A new editorial in Nature highlights a growing consensus among economists and policy-makers that “governments’ reliance on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the main proxy for social well-being and progress is leading the world in wrong and unsustainable directions.”

For example, healthcare spending in the U.S., representing about 17% of our GDP, may be inflating the GDP for the wrong reasons: lack of productivity and efficiency. It appears that “GDP makes no distinction between productive investment and profligate waste.”

“What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong measures, we will strive for the wrong things,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University in New York. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, chaired the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, a panel of economists convened by the French government to look for better measures. Its report, released last September, recommends that indicators should be expanded beyond GDP to include those that reflect quality of life, sustainable development and the environment

In 1972, the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan opted to base its policy-making on indicators of "gross national happiness"