The use of alternative metrics to GDP has a long history within the environmental movement (Housework to green energy: the new markers of growth in rival metric to GDP, 19 November).
GDP was never meant to be a measure of national or even of economic wellbeing. It simply measures sales, and is always the same figure as national expenditure. The person who invented the measure – Simon Kuznets – called it national income, which it also mirrors.
The idea that if we spend more we are better off is obviously silly. Economic activity has a qualitative as well as a quantitative aspect. A good analogy is with food: if we have none we will starve, but it does not follow from that that we should eat as much as we can. After staving off hunger, what matters is what we eat, not how much.
The question to ask is not how much economic activity we can generate but rather what we want the economic activity to do, and how that can be achieved. The idea that “growth” will solve all our problems is misguided.
Dr Jon Mulberg
The Open University
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