“The longer our obsession with GDP goes on, the longer the issues that really matter to people across the globe will continue to go ignored,” Mr Green said. “It’s not a measure of our well-being and it shouldn’t be a guide to all decision making.”
GDP was introduced as a concept in the 1930s by the economist Simon Kuznets, who warned at the time that “the welfare of a nation can… scarcely be inferred from a measurement of a national income”such as GDP. He later pointed out that there are distinctions between quantity and quality of growth, and between short term and long term goals.
“But we have ignored Kusnets’ warning,” said Mr Green, and we now talk about GDP as if it were “handed down from God on tablets of stone”. But major institutions are now weighing in with alternative measures of growth.