The Progress Project: Rethinking Progress and Human Development. The Glaser Progress Foundation in partnership with the University of Washington Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs examined the concept of progress and its relationship to public decision making from a variety of perspectives. The centerpiece of the project was a lecture series featuring Jane Goodall, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Paul Hawken, Vandana Shiva, Ralph Nader, Jimmy Carter, George Mitchell, Doug Engelbart, Amory Lovins, Robert Kuttner and others. These public lectures, webcast live and archived here, engaged scholars, policymakers, business leaders, and the public in a serious discussion of the subject of progress.

Program on Nonmarket Accounts. As the centerpiece of a vast and elaborate accounting system, our country's National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) represent one of the most important ways we track our nation's economy. These accounts are used by government and business to judge our nation's economic performance over time, to compare the economies of different nations, to measure the nation's saving and investment and to track the business cycle. The most well-known account is the GDP.

But the NIPA measure only market activity -- goods and services bought and sold in market transactions -- which distorts their measurement of environmental health and social well-being. Divorce, disease, pollution and crime make the country appear better off because they drive the GDP up through increased market activity. Conversely, many valuable services and goods such as recreation and leisure activities, volunteer work, household labor and parental child care and investments in human capital generate little or no market activity so they are excluded from the GDP.

In order to improve and modernize our national accounting system, The Glaser Progress Foundation and Yale economist William Nordhaus have developed a ten-year program to build a comprehensive set of nonmarket accounts for the United States. The Program on Nonmarket Accounts (PNA) has built the first environmental nonmarket accounts in the areas of forestry and pollution, develop a blueprint for constructing a set of social nonmarket accounts and develop better population time-use data for the United States. Since 2001 The Glaser Progress Foundation has contributed more than $2.5 million to this program initiative.