It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s health. An authoritarian regime might score well, even if it hoards wealth and its median citizen lives in poverty.<\/p>\n
For decades<\/a>, 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<\/a>, well-being<\/a> and natural capital<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The result, released this month, is a dashboard of 31 metrics<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The dashboard is more concise than the hundreds of data points underpinning the Sustainable Development Goals<\/a> the United Nations set in 2015. Ant\u00f3nio 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe report is also a call to action: Let\u2019s count what matters,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s Ridiculous\u2019<\/p>\n And yet the proposal is nowhere near the straightforward benchmark encapsulated in G.D.P., and it has already drawn criticism.<\/p>\n Weeks before the release of the proposal, a letter signed by 58 experts<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is difficult to imagine any aspect of well-being that would plausibly fall outside such an extremely broad framework,\u201d 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<\/a> in 2024, to complement G.D.P.\u2019s focus on income.<\/p>\n Robert Smith, a former director of environmental accounts for Canada\u2019s national statistics agency, who orchestrated the letter, called the U.N. effort well meaning but undisciplined.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not going to compete with G.D.P.,\u201d Mr. Smith said. \u201cCountries are going to look at this and say, \u2018We\u2019re going to come up with our own set of indicators\u2019 or \u2018It\u2019s ridiculous, and we\u2019re going to stick with G.D.P.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n When the report was presented<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cReopening or replicating this work under a different label would risk fragmentation and dilute political momentum,\u201d said Ilana Seid, Palau\u2019s U.N. representative. Plus, she noted, many small countries don\u2019t have the resources to compile large volumes of data. \u201cThe proliferation of indicators carries real capacity costs and constraints,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Luis A. Molina Chac\u00f3n, the vice minister of finance, said in an interview that he believed Costa Rica \u2014 where G.D.P. is about $19,000 per person \u2014 would be considered 40 percent richer if its natural wealth were taken into account<\/a>. But it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThose assets were not liquid 100 years ago,\u201d Mr. Molina said. \u201cAnd somehow the international community figured a way to accept it as collateral and a way to lend money to different countries.\u201d<\/p>\n The commission\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This Isn\u2019t Bretton Woods<\/p>\n Nora Lustig, an Argentine economist at El Colegio de M\u00e9xico who studies inequality, understands the complaints. Ms. Lustig said she was skeptical when the secretary general\u2019s office asked her to help lead the commission.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not for lack of effort that we don\u2019t have a beyond G.D.P. competitor,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s because we have not been able to agree.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you don\u2019t have peace and security and human rights are violated and the planet is gone, you cannot have any well-being,\u201d Ms. Lustig said. \u201cThey are primordial, in some sense.\u201d<\/p>\n A central disagreement was whether to have a dashboard at all, or if the indicators should instead be aggregated into a composite \u2014 like G.D.P. \u2014 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.<\/p>\n One commission member and early proponent<\/a> of a G.D.P. alternative<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt takes a national dialogue to decide what are the things that are important,\u201d Mr. Stiglitz said. \u201cMaybe after a number of countries do it, we\u2019ll be able to get a sense of what are the metrics that seem to work in guiding policy and motivating citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n Several countries are experimenting with dashboards. Canada has a \u201cquality of life framework<\/a>\u201d integrated into budget processes and public communications. Kari Wolanski, an official with Canada\u2019s federal statistical agency, is working with a separate U.N. commission<\/a> to design uniform social and demographic metrics. The idea is that Canada might choose different indicators from Chile\u2019s, but they\u2019re all interchangeable, like Legos.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can present this to different constituencies with different brands, but produce underneath work that is internally logical and coherent,\u201d Ms. Wolanski said.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t use indicators that made them look bad.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t expect a new measure to be voluntarily adopted, every country jumping in, because some are winners and some are losers,\u201d Mr. Basu said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n