energy.

4. Global consumption of energy, millions of tons of oil equivalent, by source

Despite the massive pollution and land degradation caused by coal mining, our voracious Western appetite for energy is driving us to increase, rather than decrease, coal-burning. Likewise, although nuclear power’s environmental damage, accident risk and enormous cost has reduced the number of new reactors being built, use of existing reactors continues to rise. And although renewable energy is off to a promising start, it still accounts for only 1.5% of global consumption.

5. Global carbon emissions, millions of tons, versus millions of cars in use globally

There’s nearly a perfect correlation between global energy consumption, total carbon emissions, and average global temperature, but the world’s greatest polluters continue to fund massive PR campaigns and phony research to try to convince us there is no need for action. Fortunately, this is one corporatist lie very few people are buying. And not only is the number of cars on the road growing at twice the rate of population, the average miles per car per year is also rising rapidly as drivers live further and further from where they work and shop.

6. GDP versus Genuine Progress Indicator, per capita, US

Since the late 1990s, the momentum that was building to replace the discredited and worthless GDP as a measure of economic health has stalled. This is unfortunate, since it allows the Bush regime to claim the economy is rebounding while it continues to stagnate. The Genuine Progress Indicator, which subtracts from GDP the costs of traffic, pollution, non-renewable resource use and crime, and adds back the value of unpaid work, is a flawed but certainly superior measure. Unfortunately, producing this data on a more timely basis (it’s available for only eight countries, and the latest available data is for 2000) will require governments to invest in calculating this data, and to publicize and use GPI, rather than GDP, in making economic and political decisions. Huge lobbies are working to prevent this, since it threatens their massive subsidies, and governments would prefer, especially in an election year, to be the bearer of good tidings, even if they’re patently false, than bad news that suggests most of what our economy now does detracts, rather than contributes, to well-being.