You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Credit...Matt ChaseThe United Nations has a new plan for weighing economic gains alongside health and environmental progress. But consensus is elusive.Credit...Matt ChaseListen · 10:00 min May 26, 2026It’s no secret that gross domestic product, the number that serves as a measure for economic progress around the world, is hardly a barometer of human flourishing.It registers the harvest of a forest as timber income, for example, without recognizing the resulting erosion and water quality degradation. It measures spending on hospitals, but not people’s health. An authoritarian regime might score well, even if it hoards wealth and its median citizen lives in poverty.For decades, economists have tried to devise an alternative metric to capture a broader picture of prosperity, which would change the goals that nations try to achieve. Committees have been convened and international institutions have introduced indexes and frameworks to assess vulnerability, well-being and natural capital.But none has gained widespread favor. So last year, the United Nations set up a commission to design a more focused set of indicators that could finally take away some of the attention paid to G.D.P.The result, released this month, is a dashboard of 31 metrics grouped in four buckets representing peace and human rights, sustainability, quality of life, and inequality. It includes the share of people who feel comfortable walking in their neighborhood after dark, the wealth share of the richest 1 percent and the number of conflict-related deaths per 100,000 people.The dashboard is more concise than the hundreds of data points underpinning the Sustainable Development Goals the United Nations set in 2015. António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, whose term ends this year, called the new dashboard a complement to G.D.P., and beseeched delegates to take it up in their own countries.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT