Guest lecture on Learning from the Frog: GDP, Climate Change and Sustainable Living

The Department of Economics of the IIS University organized a guest lecture on 10^th August, 2018 in the A.V. Hall from 1 pm onwards. The guest of honour was Shri Devinder Sharma, a renowned food policy expert and an award-winning journalist. The subject of the lecture was ‘Learning from the Frog: GDP, Climate Change and Sustainable Living’. He began with a discussion on GDP as an inappropriate measure of development and the bizarre methods used by some countries in order to increase their GDP growth figures. Then he went on to discuss climate change and environmental destruction as by-products of growth process in an economy. He also emphasized the need for economic valuation of ‘free’ natural resources. The speaker was critical of the economic models which treat farming as unproductive and disapproved of the culture of ‘socialism for corporates, capitalism for farmers’. He also touched upon the subjects of ‘quantitative easing’ and various efforts carried out by modern economists to develop comprehensive measures of development. One of the initiatives in this regard by the UN is TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity). Finally, he addressed the analogy of learning from the frog for a sustainable living. He concluded the session by advising the audience to think out-of-the-box for sustainable solutions. The audience thanked him for an inspiring and thought-provoking session.