“The Gross National Product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” — Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

It is June 5, 1968. An eleven-year-old English boy is watching the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on his black and white television. That little boy is Tim Jackson — now one of Britain’s most influential critics of capitalism. He had no idea then that RFK would change his life. It happened years later, when Jackson discovered a speech Kennedy gave in Kansas in the spring of 1968. It was a speech that changed the way Tim Jackson thought about economics.

The March 1968 speech, one of the first of RFK’s presidential campaign, was delivered at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, University of Kansas. It opened with a joke at the expense of rival Kansas State University. Then Bobby turned deadly serious. For the first time (at least for a Presidential candidate), he attacked the very idea of the Gross National Product itself. RFK argued that GDP quantifies all the worst stuff including air pollution, cigarette advertising and jails. But it doesn’t measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It quantifies everything except that which makes life worthwhile. Then fetishizes the data. Worse than wrong, Bobby Kennedy suggested, GDP makes data evil.

For Jackson, who has spent his career mulling over the idea of economic growth, RFK’s Phog Allen Fieldhouse speech came as a revelation. Indeed much of his later thinking, including his 2021 award-winning book Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, is indebted to this March 1968 speech. Almost sixty years later, in our ever-more-quantifiable age of ubiquitous data-centres, it’s a speech that appears uncannily prescient. Both Tim Jackson and Bobby Kennedy are right to remind us that there is an alternative to quantifying progress. There is, indeed, life after GDP. And it can’t be measured.

Five Takeaways

• An 11-Year-Old on His Birthday. Born June 4. RFK shot June 4–5, 1968. Black and white TV in the UK. His aunt had just sailed for America. Oh no, not again.

• The Kansas Speech. GDP counts air pollution and jail cells, not the health of children or the joy of play. It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.

• The Two Wrong Turns. Post-war solution: persuade people having more stuff is what matters. Two mistakes: material consumption is not all we are; more production does more environmental damage. Both wrong turns we are now living with in extremis.

• The Trillionaire and the 2 Billion. Recorded the day after the world’s first trillionaire arrived. Jackson: this is obscene while 2 billion lack clean water. Not new. The latest expression of a system always building toward this.

• They Created a Desert and Called It Peace. Tacitus via RFK applied to today’s America: what is it to be American only on the back of a flattened Gaza, a distant war, a failing empire? Bernie said the same. AOC picked up the mantle. It’s still Kansas, 1968.

About the Guest

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and the author of Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (Polity Press, 2021). He lives in Guildford, Surrey.

References

Post Growth by Tim Jackson (Polity Press, 2021): timjackson.org.uk/ecological-economics/postgrowth-book
RFK’s University of Kansas speech, March 18, 1968
Tacitus, Agricola: ‘they created a desert and called it peace’

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:30 Guildford, Surrey, and June 4, 1968
00:01:30 Watching the assassination on his birthday
00:03:56 The Kansas speech
00:05:12 What Kennedy actually said about GDP
00:20:29 The trillionaire and 2 billion without clean water
00:21:09 The two wrong turns
00:26:38 Can Kennedy reinvigorate progressives?
00:27:40 They created a desert and called it peace