by Jimmy Nightingale

Created on: May 29, 2008   Last Updated: December 07, 2009

Ask any morally righteous person what they would like to achieve out of life and you will invariably get the answer that they "want to make the world a better place".

It sounds wonderful and gives you warm fuzzy feelings inside. Doesn't it?

But think about it for a moment. What does it mean? A better place for whom? Does that mean that the world is currently a bad place?

And the more you think about it, the more vague the virtuous ideal of making the world a better place becomes.

Personally, I'd like to think that if there was some kind of quantifiable way of measuring goodness, kind of like a pH scale with good at the top end of the scale and bad down at the bottom, you would just want to make sure that you improved the world's measure from the time of your birth until your death. This pG scale (the G stands for goodness) would hopefully see a continual improvement as more and more people jumped on the bandwagon.

I think Catherine Ryan Hyde had the right idea in her book 'Pay It Forward'. For those unfamiliar with the book, subsequent movie or concept, it involves doing something really good for three people. If they ask you how they can pay you back, the answer is to pay it forward and do the same for three more people. And so and so forth. Within a short space of time, according to the concept, this feel good pyramid scheme evolves into something on a global scale. It's kind of a self-perpetuating global betterment idea and I think it is a good one.

You can Google 'Pay It Forward' or go to Catherine Ryan Hyde's foundation page at http://www.payitforwardfoundation.org/home.html if you want to know more.

That there is no such thing as a pG scale is, in my view, very sad. The proxies that we tend to use, things like GDP, life expectancy, infant mortality and so on, are merely aspects of betterment. But it does beg the question. If you had everything you could ever want and could live forever, would you really be happy? Perhaps for a while, but I think you need to introduce some measure of quality in the equation.

GDP does try to introduce some measure of quality by arguing that if people have greater wealth, then they will have more income to spend and live a better quality of life. Partly true, but the problems I have with GDP as a proxy for my pG scale are:

- it assumes infinite resources and encourages wastefulness. For a manufacturing company to succeed, it needs to grow. That means make more, sell more, employ more, produce a bigger bottom line and grow its share

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