Beyond GDP: The Full Spectrum

On the recent solar eclipse and a different type of trajectory.

I am aware it is August and that most of you reading this are hopefully taking a well-earned break, so I’ll try to keep this one short.

If you are currently in the UK or Europe, you will probably have seen Wednesday’s solar eclipse, which was full or partial depending on where you were watching. I watched it with my children and their friends, in a field at the top of the steep valley where we live in the South West.

There is nothing like these events for reminding us that, for all the human societies we have constructed, we still have the capacity to be enthralled by the universe we are part of.

It is also an excellent opportunity to time travel.

My children wanted to know what I was doing in 1999, when the last full eclipse was visible in the UK, a time twelve years before my eldest was born. I could see them trying to picture me as a twenty-year-old undergraduate, desperately trying to find the eclipse glasses, huddled in a small garden in South London with flatmates and neighbours watching an overcast sky.

I in turn asked them what they think they might be doing in 2090, the next time a true total solar eclipse is visible from the UK, on 23 September of that year. This produced a good deal of speculation about how nobody will need glasses by then, on account of the implanted robotic AI eyeballs.

It also caused my nine-year-old son to snuggle a bit closer and squeeze my hand. Thinking about the future without your mum, and about being an older person, is hard when you are nine and have only a nine-year-old brain to do it with.

We then talked about what we would wish for, for our future selves and for the world.

This led to an intense debate about whether contentment and happiness are the same thing (and if not, which one is better) and then my daughter's friend said she hoped that by 2090 we would have found a way to truly value the world. My mind went straight to the Beyond GDP movement, and I quietly thanked her for providing the inspiration for this week’s newsletter.

We were, after all, standing in a scorched field, in the middle of the drought that has been working its way across most of Europe all summer. Standing with these young people, instead of doom I felt myself doubling down on a conviction that the trajectory we at times seem to be on, of mass extinctions, poverty, climate disaster, scorched earth and the rise of fascism, has to be interrupted and course-corrected, now. As with the Apollo 13 mission, failure is not an option. Astronomers can already tell us the date of that 2090 eclipse, the path the shadow will take, and the time it will cross the coast, but this is only one kind of information. What we cannot say with any certainty is what and who will be standing underneath it.

Understanding Beyond GDP

In many ways filling in the bigger picture is what the Beyond GDP movement is about. It takes one way of measuring, assessing and predicting the world and, rather than replacing it outright, sets alongside it a whole spectrum of other measurements, concerned with lives and livelihoods.

In 2024 all 193 UN member states adopted the Pact for the Future, which included a request for measures of progress that complement and go beyond GDP. The Secretary-General convened an independent expert group, and on 7 May this year they delivered: Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet.

It proposes a dashboard of thirty-one indicators, roughly half of them already collected under the SDGs. That is the point: much of this can start now, without a single new survey. It is the first proposal of its kind the UN has produced at the explicit request of every member state.

What makes it relevant to a conversation in a field watching a partial solar eclipse is that the framework is explicitly intergenerational. It treats wellbeing as depending on environmental and institutional conditions as well as economic ones, which means that a country that sells off its forests, drains its aquifers or exhausts its soils, or relies on exploitative labour, can no longer book the proceeds as unambiguous success.

Changing that changes what a finance ministry is able to call a good year, and gives us a wider set of values against which to judge progress. That in turn shapes what sort of world we choose to incentivise and, above all, how we act to create it through policy.

Expanded horizons

Our most ambitious current collective agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals, was agreed in 2015 and expires in 2030, four years away. We are already inside its final stretch, and the negotiation over what replaces it is under way. That successor framework is the most consequential thing being designed in international policy at the moment.

Meanwhile, the things the Beyond GDP dashboard proposes to measure – soil, aquifers, woodland, the health of children, the durability of institutions – do not operate on fifteen-year cycles. An aquifer drawn down now is a problem for someone in 2070, in the same way that a hedgerow planted this winter is a different landscape in 2090. Astronomers work comfortably in centuries, but our economic instruments largely work in quarters.

So the Beyond GDP argument is not only about measuring more things. It is about measuring on a longer horizon, which is precisely what makes it a future generations question rather than purely a statistical one. If you want a government to act as though 2090 exists, you have to give it something that registers 2090 as a consequence. And it has to leave room to change course, so that a decision taken now does not bind the people who will have to live with it. We need to keep our futures open.

Access to finance

A country’s numbers are not merely descriptive; they determine what it can borrow against, on what terms, and whether it qualifies for the cheaper development finance reserved for countries deemed to need it. Many middle-income countries are currently shut out of concessional finance because GDP per capita says they are managing perfectly well, while their debt burdens and their exposure to climate damage say something else entirely.

In June, the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth was published under the mandate of Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, alongside an article signed by Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth, Jayati Ghosh and Jason Hickel. It was co-constructed by more than four hundred people, from UN agencies to trade unions to grassroots movements, and carries some three hundred and sixty signatories.

Their framing is that poverty is manufactured. It is both a terrible and a hopeful message: it means we could have avoided so much suffering with a better design, but also that we still have the agency to do something about it.

What to watch

The Beyond GDP negotiation now sits with member states, co-facilitated by Guyana and Spain. September’s UN General Assembly will set how seriously and for how long this gets negotiated; the IMF and World Bank meetings in October are the test of whether the institutions that actually move money are engaging; a new Secretary-General will also take office with the chance to carry it. And the likeliest home for it is the process that succeeds the SDGs. Given everything above about how far ahead we are able to look, that feels like the right place.

Asking a country how it is doing

What that looks like on the ground is worth seeing. Last week a Malaysian commentary asked a simple question: judged on outcomes rather than output, how is Malaysia actually doing? The answer was a genuinely mixed report card, with high happiness and social cohesion, a national human development index of 0.826, social progress rising ten years running, and roughly half its SDG targets on course against a global average nearer a fifth. And alongside that, a poor environmental performance score, a worse biodiversity ranking, a stark gap between Kuala Lumpur and Kelantan, and women who have achieved near-parity in education holding a political empowerment score of 0.079. The author’s phrase for the environmental picture was that the country is “liquidating our natural capital and calling it income”.

Reading a country beyond GDP gives a much fuller account, with strengths and losses in the same frame, which is more useful to a government than either a boast or an indictment.

The proposed dashboard will let countries see a much wider range of indicators alongside GDP, and with that a clearer sight of where they are actually heading.

What we need to ensure is that this analysis is accompanied by the political will to act. That step, from analysis to policy, is what was set out in Counting What Counts, and it remains the top priority for the large coalition working on Beyond GDP.

New trajectories

There was a moment on Wednesday, as eclipse happened, when the colour went out of the field. Not darkness exactly, but a thin, silvery light, the greens gone grey, birds silent and everything muted. And then it came back. The everyday colour of an ordinary August field felt like something worth rejoicing in and we clapped and cheered.

That is the closest I can get to what a fuller set of measures might do. Not replace the number we have, but return the colour to it, so that the care given invisibly, the water, the soil, the labour and the childhoods show up in the picture rather than being excluded. Once things are visible they can be counted, celebrated, and if the true cost proves too great, given up.

Those of you reading from outside the UK and Europe have your own eclipse moments coming.

I won’t live to see another full solar eclipse, at least not in the UK. But my fifteen-year-old daughter, who stood in that field holding up a colander to the sun (I never did find the glasses, in 1999 or on Wednesday; I am at the very least consistent in this regard), will hopefully be 79, perhaps with children and grandchildren of her own standing alongside her.

Whether the ground beneath them in 2090 is firmer, regenerative, fertile, stable and still able to provide them with food, comfort and refuge depends on what we do now.

Going beyond GDP is where the work starts and it must start now.