Steven Stone is acting director of the United Nations Environment Programme's Office of Science In 1934, American economist Simon Kuznets presented a paper to Congress advocating for a new way of measuring economic performance.The United States was reeling from the Great Depression, and Kuznets – a future Novel prize winner – wanted to gauge just how badly the country’s economy had been dented.His metric, which would come to be known as gross domestic product (GDP), was a breakthrough. But as pioneering as it was, Kuznets saw its limitations.“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income,” he wrote in the 1934 paper.
As fires burn and temperatures soar, it’s time to imagine a world beyond GDP
Environmental destruction, like clear-cutting a forest, can boost gross domestic product but it reduces a country's real wealth
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