Beyond GDP

A new report grapples with an old issue:

It’s no secret that gross domestic product, the number that serves as a measure for economic progress around the world, is hardly a barometer of human flourishing.

It registers the harvest of a forest as timber income, for example, without recognizing the resulting erosion and water quality degradation. It measures spending on hospitals, but not people’s health. An authoritarian regime might score well, even if it hoards wealth and its median citizen lives in poverty.

For decades, economists have tried to devise an alternative metric to capture a broader picture of prosperity, which would change the goals that nations try to achieve.

Read more here.