The Number We Chose

GDP diverged from life a long time ago and the gap keeps compounding. Can we count better?

The value of an artillery shell fired in a war counts the same as a bridge that will stand for eighty years or more. A washing machine that dies after a mere thirty months of modest use counts for twice as much as one that lasts sixty. Wikipedia counts for nothing. GDP measures market output and it measures it well. The problem is that we do too much with it. We made it the target, we optimised for it for eighty years, and somewhere along the way stopped asking what else was moving. Let’s talk about that.

What got me into this was a talk by a Stanford economics professor that YouTube just recommended to me [3]. His claim: the economic impact of AI will be slower than we think, because GDP per head has grown around 2% a year for the last 150 years with no visible bump for steam, electricity, computers or the internet. Any past technology took decades to adopt because of its weak links. AI won’t be different [4]. The talk is great. But it left me with a puzzle. Anyone comparing life today with 1875 sees transformation everywhere - poverty, child mortality, literacy, working hours, heated and insulated homes, cars, flights, antibiotics. Yet the line says 2%. Steady as she goes. For 150 years. How come? My hypothesis: either the transformation is smaller than it feels, or the line does not measure it. And if the line does not measure it, we have been making policy by a number that does not measure a good life. But metrics get optimised for, so should we not measure the other domains of life at least as seriously as we measure the economic output?

Let me make that personal for a moment, because for me it is. US GDP has doubled since 2010 in nominal dollars. In real terms it grew by roughly a third, per head by about a quarter [61]. OK, a quarter. Where is my quarter? For someone in my position, buying a flat was comparatively easier 15 years ago than it is now. Buying a home in Berlin would cost me about a tenth of the price in taxes and fees to the state and the intermediaries before the first mortgage payment. Then I’ll pay a big chunk of my income to a bank for decades. I don’t need another phone. I don’t want a new washing machine as long as this one lasts. I need better living quarters for the family and time, time to see my friends, Time I won’t have to spend chasing the next productivity gain just to stay employable. Those are the things I’d wish a quarter more output to buy me but I can’t find them in the receipt. We all have many diverse and authentic needs and it would be best if the society’s effort optimized for satisfying our needs. Instead, a lot of focus goes into just economic growth. Imagine healthy life years had grown by a quarter instead, or your hours with friends, or what if the years of salary it takes to buy a flat had fallen by a quarter. When people are asked what they would trade there are many things coming out ahead of income: health, security and family [62]. Unfortunately, the health line and the human connection line have not had eighty years of optimisation pointed at them. Things got better elsewhere more or less incidentally, growth correlates with welfare. But plenty of low-hanging fruit must still be on the tree.

I must say I’m no expert in this. My humble aim is to further my own understanding and share out loud what I found. I worked on this with Claude Opus 5/Fable 5.1 and it helped me find sources, validate and disprove my thinking, and write part of this. Where I get to “what to do”, please read it as a direction to argue with, not as a plan.

Part I - The diagnosis

GDP was never a welfare measure. It captures the market value of final goods and services, nothing more. Simon Kuznets, who built the US national accounts, told Congress already in 1934 that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income” [1]. Its blind spots are structural. There is no distribution, no unpaid work, no leisure, no deduction for what got used up, no distinction between creating new value and recovering a loss. Bastiat’s broken window [2] or an artillery shell fired at the front count the same as a new bridge. War spending is, unfortunately, also GDP.

The line may be flatter than the life because of how prices are measured. Robert Gordon’s thesis is that 1870–1970 was a one-time “special century” and computers a mere bump [3]. For AI, Acemoglu projects at most a 0.66% productivity gain over ten years [4]. But real GDP depends on price indices and pricing a good whose quality improves fast is unsolved in practice. Let’s take illumination. If priced in cost per lumen-hour, conventional indices understate the real growth of light by a factor of 900 to 1,600 since 1800 [5]. The Boskin Commission found the US CPI overstating inflation by about 1.1 points a year [6]. Compound even a fraction of that over 150 years and the “true” multiple is far above the measured 20x. Additionally, free digital goods (Wikipedia, maps, GPS) are priced at zero, GDP contribution is then also zero yet the welfare impact is enormous [7].

The largest gains were never priced in. Reported wellbeing rises roughly with the logarithm of income. Each doubling buys about the same increment of felt improvement, so a 20-fold rise in income should correspond to something like four steps up, not twenty [8]. But it covers only what was measured as economic output. In 1900, nearly 18% of American males died before their first birthday. Today, cumulative mortality doesn’t reach 18% until about age 62. Murphy and Topel valued the 20th century’s longevity gains at over $1.2 million per person. The gains of 1970–2000 alone added about $3.2 trillion a year to US wealth, roughly half of GDP, but none of it in GDP [9]. Housework dropped from about 58 weekly hours in 1900 to 18 by 1975, which is what enabled married women to take paid work [10]. The same amount of work effort counts fully when waged and not at all at home [11].

Jones and Klenow built the measure combining consumption, leisure, mortality and inequality in one statistic and compared it with GDP [12]. Here I have to be fair to GDP, because the first thing their paper shows is that welfare and income are very highly correlated across countries. Rich countries are better places to live. It is the strongest argument for growth and it’s simply true. What the paper shows second is the size of the residual across their thirteen countries with detailed data. The median deviation is around 35%. The UK, France, Italy and Spain all have income per head around two-thirds of the American level; their welfare comes out around 85%. France is the sharpest case: income 67% of the US, consumption only 60%, welfare over 90%, the gap is closed by a longer life (80.1 years versus 77.4), far fewer hours worked per person (535 a year versus 877) and consumption spread more evenly. Over time the correction continues in the same direction: in recent decades rising life expectancy alone added more than a full percentage point a year to welfare growth across much of the world, on top of what income shows. So GDP isn’t just incomplete. In cross-country comparisons it is off by a third, consistently in the same direction, and the gap consists of exactly the things a society should care about just as much.

Mean versus median. The simplest correction is also the least used. GDP per capita is an average. If one person in a village of a hundred gets a raise of a million, GDP per head in the village goes up by ten thousand and nobody but him is better off. The median household income is what a statistician would reach for if you asked how the typical person is doing, and it is published everywhere [60]. However, it does not feature in news headlines. In the US, real GDP per capita and real median household income parted ways in the 1970s and never reconciled. In Germany, the gap is smaller but it is there. When the headline says “growth” and the median says “flat”, the headline gets the airtime. That’s a choice about what we pay attention to.

We have known all this for a long time. In 2008 Sarkozy asked Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi to write up what is wrong with GDP as a guide for policy. Their 2009 report is still the reference [17]. Its recommendations read like an outline of this essay: look at income and consumption rather than production; take the household’s point of view; report medians and distributions, not just means; count non-market activity; treat quality of life as multidimensional (health, education, social connections, environment, insecurity, political voice); put sustainability on a separate dashboard instead of folding it into one number; take subjective wellbeing seriously. The OECD’s Better Life Index and its How’s Life? reports came out of it. Eurostat built a quality-of-life indicator set. A follow-up group reported again in 2018 under the title Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts. Seventeen years later every finance minister still stands up with one number. So it isn’t the diagnosis that’s missing. What’s missing is whatever turns the treatment into a habit.

And we keep optimising for it. Goodhart’s Law: a measure used as a target stops being a good measure [13]. Holmström and Milgrom formalised why effort goes to whatever is measured and rewarded [14]. Raising GDP is a standing objective with institutions, budgets and statutory mandates behind it. Central banks are charged with closing output gaps, finance ministries do budget arithmetic that presumes a growth rate, structural reforms are pressed forward in the name of growth. An enormous apparatus exists to make the number go up. We know that growth is important but it is not the only thing there is. It would be great to have such care for other areas too. Another big caveat. Almost none of the said apparatus asks what kind of growth it is getting. A euro of extracted rent, a euro of damage repaired and a euro of something genuinely new, they all register identically, and nobody in the chain is asked to tell them apart [15].

But growth is not a false god. It pays for the health systems and the pensions. Rising productivity is what makes rising service costs affordable, at least in theory. And the accounts are not as undifferentiated as the headlines suggest. The statisticians separate investment from consumption, and accounts exist for the environment and for unpaid work. But the composition of GDP sits in annexes while the headline number moves the rest of the machinery.

GDP is quarterly, attributable, moved by known levers within months. Health and connection are slow, diffuse, seemingly with no levers to pull. Governments steer the steerable. COVID already proved a change is possible. We made a health number the focus of the day and societies sacrificed trillions to move it. The attention faded with the retreat of the pandemic. And pointing at a non-GDP goal may not be enough by itself. New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget moved little in five years [16]. Measurement without levers is not enough and without measurement the levers are rarely built, let alone pulled. Besides, Goodhart applies to any replacement metric too. I’ll come back to that.

Concretely speaking. Let’s look at four countries over the last three years - the USA, Germany, Japan, and Czechia. All four were reporting growth. Now, what was the growth made of? The US grew about 2% a year. Following Jason Furman’s arithmetic, investment in information processing equipment and software sits at 4% of GDP and was responsible for 92% of the growth in the first half of 2025. Without those categories the economy grew at a meagre 0.1% [18]. (Furman himself adds that this is not a counterfactual as without the AI boom, rates and electricity would be cheaper and other sectors would have grown some so we may halve the result.) Germany’s return to growth after two years of contraction came from household and government consumption, while the productive core of exports and machinery investment shrank. Japan’s 2025 stimulus subsidises energy costs which lowers the deflator. As far as I understand it the same money then lifts real GDP twice: once as spending and once through the price index. And the GDP of Czechia, where I’m from, was flat to slightly positive over 2022–2024. Yet in the same window real wages fell 9.3% in one year and another 2.4% the next, the deepest fall in the EU, with the average real wage still below its 2019 level at the end of 2025 and the number of people on housing allowance nearly doubling [19]. The top number said it’s fine, the households said otherwise. Same word, same time frame, four fairly different pictures. Whatever country you live in, look at what your growth is actually made of. The detailed numbers are published if you dig for them.

Part II - Where is the gap?

The gap runs through many domains of life. Let’s explore a few in some detail.

The GDP itself. What the statisticians know, and what they could know. I moved out from my parents and bought a washing machine, a dishwasher, a bed. New household, new capability, new value. Two and a half years later the washing machine died and I bought another one. GDP recorded both purchases the same way.

Can we tell the difference? For companies, yes. The accounts separate repairs and maintenance, counted as intermediate consumption, from improvements that prolong an asset’s working life, counted as capital formation. Depreciation gets its own line. Subtract depreciation and you get Net Domestic Product which is published and almost never quoted. For households, unfortunately the answer is no. Consumer durables sit outside the asset boundary. A fridge in my kitchen is consumption. The same fridge in a restaurant is an asset. The accounts classify by owner, not by function.

Also a washing machine lasting twenty years looks identical to one lasting two years when you buy them. The second gets bought ten times. Ten times the sales, ten times the GDP, and also ten times the mining, shipping and landfill. For the same amount of clean clothes. Durability is invisible to GDP while shortening it is rewarded by it. That’s a bad incentive.

But a facelift is not unthinkable. Bring consumer durables inside the asset boundary with depreciation. Net domestic product is published already so subtract from GDP what wore out and there it is. Nobody quotes it. Which is a pity, because the two numbers have started to part. Consumption of fixed capital in Germany was 16.8% of GDP in 2000. By 2025 it was 20.3%. France went from 14.8% to 18.2% (2000 to 2024, its latest year), the EU27 from 15.9% to 17.9% (2002, the first year with an aggregate, to 2025). A rising share of European output goes to replacing what wore out. Over the full period German GDP in current prices multiplied 2.13 times and NDP 2.04. That’s small but since 2019 the gap has widened to 0.46 percentage points a year. German net output now grows almost half a point slower than gross, every year, and no news report mentions it. Why the rise in depreciation? Most likely because the assets got shorter-lived. Software, servers and IT equipment depreciate in three to six years whereas a factory building takes forty. The data centre buildout is about to make this considerably worse, and NDP is the only published number that would show it. Plenty of room for improvement here.

Health. The greatest welfare gains of the last 150 years were health gains, and in the rich world the series has stalled or turned. US life expectancy fell from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.6 in 2017, before COVID, driven by what Case and Deaton named “deaths of despair”: overdose, alcohol, suicide, concentrated among those without degrees [20]. Obesity and sedentary work grind on beneath. Europe’s equivalent indicator cannot be reliably consulted. The OECD warns that breaks in Eurostat’s healthy-life-years series make trend analysis unreliable as the data after a break should not be compared with the data before it [21]. The numbers we do have look thin. Life expectancy at 65 in the EU rose 1.2 years between 2005 and 2022; two-thirds of that, some 0.8 years, were healthy ones, and the share of post-65 life lived with disability fell from 55% to 53%. Across 31 European countries between 2005 and 2019 there is no common trend at all: a third of the countries show compressing morbidity, a third expanding, a third holding steady [22]. So, did Europeans gain healthy years? We cannot say with confidence. Meanwhile we state quarterly GDP to a decimal place. There is no quarterly healthy-life release, no minister whose job is on the line if the numbers don’t come back right.

Time and connection. Working hours are lower in some countries than in other. As far as GDP is concerned those not-working-hours are hours not producing value. But some people gained free time. Is that a good thing? Where does it show? Plus there is a catch. In-person adolescent socialising has collapsed. Loneliness among 15–16-year-olds rose after 2012 in 36 of 37 countries studied, having been flat the decade before [23]. The share of US teens meeting friends almost daily fell from 44% to 32% [24]. Whether screens are to blame is disputed but the trend is clear and it is worrying. The standard research also mismeasures what remains. Studies find people who live alone “more socially active” because they count restaurants and events, the shallower interactions, while time with a spouse and children doesn’t count as socialising [25]. The largest meta-analysis available, 148 studies and 308,849 people, says both halves matter: strong social ties raise survival odds by 50%, comparable to quitting smoking, and the strongest predictor is not marriage or living arrangement but the breadth of the whole network [26]. Unfortunately, nobody counts that. We measure the shallow half well, the deep half not at all, and the sum does not get any headline. GDP records nothing either way.

The externality economy: growth at the expense of the rest. A widening slice of GDP exists because something got worse. Profits privatised, costs socialised [27]. National spend on remediation is booked as output like any other. It should be noted that the Genuine Progress Indicator, one of the older GDP alternatives, formally subtracts such spend [28]. Externalities run through the whole economy - climate, engineered obsolescence, resource extraction - and they are not only material. Take the attention economy. Platforms monetise engagement, while social isolation is associated with roughly a 29% increase in premature mortality risk and isolation among older adults is estimated to cost about $6.7bn a year in excess US Medicare spending [29]. These figures need care: causation runs both ways (poor health produces isolation as well) and the popular “15 cigarettes a day” comparison has since been walked back by its own authors. But assume some level of causation and there is harm done by engagement design that pulls people into their feeds in the evening and away from their friends. The harm goes unrecorded while the remediation bill is footed by the state and booked as growth. With the metrics we have we cannot say if we live in an economy that erodes connection and sells the cure or in one that generates healthy connection. Acemoglu models the same loop with AI in the picture: manipulative, engagement-deepening uses could add to measured GDP while welfare falls [4].

Housing. Germany’s price-to-income ratio hit its lowest level since at least 1980 in 2010, then climbed to a peak in 2021 [30]. Nationally, prices rose by about 64% in the seven years between 2015 and the 2022 peak. Despite that staggering price increase, a large portion of the dwellings did not improve much or at all [31]. The drivers: location rent (the land is scarce), a decade of near-zero interest rates that inflated buyers’ bids, and a supply side that never answered the demand, with completions falling from about 295,000 in 2022 to about 207,000 in 2025, the lowest since 2012, against an assessed need of 320,000 to 373,000 a year [32]. Location is a positional good. Bidding for the same location raises prices without improving anyone’s relative wellbeing [33]. When the ECB hiked the rates, Germany recorded the sharpest annual price fall in the history of the series in 2023 [31]. Housing prices track the cost of money, through competition for location, not through better housing.

The GDP accounting of this is tricky. Statisticians credit every homeowner with an imputed rent, the rent they would pay themselves, so that a nation of owners and a nation of renters get counted alike. In Germany this is roughly one tenth of GDP. When rents rise, output rises with them even though not a single flat was built. Real GDP is supposed to compensate with a price index but that only works if the index can reliably tell whether a flat just got more expensive or got better. In housing that distinction is close to unanswerable, because what usually changed is the desirability of the location, not the building. So the quality of the metric for one tenth of the economy rests on the quality of that judgement.

Ownership over work, briefly. A well-paid professional in a European city works and saves diligently, landing at some increase of savings. In the meantime a flat in the same city appreciates by more than what they earned. Not saved, earned. And what does GDP notice of this increase? Nothing. The appreciation of an existing dwelling is not output and hence never enters the number. The biggest change in that household’s position over a decade is invisible to the headline, and so is the distributional side, where returns on what you already own outrun what you earn [34]. A country can walk (has walked?) into that dynamic while its headline reports steady, respectable growth. What to do about it seems more of a tax question, big enough that it warrants a separate essay. Here I only want to add the respective line to the dashboard proposal.

The demographic convergence. The economics of fertility has recently been rewritten. Doepke, Hannusch, Kindermann and Tertilt document that the old regularities no longer apply: women’s employment and fertility across rich countries now correlate positively, and the problem is the compatibility of career and family, not income [35]. A child is likely to be born only when both partners want one. Where fathers do little childcare, fertility stays low [36]. Imagine reading the sections above as a young couple experiencing all of it: housing you cannot buy, childcare the state doesn’t provide enough of while market prices are out of reach, health systems under strain, hours freed by productivity absorbed by screens, and a partner never met because the socialising that used to “produce” partners is in decline.

Let me pitch my stick in the sand with a falsifiable prediction. Cohorts born 1997–2007, the first to reach adolescence after smartphone saturation, will show lower partnership rates at ages 25–34 than the 1982–1992 cohorts did at the same ages, by at least three percentage points, in Germany, in Czechia and pooled across the EU member states that publish the series. Data: Eurostat population by legal marital status and single year of age (demo_pjanmarsta), which gives the share married or in a registered partnership for each birth cohort, read in 2030 and 2035. Eurostat publishes no EU-27 total for this table, so the pooled figure has to be summed from the countries. The household-composition series (lfst_hhindws) counts adults living in a couple, but only in broad age bands such as 25–49. Controls: real median disposable income for the age band and the regional house-price-to-income ratio, since both independently delay household formation. What refutes it: partnership rates holding flat or rising once age- and income-adjusted, a gap under three points, or the gap disappearing when housing costs are controlled for, which would mean unaffordable housing, not eroded socialising, was to blame all along. What would complicate it: rising cohabitation without marriage or registered partnership, which the marital-status series cannot see, and the household-composition series cannot pin to ages 25–34. This is the household-formation row of the dashboard in Part III, put to the test.

If the prediction holds, we are a society that struggles to reproduce itself, and an ageing population tightens every screw above.

Part III - The way out

The remedy, as far as I can see it, has three layers:

• make the divergence visible
• build against gaming
• find the levers in each domain

None of them works alone. New Zealand showed that measurement without levers goes nowhere. Germany, as we’ll see, showed where measurements without an owner go to die. And a fixed dashboard where the numbers are all that count would just build us several little GDPs.

Make the divergence visible. A panel of metrics with GDP’s cadence and ceremony. Four design principles: report outcomes, not money spent; report level and distribution (every metric by decile); report with a clear cadence; and give each figure the status the growth figure has today, with a named minister answering for it.

One row cannot be filled today. The number that would settle whether Europe’s durability and right-to-repair rules do anything is the average age of an appliance when it gets thrown out. There are one-off studies but no series to validate the impact of the policy.

Run it backwards. Include historical data where available. Then we can survey Germany, 2010 to 2025, using numbers already used in this essay. GDP per head grew comfortably through the 2010s and has been more or less flat since 2019 - a decent decade, then a stall. The dashboard tells us a different story for the same years. The replacement burden climbed from under 18% of GDP to over 20%, so net output lagged gross the whole time. Price-to-income went from its lowest since at least 1980 to its 2021 peak to fall again a bit, while completions fell to their lowest since 2012, under two-thirds of even the lower published estimate of need. Whether healthy life years rose is unknowable because the series broke. Teen loneliness turned up around 2012 and at least till 2018 did not turn back. Nobody who saw those lines together would describe the period as “comfortable growth then a stall”. They’d describe it as a decade in which the number and the country parted ways. And all of the data to say so was public already.

What the rows say. GDP per head grew 14.7% from 2010 to 2019 and was 0.7% lower in 2025 than in 2019. Some things got better that GDP never counted. Each worker works 6.4% fewer hours a year than in 2010. The carbon footprint of what Germans buy, wherever it was made, fell from 12.7 to 9.1 tonnes a head. Until 2019, incomes at the bottom rose faster than at the top: the tenth percentile up 11%, the ninetieth up 6%. Other things got worse while GDP looked fine, or stayed flat while it grew. Life expectancy rose to 81.2 by 2019 and was still 81.2 in 2024. Deaths from suicide, poisoning and alcohol rose by about 9% between 2019 and 2023. Dwellings completed fell to 206,586 in 2025, 30% below 2019 and far below the 320,000 a year the BBSR says Germany needs. One German in five rates their life 5 out of 10 or lower, against 15.8% across the EU. Aid fell from 0.82% of national income to 0.56%, below the 0.7% promised in 1970. In the latest year, the median income gained 2.1% while the bottom tenth lost 0.8%.

None of this adds up to one verdict, and it shouldn’t. There is no honest exchange rate between a tonne of CO₂, an hour of leisure and a dwelling that was never built. The rows do answer a different question: which way is GDP wrong? For most of the twentieth century it understated progress. Growth came bundled with longer lives, less drudgery and goods that got better faster than their prices showed, so life improved faster than the line. That bundle has come apart. Longevity has stalled, housing is falling behind, and the gains that remain, fewer hours and lower emissions, sit beside losses the headline cannot see. The error has not gone away, but it may have changed sign. One number cannot tell you which era you are in. That is what the rows are for.

Germany has tried this. Three times. (I learned about this while researching for the essay.) In 2010 the Bundestag set up an Enquete commission on “Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life”. Its 2013 report proposed the “W3” indicator set: GDP plus nine more lead indicators in three equal pillars - material wealth, social participation, ecology - with a few “warning lamps” on the side, meant to be published alongside GDP [39]. It got a plenary debate and was shelved with the legislature. The Bundestag did ask the government to look at the commission’s results, which is how in 2015 the Merkel chancellery came to run a six-month citizens’ dialogue, “Gut leben in Deutschland”, and in 2016 to publish a strategy with twelve dimensions and forty-six indicators of what Germans said a good life consists of [40]. It got a website. The indicators there were last updated in March 2020. Then, from 2022, the economics ministry added a wellbeing chapter to the Jahreswirtschaftsbericht, the government’s central annual economic report: thirty-odd indicators at first, later close to forty, in four areas, with a biodiversity index added in 2024 and the Gini coefficient of net wealth in 2025 [41]. This was the real thing, the government’s own economic report saying in print that a single number cannot capture welfare. In January 2026, under a new government and a renamed ministry, the chapter was deleted. What remains is a cross-reference to other reporting systems and one sentence promising to examine how the public’s “legitimate interest” in a broader view of welfare might be accommodated in future [42].

Put that next to the four things GDP has and the alternatives lack, and each failure explains itself:

• an owning institution: the W3 set belonged to a commission that dissolved, the one-off citizens’ dialogue to a chancellery that moved on, the wellbeing chapter to one ministry under one minister.
• a constituency with money at stake: nobody’s budget, bonus or borrowing cost moved when the biodiversity index fell. Insurers, pension funds and employers all have real exposure to population health, and none of them lobbied to keep chapter G.
• ritual and cadence: GDP is quarterly and leads the bulletin. The wellbeing chapter was annual and got its mention starting on page 79.
• fast feedback: outcomes move over decades. Lever-side indicators (homes permitted, screening rates, hours of childcare provided) move within a year and can carry the political weight in the meantime.

Three attempts in fifteen years, each buried without an obituary, and not one of them because the numbers were wrong. The attempts died because nothing in the state’s machinery had to answer to the call when the numbers changed.

But there is hope. The infrastructure keeps getting built regardless. The UN’s 2025 revision of the System of National Accounts added extended accounts for wellbeing, unpaid work and the environment [37], and a UN high-level expert group on “Beyond GDP” is due to present its findings to the General Assembly this month [43]. Worth remembering that the national accounts themselves were born of the 1929 Depression and the war. Reforms of counting happen when a crisis makes the old number visibly wrong. So the job, for those who care, is to have the alternative fully specified and shelf-ready for when the window opens [38].

Designed against gaming. More numbers are still numbers. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State provides the warning [44]: states make the life they manage legible by abstracting it, and the abstraction throws away the local, tacit, practical knowledge that makes life worth living. The signature case is Prussian scientific forestry. The forest was replanted as an optimised monoculture, the numbers were great for one rotation, and then the rot showed, because much of what the number had ignored turned out to matter. Hayek made the same point from economics: the knowledge that matters is dispersed and local and no central aggregate can hold it [45]. And any new metric must reckon with Goodhart’s law or it will be blindly optimised for. A school district ordered to raise a “connection score” will produce mandatory friendship programmes and cheerfully falsified surveys. A naively deployed dashboard is technocracy with more dials.

Careful design can put some defences in place. Plurality raises the cost of gaming: ten domains spanning health, time, connection and ecology leave less dark space for bad results to hide in: juicing the housing line through credit shows up as damage on the distribution line. Thermometers, not thermostats to the rescue - Muller’s central rule [46]: when a metric is wired to automatic reward or punishment it gets optimised, so decouple them. The dashboard’s numbers are tripwires that trigger inquiry. A falling healthy-life line gets an investigation with the same seriousness as an economic recession. We take a page from how medicine works: vital signs decide where to look, not what to do. Measure close to the intrinsic good: you may game “patients seen within four hours”, but you can’t easily make a population report for a decade that life is going well without life actually going well. Hence the lived measures, life satisfaction and time-use diaries, are proposed. Keep the list contestable, because what matters has to be settled and re-settled by public reasoning, not fixed by experts once and for all [47]. The dashboard needs a built-in revision ritual, a periodic public review of the rows themselves. A fixed dashboard is a technocratic artefact; a contested one is a democratic instrument. Institutionalise the listening, because the depth of life enters through people, not through better numbers. Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly is the proof of concept: ninety-nine randomly selected citizens deliberating with expert input broke a decades-long constitutional deadlock, and the German-speaking community of Belgium has made a sortition-based citizens’ council a permanent organ [48]. Pair every row with its qualitative counterpart: assemblies reviewing whether the numbers still mean something, fieldwork feeding policy review, and the street-level practitioners (nurses, teachers, caseworkers) co-designing any metric that will be used on them [49].

If I were to put the concept in one line: numbers redistribute attention, deliberation supplies meaning, and a named, accountable human decides action. Polycentrism completes it, because one size rarely fits all. Ostrom showed communities govern their commons better than central blueprints when they set their own rules [49]. So the dashboard monitors outcomes nationally while the means to move the numbers stay local and plural. A hundred municipalities trying a hundred approaches to the loneliness line is both more efficient, as it addresses local challenges, and an experiment in which successful approaches spread by evidence rather than mandate.

And at all times, we need to apply humility. Some of life will always escape measurement. Hold every metric as a proxy under permanent suspicion. GDP’s problem was never that it is a number. It is that we forgot it was one.

If it has to be one number. “How far off is GDP” could be a single figure, as the method exists: equivalent income that converts each non-market thing into the extra consumption that would leave a person indifferent. Fleurbaey and Blanchet set out the theory, Jones and Klenow built one prototype, Fleurbaey and Gaulier another [50]. Four domains are fairly settled. The rest need shadow prices, and most are available: emissions times the social cost of carbon, morbidity in DALYs, defensive spending subtracted as the GPI already does, loneliness can run straight through the machinery that already prices life expectancy, since it carries a measured mortality hazard. Some domains remain hard. Housing sits half inside consumption already, hence double counting is a real risk. And the quality of leisure also lacks a shadow price. We count hours and value them at the wage, which assumes an hour is an hour. But is it really so? Is a fragmented evening of scrolling worth the same as an unfragmented one? With the onslaught of the attention economy, the worth of leisure is potentially overstated and it is getting worse every year. Kahneman’s day-reconstruction method rates activities by how they actually felt [51]. We could try running it at the scale of a national account, and it might be exactly where the attention economy finally shows up in the numbers.

Directions and discussion. I don’t have enough expertise to hand anyone a plan. But I wanted to start the conversation and explore different areas, put up proposals. Later, the numbers decide what gets looked at and people decide the rest. What follows is a stick in the sand, a departure point for discussion. Where I could find evidence I lean on it, where I couldn’t, I say so to the best of my ability.

Health. Everyone who cares knows the ground rules for a longer, healthier life. Good sleep, good food, a few hours of movement a week, less stress. Knowing was never the problem for most of us. So the question is not what people should do but what actually moves a population, and here the evidence is unkind to the things we do. My insurer offers points for regular dentist visits and a subsidy on a bike helmet. That’s nice and all. When Song and Baicker ran a proper randomised trial of a workplace wellness programme across 160 worksites, employees reported exercising more and eating better, and after eighteen months there was no significant effect on any clinical measure, on health spending or on employment [52]. People reported being more virtuous and their bodies didn’t notice the difference. What seems to work looks boring and structural. In October 2022 England banned foods high in fat, sugar and salt from checkouts, aisle ends and store entrances in larger shops. Not an awareness campaign, a rule about where the sweets sit. Earlier voluntary versions cut purchases of small confectionery packs by 15–17%, and purchases were still down a year later. A Leeds evaluation of the legislation estimates around two million fewer unhealthy products sold per day [53]. An Oxford trial removing seasonal chocolate from prominent positions cut enough to register in the total energy content of what people bought, with no difference between richer and poorer stores [54]. What changed was not willpower but the distance between a tired parent in a queue and a colourful display at child height. Then take cigarettes. On 29 April 2026 the UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Act got Royal Assent: nobody born on or after 1 January 2009 will ever be legally sold tobacco, in force from January 2027 [55]. New Zealand passed the same law in 2022 and repealed it after an election, before it even took effect [56]. So the policy exists; whether it survives can be helped by a dashboard where the respective number has a political owner. Is that all there is? Is it the cost-effective frontier? I doubt it. Bikeable cities probably beat helmet subsidies, but I haven’t seen that comparison run properly and wouldn’t trust my gut feeling on this. Which is kind of the point. We know the rules for individuals. We are still guessing at what moves populations, and we fund the respective research at a fraction of what we spend on modelling interest rates.

Time. Hours worked keep slowly falling but GDP reads that as weakness. A country that exchanges its productivity gains for leisurely afternoons rather than output looks, in the only number anyone reports, like it is failing. So the first lever for time is measurement itself: publish leisure hours and unpaid care hours, valued at replacement wage, next to the growth figure. Until a society can see what it bought with its productivity, it can’t decide whether the trade was a good one. The four-day-week trials get headlines, but they are mostly self-selected firms measuring themselves. So count first.

Family and connection. The fertility evidence points at compatibility with women’s careers: affordable childcare, long leave split between parents by default, flexible hours. Fathers doing half the care is the strongest pronatalist variable anyone has measured [35, 36]. The realistic yield of any of it looks modest, perhaps a few tenths of a child per woman, and even that may be generous. Korea’s rebound from 0.72 to 0.80 came after hundreds of trillions of won in incentives, and demographers attribute most of it to a large cohort of women in their early thirties and postponed pandemic weddings, not policy [58]. One thing worth looking at first, because it may work against everything else, is the tax code. German joint taxation halves a couple’s income before taxing it, so the subsidy is largest when one partner earns everything and the other nothing, and the second earner’s first euro is taxed at the household’s top rate. Half of married part-time women in a recent DIW survey say more hours aren’t worth it; individual taxation would, on that survey’s projection, add up to 175,000 full-time positions among women aged 45 to 66 alone [57]. A lever hiding in plain sight, and I haven’t seen it discussed as family policy. But on ageing the honest answer is a portfolio of interventions anyway: tax code, compatibility, immigration (the only fast lever), longer healthy working lives, and productivity. AI might relieve Baumol’s cost disease in care itself [59] but only if we design it to take the heavy lifting and the paperwork and leave the humans the humanity. As for connection, we can engage in a bit of incentive engineering. It’s harder to build a true connection glued to a screen. If engagement-maximising design generates measurable downstream care costs, the attention economy should at least be counted like any other polluter before we decide whether and how to price it. Also it is rather striking that capabilities like non-violent communication or active listening are missing in school curriculum.

Housing. Build at the published needs-line, and publish completions against it quarterly with a named minister. The land under a flat is worth what it is worth because of everything around it - the U-Bahn, the school, the neighbours, the city’s whole accumulated effort - none of which the owner made. What to do about that gain is a tax argument with real evidence on both sides. As that would make for an essay on its own let’s start by putting the needs number in front of everyone: completions against need, with someone accountable for whether it happened.

Part IV - What great would look like

The point of all of the above is to let something other than growth into the conversation and relocate some of society’s attention. Where would that lead? What could the future look like if the dashboard were built and taken seriously for fifteen years?

You are thirty-one, you live in a mid-sized European city, and housing takes a quarter of your income and not half, because completions have tracked a published needs-line for a decade. The price-to-income figure is now announced every quarter with the gravity of the growth number. The responsible minister could not survive letting it climb past the set threshold. Whether you rent or own is a matter of preference, not an inheritance test, because the deposit equals two years of saving. You and your partner both work, shorter, more flexible hours, because the time-use line is a headline number and the tax system stopped paying couples to keep one of them home. A second child is a question of desire, not arithmetic, because much of the needed care is free, paternity leave is long and split by default, and working as a parent comes with additional benefits to enable some parenting-life balance. The quiet revolution the fertility economists predicted is picking up, because fathers doing half the care turned out to be the strongest pronatalist policy ever tried. Your parents, at seventy, are a decade into the healthy-life-years dividend. They retired later than their parents did but also better, because when the HLY line dipped in the late 2020s it was treated like a recession: screening, food policy, GLP-1s, walkable streets were put up and the line turned. The care your grandmother needs is affordable not because carers got cheap but because the robots took the lifting and the paperwork while people still provide the much needed human touch. Baumol’s disease got relieved, not denied, by the AI that Stanford professor predicted would arrive slowly but everywhere.

Your social media feed costs money and your well-maintained park is free, because the defensive-share line made the attention economy’s invoice visible and the charge landed on the harvest, not the remedy. You know five neighbours by name. The connection series is boring now, which is what success looks like. Once, the letter came inviting you to the assembly that re-examines the rows. It was exhausting and exhilarating at the same time, three days of arguing with ninety-nine strangers about what to count and how. The list changed a bit afterwards, which is how you know it is still alive. The numbers never decided anything by themselves. They decided what got looked at, so people could decide the rest. Each quarter the finance minister stands up with ten numbers and the details behind them instead of one. Your children will find it hard to believe that at some point one number was considered enough.

None of this is utopian. Every element exists somewhere today: the childcare in France, the housing cadence in Vienna’s better decades, the healthy-ageing gains in Japan, the wellbeing law in Wales, the wellbeing chapter Germany first wrote and then deleted. What great looks like isn’t an invention, it’s putting existing pieces together and paying attention to them and evolving them together with our values and society. Attention is exactly what a dashboard redistributes.

I invite you to try it yourself. You already work under a version of this. A team, a department, a household: each has a headline number while many nearly-as-important things go unreported. Add a second number. Publish it with the same care as the first. Watch for behaviour changes.

Also write to the editor, not the minister. “You led the article with GDP growth while median income fell. Why that order?” The second time someone asks, the focus might change.

As Winifred Gallagher put it “your life is the sum of what you focus on”. We counted output so we got a lot of output. If we count the rest, I see no reason why we shouldn’t get the rest too. We are all about moving the needle. There is more then one needle it seems, let’s move the right one.

Acknowledgments: many thanks to Michal Bída and Kateřina Bída for feedback and suggestions. And to Claude Fable 5.1/Opus 5 for help with research and drafting.

Appendix A - References

Verification key: ✔ re-checked against the source in September 2026 · ~ consistent with what Claude know of the source, not re-opened · ! needs checking.

1. ~ Kuznets, S. (1934). National Income, 1929–1932, US Senate. https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/national-income-1929-1932 . The quote is on p. 7 of the report.
2. ~ Bastiat, F. (1850). That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen. https://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss.html
3. ~ Gordon, R. J. (2016). The Rise and Fall of American Growth; Solow’s “everywhere but in the productivity statistics”, NYT Book Review, July 12, 1987. The ~2% figure and the “no bump” observation are from the Stanford GSB talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBpGn3BDcOY&t=556s
4. ~ Acemoglu, D. (2024). “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI.” NBER WP 32487. https://www.nber.org/papers/w32487 . The 0.66% is his upper-bound TFP estimate over ten years. The paper argues manipulative/engagement uses can raise GDP while reducing welfare; it does not give the “2%” figure the earlier draft attributed to it, so that number was removed.
5. ~ Nordhaus, W. D. (1996). “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not.” https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf
6. ~ Boskin Commission (1996), Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living. https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html
7. ~ Brynjolfsson, E., Collis, A., Diewert, W. E., Eggers, F. & Fox, K. J. “GDP-B.” NBER WP 25695. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25695
8. ~ Stevenson, B. & Wolfers, J. (2008). “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.
9. ~ Murphy, K. M. & Topel, R. H. (2006). “The Value of Health and Longevity.” JPE 114(5). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508033 . The 18%/age-62 comparison, the $1.2m and the “$3.2 trillion a year, about half of GDP” are all from this paper’s introduction.
10. ~ Greenwood, J., Seshadri, A. & Yorukoglu, M. (2005). “Engines of Liberation.” ReStud 72(1). 58 hours/week (1900) to 18 (1975).
11. ~ Waring, M. (1988). If Women Counted.
12. ✔ Jones, C. I. & Klenow, P. J. (2016). “Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time.” AER 106(9): 2426–57. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20110236 . Checked: UK/France/Italy/Spain income ~2/3 of US, welfare averaging 85%; France income 67%, consumption 60%, welfare >90%; life expectancy 80.1 vs 77.4; hours per capita 535 vs 877; median deviation ~35% across the 13 micro-data countries; rising life expectancy adds more than a full point a year to welfare growth. The earlier draft’s “Western Europe 71%/90%” was wrong and has been replaced.
13. ~ Goodhart, C. (1975); Strathern, M. (1997). “‘Improving ratings’: audit in the British University system.” European Review 5(3).
14. ~ Holmström, B. & Milgrom, P. (1991). JLEO 7 (special issue).
15. ~ Mazzucato, M. (2018). The Value of Everything. Allen Lane.
16. ! NZ Wellbeing Budget 2019 and the 2024 retrospectives. https://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/wellbeing-budget/wellbeing-budget-2019 . The earlier draft’s “NZ$26bn” could not be traced to a source and has been removed from the text; the 2019 budget’s new operating spending was NZ$3.8bn. Re-derive any figure before using one.
17. ~ Stiglitz, J., Sen, A. & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Follow-up: Stiglitz, Fitoussi & Durand (2018), Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts for Economic and Social Performance, OECD. Downstream: OECD How’s Life? (2011–) and Better Life Index; Eurostat quality-of-life indicators.
18. ✔ Furman, J., post on X, 27 September 2025: IPE&S is 4% of GDP, 92% of H1 2025 growth, ex-IPE&S growth 0.1% annualised. Furman’s own caveat (“not a counterfactual… could maybe make up about half”) is in the same thread. Ernie Tedeschi’s reply notes much of the investment was imported; netting imports gives ~0.24pp of the 1.6% H1 growth. Fortune write-up: https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-first-half-2025-jason-furman-harvard-economist
19. ✔ Zeman, M. (2025). “Trends in Real Wage Development in the Czech Republic.” IPPS. https://www.politikaspolecnost.cz/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/06_2025_Trends-in-Real-Wage-Development-in-the-Czech-Republic_IPPS_Martin-Zeman.pdf . Real wages −9.3% (2022), −2.4% (2023), still below 2019 at end-2025; housing allowances 169k (Mar 2022) → 303k (Mar 2025), citing MoLSA. ! The GDP path (flat to slightly positive 2022–24) is my reading of ČSÚ national accounts; confirm the annual figures.
20. ~ Case, A. & Deaton, A. (2020). Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton UP. Life expectancy 78.9 (2014) → 78.6 (2017): CDC/NCHS; Woolf, S. & Schoomaker, H. (2019), JAMA 322(20). Later NCHS revisions show 2016 flat rather than falling, which is why the text now says “fell before COVID” and not “three consecutive years”.
21. ✔ OECD/European Commission (2024). Health at a Glance: Europe 2024, ch. 2, section “Living longer, living healthier?”. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-europe-2024_b3704e14-en/full-report/component-8.html . Checked: life expectancy at 65 +1.2 years 2005–2022, of which 0.8 healthy and 0.4 with disability; share lived with disability 55%→53%; explicit warning that post-break data “should not usually be compared” with pre-break data (Figure 2.5, source Eurostat lth_hlye).
22. ✔ Straka, J., Šídlo, L. & Kulhánová, I. (2024). “Trends in Healthy Life Years Between 2005 and 2019 in 31 European Countries: The Compression or Expansion of Morbidity?” International Journal of Public Health 69: 1607574. https://doi.org/10.3389/ijph.2024.1607574 (open access: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11521812/). EU-28 plus Croatia, Norway and Switzerland, Eurostat HLY at 65. The three-way split is my summary of their typology figure; check the country counts against it.
23. ~ Twenge, J. M., Haidt, J. et al. (2021). “Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness.” Journal of Adolescence 93. 36 of 37 countries, PISA 2000–2018.
24. ! Monitoring the Future via Haidt (2024), The Anxious Generation. https://monitoringthefuture.org/ . Secondary source; verify 44%→32% against the primary tabulations.
25. ~ Klinenberg, E. (2012). Going Solo; bonding/bridging: Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone.
26. ~ Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B. & Layton, J. B. (2010). PLoS Medicine 7(7): e1000316. 148 studies, 308,849 participants, OR 1.50 overall, OR 1.91 for complex social integration. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
27. ~ Kapp, K. W. (1950). The Social Costs of Private Enterprise; Leipert, C. (1989). Journal of Economic Issues 23(3).
28. ! GPI methodology: currently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_progress_indicator . Replace with Talberth, Cobb & Slattery (2007), The Genuine Progress Indicator 2006.
29. ~ Holt-Lunstad, J. et al. (2015). Perspectives on Psychological Science 10(2): isolation +29%, loneliness +26%. The smoking comparison qualified by its authors: Smith, Holt-Lunstad & Kawachi (2023), American Journal of Epidemiology 192(8). Medicare figure: AARP/Stanford (2017), https://www.aarp.org/medicare/high-price-of-social-isolation-study-2017/
30. ✔ OECD Analytical House Prices, dataflow DSD_AN_HOUSE_PRICES@DF_HOUSE_PRICES, measure HPI_YDH (price-to-income ratio, 2015 = 100), annual, Germany, as pulled for the dashboard in September 2026: lowest value 1980–2025 in 2010 (93.8), highest in 2021 (130.9), 105.4 in 2025. https://sdmx.oecd.org/public/rest/data/OECD.ECO.MPD,DSD_AN_HOUSE_PRICES@DF_HOUSE_PRICES,1.0/DEU.A.HPI_YDH.
31. ✔ Destatis Häuserpreisindex, GENESIS table 61262-0001, annual, 2025 = 100. In June 2026 Destatis rebased the index to 2025 = 100 and recomputed the whole series from Q1 2000; the old 2015 = 100 indices “lose their validity” (press release 219, 25 June 2026: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2026/06/PD26_219_61262.html). On the new base: 65.5 (2015) to 107.5 (2022), +64%; −8.5% in 2023, the largest annual fall in the series; +3.2% in 2025. The earlier “two-thirds since 2015” and the Top-7 “+79% over the decade” were computed on the old base; GENESIS statistic 61262 has no Top-7 or Kreistyp split (61262-0002 is the quarterly national index), so the Top-7 figure has been dropped. German real GDP path: Destatis national accounts.
32. ✔ Destatis press release 174, 22 May 2026: 206,600 dwellings completed in 2025 (−18.0%), lowest since 2012 (200,500); 2021–2023 each around 294,000 (295,300 in 2022); peak 306,400 in 2020. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2026/05/PD26_174_31121.html ; long series in GENESIS table 31121-0001. Need: BBSR Wohnungsbedarfsprognose, Analysen KOMPAKT 05/2025, “rund 320.000 Wohneinheiten p. a. (2023 bis 2030)”, https://www.bbsr.bund.de/BBSR/DE/veroeffentlichungen/analysen-kompakt/2025/ak-05-2025-dl.pdf ; IW Köln, IW-Report 39/2024, 372,600 a year for 2021–2025, falling to 257,400 for 2026–2040, https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Studien/Report/PDF/2024/IW-Report_2024_Regionale-Wohnungsbedarfe.pdf . The earlier “shortfall of ~830,000” could not be traced to a source and has been replaced.
33. ~ Hirsch, F. (1976). Social Limits to Growth; Frank, R. (2011). The Darwin Economy.
34. ~ Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
35. ~ Doepke, M., Hannusch, A., Kindermann, F. & Tertilt, M. (2022). “The Economics of Fertility: A New Era.” NBER WP 29948. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948
36. ~ Doepke, M. & Kindermann, F. (2019). “Bargaining over Babies.” AER 109(9); summary: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/new-era-economics-fertility
37. ~ UN SNA 2025 (adopted by the UN Statistical Commission, March 2025). https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/snaupdate/
38. ~ Kingdon, J. (1984). Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies.
39. ✔ Deutscher Bundestag, Enquete-Kommission “Wachstum, Wohlstand, Lebensqualität” (2010–2013), Schlussbericht, BT-Drs. 17/13300. W3: GDP plus nine further lead indicators in three pillars (material wealth, social/participation, ecology) with “warning lamps”; see Schmidt & aus dem Moore (2014), RWI Positionen 56, https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/95942/1/78187811X.pdf , and Giesselmann et al., DIW Wochenbericht 80(9).
40. ✔ Bundesregierung (2016). Regierungsstrategie “Gut leben in Deutschland - was uns wichtig ist”: six-month citizens’ dialogue in 2015, twelve dimensions, forty-six indicators; indicators last updated March 2020. https://www.gut-leben-in-deutschland.de . The earlier draft’s “fifteen thousand participants” was not confirmed and has been removed.
41. ✔ BMWK, Jahreswirtschaftsbericht 2022–2025. 2022: special chapter “Nachhaltiges und inklusives Wachstum - Dimensionen der Wohlfahrt messbar machen” (>30 indicators, five areas); from 2023 “Wohlfahrtsmessung und gesellschaftlicher Fortschritt” (34 indicators in 2023, close to 40 by 2025, four areas; biodiversity indicator added 2024, net-wealth Gini 2025). 2022 edition: https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/20/005/2000520.pdf ; 2023 chapter: https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/J-L/jwb-2023-kapitel-wohlfahrtsmessung.pdf ; Wirtschaftsdienst 2023/7 on the 34 indicators.
42. ✔ BMWE (2026). Jahreswirtschaftsbericht 2026, p. 19. https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Wirtschaft/jahreswirtschaftsbericht-2026.html . On the deletion: Zieschank, R. & Held, B. (2 June 2026), “Der Jahreswirtschaftsbericht 2026 - ein Sprung zurück,” Blog Postwachstum. https://www.postwachstum.de/der-jahreswirtschaftsbericht-2026-ein-sprung-zurueck-20260602
43. ✔ UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP, Interim Progress Report (November 2025). https://www.un.org/en/beyondGDP . ! Final findings scheduled for UNGA, September 2026 - check what was actually presented.
44. ~ Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. Yale UP.
45. ~ Hayek, F. A. (1945). “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” AER 35(4).
46. ~ Muller, J. Z. (2018). The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton UP.
47. ~ Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Harvard UP.
48. ~ Irish Citizens’ Assembly (99 members): https://citizensassembly.ie ; the permanent Ostbelgien Bürgerrat (est. 2019).
49. ~ Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge UP; Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-Level Bureaucracy; Lindblom, C. (1959). “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’.” Public Administration Review 19(2).
50. ~ Fleurbaey, M. & Blanchet, D. (2013). Beyond GDP: Measuring Welfare and Assessing Sustainability. OUP; Fleurbaey, M. (2009). JEL 47(4); Fleurbaey, M. & Gaulier, G. (2009). Scandinavian Journal of Economics 111(3).
51. ~ Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N. & Stone, A. (2004). “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method.” Science 306(5702).
52. ~ Song, Z. & Baicker, K. (2019). “Effect of a Workplace Wellness Program on Employee Health and Economic Outcomes.” JAMA 321(15). 160 worksites, 18-month outcomes. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2730614
53. ✔ Voluntary checkout policies: CEDAR/Cambridge evidence brief (Ejlerskov et al. 2018, PLOS Medicine). https://www.epi.ims.cam.ac.uk/resources/policy-resources/evidence-briefs/eb-checking-out-checkout-food/ . 2022 regulations: University of Leeds (Morris et al.), independent evaluation with IGD and four retailers, press release 22 August 2025: 0.63 percentage-point fall in in-scope HFSS sales by weight, from 20 to 19 of every 100 items, ≈ two million fewer products a day; 11.6bn product sales, 480 stores. https://www.leeds.ac.uk/research-32/news/article/5839/positive-impact-of-supermarket-junk-food-restrictions-revealed . Caveats: released as a preprint, and the data came from the retailers themselves. Coverage at the time noted the government intended to repeal the upcoming volume-price and aisle rules.
54. ~ Piernas, C., Harmer, G. & Jebb, S. A. (2022). “Removing seasonal confectionery from prominent store locations…” PLOS Medicine 19(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003951
55. ✔ Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 (c. 18), Royal Assent 29 April 2026; generational sales ban from 1 January 2027. https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3879 . ASH’s “four million young people within five years” is a campaign estimate, not in the Act; it has been removed from the text.
56. ~ House of Lords Library, “Smoke-free legislation: The UK and New Zealand.” https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/smoke-free-legislation-the-uk-and-new-zealand/ . NZ repeal: February 2024.
57. ✔ Bertelsmann Stiftung / DIW Berlin (5 March 2026), “Nach Kinderphase: Ehegattensplitting bremst Beschäftigung von Frauen aus.” 3,788 women aged 45–66 surveyed June–July 2025; 50% of married part-time women say more hours don’t pay; reform would raise participation by ~1.5pp, hours by ~3%, “up to” 175,000 FTE. https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/themen/aktuelle-meldungen/2026/maerz/nach-kinderphase-ehegattensplitting-bremst-beschaeftigung-von-frauen-aus
58. ✔ Korea: TFR 0.72 (2023) → 0.75 (2024) → 0.80 (2025 provisional, Ministry of Data and Statistics, 25 Feb 2026); births +6.8%. https://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Society/view?articleId=288047 . Demographers attributing the rebound to cohort size and postponed weddings rather than policy: e.g. AFP/Space Daily, July 2026. ~ Hungary 1.23→~1.5 and France ~1.8 at ~1.5% GDP: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12206145/ . The “few tenths” range is my reading, not a published estimate.
59. ~ Baumol, W. (2012). The Cost Disease.
60. ! US: Census Bureau real median household income (FRED MEHOINUSA672N) vs BEA real GDP per capita (FRED A939RX0Q048SBEA). ✔ Germany: Eurostat ilc_di03, real median equivalised disposable income (survey year X deflated with HICP of year X−1, since EU-SILC incomes refer to the previous year): +10.2% between survey years 2010 and 2019, while real GDP per head (nama_10_pc) rose 18.5% over the matching income years 2009–2018. The series breaks in 2020, when German EU-SILC moved into the Mikrozensus, so no change is quoted across that year. The size of the divergence depends on deflator and household-composition choices; cite a specific series and year range.
61. ! US nominal GDP ~$15.0tn (2010) → ~$30tn (2025), BEA; real GDP up roughly a third and real GDP per capita roughly a quarter (FRED GDPC1, A939RX0Q048SBEA). Pull exact figures.
62. ! Benjamin, D. J., Heffetz, O., Kimball, M. S. & Szembrot, N. (2014). “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference.” AER 104(9). Health, security and family rank above income in stated preferences; also Adler & Dolan (2008).

Appendix B - Dashboard data sources

What the dashboard actually reads, by row, with dataset codes as of September 2026. Each panel on the page links its exact query.

• GDP and net output: Eurostat nama_10_pc, nama_10_gdp (B1GQ), nasa_10_nf_tr (P51C)
• Distribution: Eurostat ilc_di03, ilc_di01, prc_hicp_aind (deflator); WID.world shwealj992; effective tax rates by wealth band from published estimates (Bach, Corneo and Steiner; Oxfam / Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit; Saez and Zucman; Auten and Splinter)
• Health: Eurostat hlth_hlye, demo_mlexpec, hlth_cd_asdr2
• Combined welfare: Jones & Klenow (2016), published figures
• Housing: OECD Analytical House Prices (DSD_AN_HOUSE_PRICES); Destatis GENESIS 31121-0001, 61262-0001; Eurostat ilc_lvho07a, ilc_lvho07b; BBSR and IW Köln need estimates
• Time: Eurostat nama_10_a10_e, demo_pjan, HETUS tus_00age, tus_20age
• Ecology: World Bank NY.ADJ.SVNG.GN.ZS; Global Carbon Project via Our World in Data
• Durability: Eurostat nasa_10_nf_tr (P51C), env_waseleeos
• Subjective wellbeing: Eurostat ilc_pw01, ilc_pw05, ilc_pw02; World Happiness Report (Gallup World Poll)
• Connection and family: Eurostat ilc_pw06, ilc_pw10, ilc_scp10, demo_pjanmarsta; Twenge et al. (2021) for PISA loneliness
• Externality remediation: Eurostat hlth_sha11_hf, env_ac_epneis1; GPI method (Talberth, Cobb and Slattery 2007)