What pisses me off about the 'beyond GDP' movement

I've just finished reading yet another report on how to get beyond GDP to a 'wellbeing' economy (my area of academic expertise). All of these papers with almost no exceptions say exactly the same thing and make the same fundamental errors. These are a lack of engagement with the policy sciences, no engagement with the wellbeing literature, watermelon politics (red inside green), an exceedingly technocratic approach, and narrow fixation on GDP when efficiency and productivity are more operant in contemporary governments. Let me explain...

There is no shortage of 'beyond GDP' literature. Ecological economists like Bob Costanza have been banging this drum for decades. The argument usually commences from sustainability. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. The current economic model is rapidly outstripping planetary limits and needs to be curtailed. Maybe we need degrowth. At the very least, we need to appreciate the 'donut', as Kate Raworth popularised it (this is a much older idea in ecological economics): the economy serves humans, and humans exist within a biosphere. We need to stop trashing the environment and ourselves in order to increase the size of the economy as an end in itself. We need to identify the things that really matter, and ensure everyone has access to that quality of life in a sustainable way. This is usually phrased as transitioning to an 'economy of wellbeing'. I'm broadly in favour of this line of argument (not so much the degrowth part, though as I've written before, degrowth is horribly marketed and even more poorly understood). 

Now these arguments have been coming out of academic at least since the Club of Rome report in 1972. Very little has happened policy wise (or indeed culture wise). So now you've got papers coming out that are a bit more explicitly focused on the policy change piece. They usually argue some combination of the following:

• International organisations (e.g. OECD, UN, EU) should coordinate the development of national wellbeing accounts. These would measure 'experienced wellbeing' (presumably this means life satisfaction, sense of purpose in life, and experienced moods), and a host of material factors like housing, health, education, etc. We have these sorts of things in some form in most countries as all countries already care about health, housing, education, etc., but the most advanced examples are New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Bhutan, Italy, and the Nordics (only recently though); Canada catching up rapidly.
• International organisations (e.g. OECD, UN, EU) should help national governments to refocus their priorities away from GDP to inclusive and sustainable wellbeing for all.
• This will require institutional change, which should again be driven by international organisations disseminating best practice through national governments. 
• Advocacy coalitions should be established at the international level to influence national politics. 

Are you seeing a pattern? 

We are living through a high tide of populist, anti-elite, anti-technocratic, anti-globalist, anti-international institution, pro-local sentiment, and these 'intellectuals' think the best way to effect a dramatic change in the values governments pursue is to ram it down citizens' throats through high level technocratic mechanisms. The stupidity is mind-bottling, to quote Zoolander ("you know, when your thoughts get all trapped up like in a bottle?"). 

A cursory discussion with policymakers about the 'national wellbeing accounts' that already exist will reveal to anyone with ears that these things have close to zero impact on policymaking. There are several reasons for this:

• Fabio Battaglia's PhD thesis, in which he interviewed 100+ policymakers and politicians, reveals that politicians (you know, the people with the actual power, unlike the bureaucrats in the OECD), are sceptical of subjective measures and recognise that voters remains focused on hip pocket issues.  
• National statistical accounts do not enter in any way into everyday governance, either in terms of how politicians make and market decisions, nor in how bureaucrats administer policy. For wellbeing policy to 'cut through' it has to meet policy practitioners where they are at. They are not in National Statistics Offices or even in treasury/finance ministries, because these ministries do not deliver any policy. They are concerned about teacher morale in schools, garbage collection rates, energy demand, social care budgets, how many people use heritage sites and for what, etc. 
• Contrary to the self-aggrandising presumptions of academic elites, the vast bulk of public policy is not carried out from the cockpit of international organisations and national cabinets. Governments in OECD nations comprise around 40% of GDP - they are enormous. Think of all the schools, hospitals, job centres, army bases, diplomatic missions, police departments, council gardening crews, prisons, aged care facilities, national parks, power plants, sewerage treatment services, museums, community centres, and other sites where taxpayer funded services (i.e. public policy) is delivered to citizens. You need to get your wellbeing agenda into that activity and this requires a distributed, bottom-up, viral, approach that can be rapidly picked up by different policy sites and adapted to their specific context. Not a directive to measure health as life expectancy at the national level (we already do that!). 
• Contemporary public administration is often organised around principles of efficient public spending that centre business cases, cost-benefit analysis, outcomes-based commissioning, and recurrent funding for established need. If your wellbeing agenda is metrics focused and these metrics are not compatible with these practices (spoiler alert: they are not) then you won't change practice by insisting on these new metrics. Now a lot of wellbeing policy advocates, probably because they are technocratic and heavily influenced by economic ways of thinking, think that metrics will ultimately become compatible with cost-benefit analysis and such like. What we should instead be doing is pushing back on this whole way of doing public policy - so called New Public Management. Again, a cursory glance at the policy studies literature of the past 40 years or so will provide ample evidence, theory, and analytical traction to make this case. But nobody reads policy studies. 
• In most countries, the bulk of public policy delivery is handled at a subsidiary level from national governments level alone international organisations. In Australia, for example, health, education, and infrastructure are handled at the state level, and much of the built and natural environment is handled by local councils. You aren't going to get shit done in these jurisdictions if you're relying on UN documents and IPCC communiques. In those countries where governance is heavily centralised in national governments, like the UK or France, that is typically precisely why they have terrible wellbeing policy outcomes. Wellbeing is a very granular thing - it's about stuff like having good communication from hospital about when your shoulder reconstruction is going to happen - and so trying to promote it from HQ fails because you don't have a granular level of information there. Ironically, this is the most foundational insight of economics (see Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society, but it is also in Adam Smith), but the current crop of ecological economists and causal inference obsessed mainstream economists think they can do anything with a spreadsheet and a randomised-control trial.    

Those are the problems on the policymaking front. Let's talk about the politics for a bit. Degrowth, ecosocialism, and the technocracy of international organisations are all fundamentally unpopular. I don't think this is because the central ideas are unpopular, to be honest. I think people like clean air and water, steady income, a future for their kids, etc. My impression of the working and middle classes is that you could sell them a 'sufficientarian' agenda if you put it in the right language. That language would avoid the word 'sufficiency'. It would emphasise material security, a fair go (i.e. a life that gets better slowly if you keep at it, and that doesn't put immense pressure on you to be at it all the time), cultural and community cohesion (I feel like writing a separate post on this - why are liberal centrists accepting migration policy points instead of countering with investment in social and cultural infrastructure?), good quality public services, minimal bureaucratic hassle, and government on a level comprehensible to its people (i.e. politicians would never, ever, talk about the IPCC and national governments would constantly celebrate local government). 

The main reason the ecological economics agenda is unpopular is because the people advocating for it are perceived as twats - high minded, arrogant, paternalistic, snobs who've never come down from the smarmy capital city or their ivory tower to speak to the 'man on the street'. Meanwhile they're saying that their brains trust will decide how much money each person gets, and only then will they have deliberative democratic mechanisms for the public to decide how to spend that money. How people can think this is 'democratic' as opposed to authoritarian is beyond me. I suspect it's because their paternalistic instincts are so deep as to be invisible to them. They don't think there is anything wrong with saying to a child "now son, you can only play videogames for an hour a day, but I'll let you decide what game you want to play (not Stellar Blade though that's sexist)", so they also can't fathom their being something wrong with saying to a fellow citizen "now Doug, you can't drive your car anymore but I'll let you decide whether you want to take the bus or the train". 

The second reason why it's unpopular is because it's explicitly eco-socialist and people are allergic to that word. Full central planning was obviously a disaster in the mid 20th century. But remember that even modest central planning of the Keynesian welfare state type wound up in Stagflation by the late 70s. That was the origin of the neoliberal turn. One of the depressing ironies of ecological 'economics' is that it has such a deep hatred for the ideological form of neoliberalism (e.g. the advocacy of Milton Friedman or Julian Le Grand, or the politics of Thatcher and Reagan), that it hasn't learnt the good policy design lessons of countries that prosecuted the neoliberal turn in a technical fashion. I am thinking here of places like Australia, Canada, and Scandinavia. This was the subject of my first book (from what I now call my technocratic era) - a short version is here. Consequently, ecological economics is often drawing on a play book of good industrial policy, redistribution, and social policy ideas in a ham-fisted way that makes them bad ideas. For example, South Korea's historical development has very little relevance to our contemporary post-WTO, post-global values chains world, but Korea's current experiments with greening its economy, or the development experiences of Malaysia and Macedonia, are much more relevant. Ecological economics and related movements could learn all of this if they didn't dismiss mainstream economics out of hand as 'neoliberal'. Meanwhile, their advocacy for brain dead things like nationalising energy infrastructure is creating fertile ground for equally stupid statist ideas from the far right. I fear we are going to have to learn the lessons of the late 20th century all over again. 

Eco-socialism is especially unsavoury to many voters because it feels deceptive. As in the meme at the top of the page, what people feel is going on here is socialism, and the eco is just a trojan horse. This is even more so the case when the word 'wellbeing' is thrown around with close to 0 engagement with the wellbeing literature. Ecosocialists don't actually need to understand 'wellbeing' as a psycho-social phenomena because what they're really interested in is political economy, namely getting from capitalism to socialism. Voters, bureaucrats, mainstream economists, industry, and the man on the street can all smell that stink. 

I don't think the ecological economics movement is going to achieve 'cut through' until it stops thinking that it is smarter and more moral than everybody else. It needs to read the policy sciences and wellbeing literatures if it wants to talk about those topics effectively. It needs to spend time in the sorts of electorates that produced the Gilet Jaunes in France, or the rust belt regions that broke for Trump in 2016 - and not call everyone their racist, homophobic, and fascist immediately upon arrival. It needs to engage with policymakers at the level where public policy is delivered to a service user, not just hob nob with other fancy pantses at international organisations. And it needs to start speaking the language a typical drive time radio listener would understand instead of only catering to a Guardian readership. 

Alright I think this is out of my system now. I am writing a book on this stuff - The Wellbeing State: Transforming Public Policy - that will be out in Spring 2026. Hopefully I'll have calmed down by then.