For decades, we’ve treated a country’s success as the same thing as its wealth, using GDP as the main scorecard. But maybe it’s time to rethink that?
As global tensions rise (whether it’s wars over oil or competition for resources) this obsession with constant growth is only making things more aggressive and unstable.
Economist Tim Jackson says we should stop using GDP as our main measure of progress and start thinking of prosperity as health, not just money, and building an economy that actually works for people and the planet.
As he puts it, “growth, growth, growth” has been the go-to political mantra for decades...
GDP has plenty of problems, but the mistake is to think that this drive for growth is all top down, or that it's the result of "capitalism."
The drive for growth happens at the individual level. Do you not always try to invest in companies that give you the highest growth rate? Until you yourself can stop doing that, you don't really have any business criticizing anyone else's drive for growth.
There are metrics that attempt to do this, like the Human Development Index (HDI). The problem with these is that they impose more assumptions on people's preferences than just looking at economic activity.
Something I'd like to do at some point (or for someone else to do) is calculate expected lifetime earnings per capita for different places. That would incorporate health in the form of life expectancy.
It’s a cool idea. This way you try to tie economics to something real, like time and how long people actually live.
But it still has a blind spot. Even if you add life expectancy, you’re basically still reducing well-being to money.
A lot of what actually matters doesn’t fit into that—relationships, freedom, purpose, just enjoying life day to day. None of that shows up in “lifetime earnings.”
So yeah, it’s better than GDP, but it still doesn’t fully capture what living well really means.
Yes, there are lots of things we can't attach value measures to that we know people do value.