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. Committees have been convened and international institutions have introduced indexes and frameworks to assess vulnerability, well-being and natural capital.
But none has gained widespread favor. So last year, the United Nations set up a commission to design a more focused set of indicators that could finally take away some of the attention paid to G.D.P.
The result, released this month, is a dashboard of 31 metrics grouped in four buckets representing peace and human rights, sustainability, quality of life, and inequality. It includes the share of people who feel comfortable walking in their neighborhood after dark, the wealth share of the richest 1 percent and the number of conflict-related deaths per 100,000 people.
The dashboard is more concise than the hundreds of data points underpinning the Sustainable Development Goals the United Nations set in 2015. António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, whose term ends this year, called the new dashboard a complement to G.D.P., and beseeched delegates to take it up in their own countries.
“The report is also a call to action: Let’s count what matters,” he said.
‘It’s Ridiculous’
And yet the proposal is nowhere near the straightforward benchmark encapsulated in G.D.P., and it has already drawn criticism.
Weeks before the release of the proposal, a letter signed by 58 experts, including professors at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale and a former president of the U.N. General Assembly, argued that the commission had squandered its mandate by selecting too many indicators.
“It is difficult to imagine any aspect of well-being that would plausibly fall outside such an extremely broad framework,” the letter reads. The signatories, who come mostly from the field of environmental economics, instead argued for adopting a more holistic measure of wealth including elements like public health and natural resources. The World Bank released the latest edition of one such measurement system in 2024, to complement G.D.P.’s focus on income.
Robert Smith, a former director of environmental accounts for Canada’s national statistics agency, who orchestrated the letter, called the U.N. effort well meaning but undisciplined.
“This is not going to compete with G.D.P.,” Mr. Smith said. “Countries are going to look at this and say, ‘We’re going to come up with our own set of indicators’ or ‘It’s ridiculous, and we’re going to stick with G.D.P.’”
When the report was presented this month by the expert group and U.N. officials, a representative for an alliance of small island countries pointed out that other alternative indicators serve a similar purpose and are already gaining traction.
“Reopening or replicating this work under a different label would risk fragmentation and dilute political momentum,” said Ilana Seid, Palau’s U.N. representative. Plus, she noted, many small countries don’t have the resources to compile large volumes of data. “The proliferation of indicators carries real capacity costs and constraints,” she said.
The process has also exposed disagreements about how such an alternative metric would be used. Costa Rica, which was among countries that called for the commission, is mostly interested in using an alternative G.D.P. measure to win more favorable borrowing terms.
Luis A. Molina Chacón, the vice minister of finance, said in an interview that he believed Costa Rica — where G.D.P. is about $19,000 per person — would be considered 40 percent richer if its natural wealth were taken into account. But it’s difficult to use a highly biodiverse tropical rainforest as collateral for a loan. In the past, he argued, countries used things like trading routes as collateral.
“Those assets were not liquid 100 years ago,” Mr. Molina said. “And somehow the international community figured a way to accept it as collateral and a way to lend money to different countries.”
The commission’s report did not say whether development institutions like the World Bank should use their framework for underwriting loans, however, and a delegate speaking for Canada, Australia and New Zealand told the nations assembled at the release event that his group opposed it, given the other indicators already available.
This Isn’t Bretton Woods
Nora Lustig, an Argentine economist at El Colegio de México who studies inequality, understands the complaints. Ms. Lustig said she was skeptical when the secretary general’s office asked her to help lead the commission.
“It’s not for lack of effort that we don’t have a beyond G.D.P. competitor,” she said. “It’s because we have not been able to agree.”
The report is a product of compromise. The commission members came from many disciplines, and consulted proponents of several schools of thought about how best to measure what matters most. They tried to narrow down the number of indicators, but each had strong defenders.
“If you don’t have peace and security and human rights are violated and the planet is gone, you cannot have any well-being,” Ms. Lustig said. “They are primordial, in some sense.”
A central disagreement was whether to have a dashboard at all, or if the indicators should instead be aggregated into a composite — like G.D.P. — that weights each component by its importance. Ms. Lustig said she had come around to believing that was the correct approach, and is carrying the research forward with a group of like-minded academics.
One commission member and early proponent of a G.D.P. alternative is Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank. He said he believed that a dashboard of indicators would be best because flattening the disparate elements of well-being into one number defeated the purpose of the exercise. After years of international debate, he said, a top-down prescription may not be the best path forward.
“It takes a national dialogue to decide what are the things that are important,” Mr. Stiglitz said. “Maybe after a number of countries do it, we’ll be able to get a sense of what are the metrics that seem to work in guiding policy and motivating citizens.”
Several countries are experimenting with dashboards. Canada has a “quality of life framework” integrated into budget processes and public communications. Kari Wolanski, an official with Canada’s federal statistical agency, is working with a separate U.N. commission to design uniform social and demographic metrics. The idea is that Canada might choose different indicators from Chile’s, but they’re all interchangeable, like Legos.
“You can present this to different constituencies with different brands, but produce underneath work that is internally logical and coherent,” Ms. Wolanski said.
But that strategy may not lead anytime soon to the universally understood system that has made G.D.P. so powerful. Kaushik Basu, an economist at Cornell University and a co-chairman of the U.N. G.D.P. commission, said he worried that countries wouldn’t use indicators that made them look bad.
“You can’t expect a new measure to be voluntarily adopted, every country jumping in, because some are winners and some are losers,” Mr. Basu said.
He said he hoped that the U.N. would push its member states to participate. G.D.P. gained traction only because the United States demanded it at the Bretton Woods conference at the end of World War II, where nations set up the international financial institutions that endure today.
The Biden administration appeared headed in a similar direction: The White House worked on a plan to reflect the environment in the accounting system from which G.D.P. is derived. Measuring the health of forests and wetlands can shed light on their capacity to produce income in the future, while putting a price tag on the services they provide — by preventing flooding, for example — can prove the value of allowing them to exist undisturbed.
But the Trump administration appears uninterested in such efforts. It has cut budgets for statistical agencies and eviscerated efforts to measure inequality, racial disparities and the economic impact of environmental factors.
“Unfortunately, when you start looking at things like climate, you’re heading into more political territory,” said Karen Dynan, an economist at Harvard and a former Treasury official.
Ms. Dynan said she believed that the conversation should continue in the United States — but perhaps led by academics and others with more time and resources than civil servants who are struggling to maintain the integrity of basic data.
“I don’t think the agencies are in a position to even lead that discussion,” she said. “I think they don’t really want to be mediating different voices on this.”
