A recent article in the NYT, “G.D.P. Seen as Inadequate Measure of Economic Health” by David Jolly, discussed the inadequacy of using GDP alone (“It’s not a question of replacing G.D.P. It’s a question of complementing it with other indicators that can provide other measures of well-being.”) as an indicator of a society’s well-being:

G.D.P. is the measure of the market value of all the goods and services produced in the economy. Its development in the 1930s, when the U.S. government was looking for new tools to measure national income and output more accurately, has been described as one of the most important advances in macroeconomics.

However, there has long been criticism that, while it accurately captures the growth or contraction of the overall economy, it is a crude tool for describing social health…

The articles mentions some other measures of well-being in addition to GDP that are reported by other countries around the world in an attempt to better capture the country’s total well-being. For example,

[T]he Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has chosen to focus on “gross national happiness…

The United Nations Development Program’s human development index…also seek[s] to incorporate the value of a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living.”