David Brancaccio, a longtime correspondent for public radio and television, has written a fascinating post on his new Economy 4.0 blog for the Marketplace radio show analyzing the economic impacts of the gulf oil spill six months after explosions killed 11 workers and unleashed the gusher in the seabed.

His bottom line? Using conventional analysis, the oil spill was a winner for the American gross domestic product. Here’s how he put it, citing a June forecast by an analyst for J.P. Morgan Chase:

Even if you factor in declines in fishing, tourism, and offshore oil production, the analysis argued the government’s key calculation of economic growth, the Gross Domestic Product, would get a push upward by the worst oil spill ever. Here is the apparent takeaway: if we want to steer the economy away from a double-dip, one strategy would be to set off a series of environmental disasters. Maybe chop a hole in the Alaska pipeline. Turn a few spigots on willy-nilly at some chemical plants. Hire a platoon of locusts to decimate the wheat crop.

Of course, he’s not endorsing this econometric approach; in fact he’s using it to emphasize the need for a reexamination of longstanding norms for how we measure progress. Such reexaminations have been underway for awhile in places as far-flung as Bhutan and Britain. I asked Brancaccio several questions about his focus on unconventional economics. Here are his replies:

Q.

You appear to have migrated toward a new personal definition of economics that’s wider than the conventional one framing most coverage of the flows of money, goods and services. What prompted that?

A.

A series of minor epiphanies launched me on the Economy 4.0 beat. For instance, one day I discovered the original Monroney sticker for my car under the passenger seat along with some stale Cheerios and a map of Acadia National Park. The Monroney is the window sticker from the new car lot, all those years ago. It is the one printed with the E.P.A. city and highway mileage, according to the old standard. The message for me was this: America could not raise fuel efficiency in cars until we put the miles per gallon on every car. Outcomes can follow metrics. We get what we measure, in other words. If we would like to make the economy do a better job for more people (a completely non-controversial premise), what might we measure so the outcomes are better? It quickly became clear to me that Gross Domestic Product, measuring the economy based on dollar transactions, was insufficient. Exploring alternatives should be fascinating since every proposed alternative measure is a window into someone’s vision for a better future.

Q.

Do you think that this approach to covering the world of business and finance can exist outside that constraining box called “sustainability” — as in Marketplace’s sustainability desk and my occasional explorations of alternative economic models?

A.

If you replace the greenish word “sustainability” with the more financial-sounding phrase “long-term view” you are saying the same thing. The earth may be facing an existential crisis. The financial system, too. People much smarter than me feel strongly that the financial collapse of 2008 was ultimately a failure by players in the system to think beyond the next quarterly earnings report or their own year-end bonus.

Everyone who cares about their family’s long-term well-being, raise your hands: that is everybody, a very big coalition that transcends the environmental movement or party affiliation. Well-being, of course, cannot be divorced from environmental impacts. P.S.: I love my sisters and brothers on the Marketplace Sustainability Desk.

Q.

Awhile back, Herman Daly proposed that the financial implosion and Great Recession offered a chance to set a new course and benchmarks for economies. But politics and traditional approaches still seem to favor spending over saving, not to mention borrowing in a big way. Is Daly destined to remain a Don Quixote of sorts?

A.

Number one, thinking longer-term means having some patience. I have just returned from a wild road trip across America to look at financial experiments not on Wall Street but on Main Street, part of a PBS TV project called “Fixing the Future.” Industrial-scale worker-owned coops in Cleveland (including perhaps the world’s greenest commercial laundry); an enlightened for-profit bank in the upper Midwest that gives its profits back to the community as charity; a city in Washington State that has united local businesses and residents who share a single value: the long-term view. I visited a handful of places where folks march to a beat of a different economic drummer, but what impressed me is that these kinds of experiments are going on in towns all around us. They are, however, not yet bound into a single movement with a clear name. However, if these Main Street projects do learn to talk to each other and coordinate, it could become a force that does shake up the financial order.