““What we need is a “dashboard” complete with an array of indicators to track the things that make life worthwhile – money and growth, obviously, but also community service, jobs, knowledge, social cohesion. And, of course, the scarcest good of all: time. “But such a dashboard couldn’t possibly be objective,” you might counter. True. But there’s no such thing as a neutral metric. Behind every statistic is a certain set of assumptions and prejudices. What’s more, those figures – and their assumptions – guide our actions. That’s true of GDP but equally true of the Human Development and Happy Planet indices. And it’s precisely because we need to change our actions that we need new figures to guide us.””
