The New Yardsticks of Prosperity

Chosen theme: Alternative Economic Growth Assessment Tools. Let’s step beyond GDP and explore humane, ecological, and inclusive ways to understand progress—so your community, company, or city measures what truly matters. Subscribe to follow this evolving toolkit.

Why GDP Isn’t Enough

GDP rises with pollution cleanup, disaster rebuilding, and burnout-driven overtime, but ignores unpaid care, mental health, ecosystem loss, and inequality. Decision-makers need tools that reveal hidden costs and benefits across society.

Frameworks That Reframe Prosperity

GPI starts with personal consumption, then adds household and volunteer work while subtracting costs like crime, pollution, and resource depletion. It turns growth into net wellbeing, encouraging investment in prevention and care.

Frameworks That Reframe Prosperity

HDI blends life expectancy, education, and income into one simple measure. It’s globally comparable and policy-friendly, reminding leaders that prosperity is meaningless if people cannot learn, live long, and choose their futures.

Natural Capital Accounting

This approach quantifies ecosystems—forests, wetlands, watersheds—as assets with services like flood protection and carbon storage. It enables smarter trade-offs, guiding budgets toward conservation that safeguards livelihoods and reduces long-run public expenses.

Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI)

IWI sums produced, human, and natural capital to track whether a nation’s total wealth is rising. If financial assets grow while soils, skills, or species decline, the index warns of fragile futures.

Green GDP and carbon-adjusted output

Green GDP deducts environmental degradation and resource depletion from output. Carbon-adjusted variants price emissions explicitly, steering policy toward low-carbon infrastructure, restoration projects, and efficiency that deliver cleaner, resilient prosperity.

Surveys of life satisfaction, purpose, and daily emotions complement clinical health data. Paired with local indicators—green space, commute stress, loneliness—they map how policies change feelings, not only financial figures.

Wellbeing, Time, and the Human Experience

Time-use data exposes hidden economies of care, civic participation, and rest. Balanced schedules signal healthier communities, while chronic overwork and unpaid burdens indicate growth that extracts more than it gives.

Wellbeing, Time, and the Human Experience

Distribution, Access, and True Inclusion

MPI measures deprivations in health, education, and living standards simultaneously. It finds pockets of hardship within prosperous regions, enabling targeted interventions that move households from survival toward opportunity.

Distribution, Access, and True Inclusion

Distribution metrics show whether gains cluster at the top or spread widely. When paired with social mobility data, they reveal whether effort converts into opportunity, not just headlines about average growth.

Distribution, Access, and True Inclusion

Tracking pay gaps, childcare availability, safety, and disability access reveals structural barriers. These measures help design policies that unlock talent, reduce burnout, and build economies that respect everyone’s time and dignity.

Nighttime lights and mobility data

Satellite imagery of lights correlates with economic activity, while mobility patterns indicate retail and service health. Combined carefully with surveys, they provide timely signals for planning and crisis response.

Citizen-generated data and participatory budgeting scores

Community reporting on safety, amenities, and service quality enriches dashboards with lived experience. Participatory budgeting outcomes quantify priorities, linking resource allocation to resident-defined measures of progress and trust.

Building Your Mixed-Metric Scorecard

Co-design a shortlist with stakeholders: environment, health, equity, safety, education, and time. Prioritize measures linked to actionable policies so each data point guides decisions, budgets, and accountability.

Building Your Mixed-Metric Scorecard

Agree publicly on indicator weights, trade-offs, and red lines like emissions caps or eviction rates. Document rationales, publish methods, and invite external review to build trust and reduce political gaming.