Jayati Ghosh has a new article in Project Syndicate entitled “Let’s count what really matters,” in which she argues for using indicators other than GDP to truly measure well-being: the median wage multiplied by the employment rate, the proportion of the population that can afford a nutritious diet, time-use disaggregated by gender, and per capita carbon dioxide emissions:
If all countries tracked these four indicators regularly, we would have a very different view of comparative economic performance from the one that emerges from simplistic measures of per capita or aggregate GDP. And public awareness of this revised view of reality could well mobilise support for fundamentally different policies at national and international levels.
