Gross Domestic Product or GDP is the sum of the value of goods and services produced within a country over a given period. Not without reason has it been called “the most powerful statistical figure in human history”121 – so why would a Nobel prize winning economist be calling for it to be abolished?

Using GDP as the yardstick of economic growth is so universally accepted that it seems strange to think that the whole concept was invented less than a century ago122. Its roots in common use lie in America’s struggle to emerge from the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the time, the idea that adding up the total value of economic activity would be a good metric of success, and should be used to guide government policy, was justified. The relationship between economic growth and standards of living was close enough, across enough of society, for the two to appear integrally linked.

So ingrained has this link become in our minds that to even think of questioning it seems ridiculous. Yet that is what Joseph Stiglitz – and countless other economists and leading thinkers – are now doing123. The main problem with GDP is that it focuses on the amount of growth being achieved rather than the quality of that growth and takes no account of the human or environmental cost of achieving it.124 When viewed in these terms, “growth for growth’s sake – at any cost” is not sustainable. As Simon Kuznets says of the statistic, he himself created: "distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between the short and the long term. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what."