GDP and growth don't make us happy

The Guardian recently ran a leading article about the economy ("No ordinary recession") in which the fall of manufacturing output by 4.6% was described as a "statistic that can be easily translated into real life". I beg to differ.

Manufacturing output is simply a measure of how many things, gadgets and widgets our factories have churned out. Like GDP it is essentially meaningless in terms of the reality of human existence.

Walking the dog, growing your own salad (see my balcony below from last summer), having friendly neighbours, reading a good book, playing the piano, feeling loved, not suffering from mental illness - these are the things that make us real and happy, not GDP, manufacturing output or inflation targets. Equally, none of those conventional measures of economic progress highlight the damage we are doing to the planet and the risk that we are creating for future generations.

Last week the New Economics Foundation published their latest survey on wellbeing which measures indicators like how happy we say we are. The sad fact is that, as a society, we are no happier than we were in the 1960s despite a flood of "useful" things being produced by our factories and a plethora of "exciting" financial products being conjured out of thin air by our bankers.

If ever there was a time to stop pretending that economic growth theory is a measure of human progress or something that "translates into real life" it is now. We need to define human progress not in terms of "stuff" but in terms of what makes us happy.