Keen On

“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 inclu