You make two observations: First, that life cycle assessment be a component of Q, quality; and of course you are correct. We do not refer to Goleman’s book (and will in future editions of this paper). But we do address the matter briefly under the component of quality we call Ethicality.

Your other observation, that “government or independent agency analysis” of a range of goods’ quality is necessary, given the maelstrom of deceptive information swirling about in most developed markets, is a good one. In a longer version of this paper (see http://soa.utexas.edu/files/csd/wps201101.pdf) we do indeed discuss the role of the agencies such as the BLS in tracking qualitative contributions to price increases. Certainly, there are many other government certification agencies that maintain quality standards for many commodities, professional services, and so on. But these standards are usually restricted to health and safety issues, and they are posed as quality minima. The kind of quality (or qualitative) economic growth we are looking for only begins after such minimum standards are met, i.e., with rising norms of functionality, reliability, attention to detail, beauty, generosity, simplicity, and ethicality in all goods and services. Our hope was to outline how this might go, how understanding what “quality” consists in could work in the cause of sustainable prosperity using the energy of the market, deftly regulated and educated.

The particular contribution this interesting paper makes is a call for “a more fundamental recasting of how we conceptualize, understand and organize economic activities” is vital. Widespread acceptance of the need to recast would provide a strong impetus to dismiss the quantity-oriented orthodox economic approach to evaluating economic activity. They offer a broad range of measures that would be combined to provide a quality measure. One suggestion would be, in the interest of building upon Daly’s work, that “optimal scale” of production be included when a measure of quality was made.

Concerning consumer education and determining what is a higher quality versus a lower quality good, using the ecological economist’s understanding of quality, the author’s could add the Life Cycle Assessment measure proposed by Daniel Goleman in his Ecological Intelligence book. Such a measure could help to achieve the “realignment of prices over time” the authors advocate
in the interest of encouraging more production and consumption of “high-quality, natural-resource-efficient ones that use (and thus elicit) more substantial human capital.”

The suggestions for influencing consumer decision-making do offer a means to shift spending towards the purchase of higher-quality goods. This section would have more convincing qualities if the authors added that some form of government or independent agency analysis should accompany such an effort to counteract what, in the USA, is the overwhelming number of messages aggressively financed by private interests seeking to convince potential consumers that thinking of the quantity of consumption will bring them greater satisfaction than any alternative.