The ONS’s Measuring National Well-being programme and developments by the Welsh Government are exemplars in going ‘beyond GDP’. However, measuring things differently is not enough: new measures will have to be used in government, business and everyday life.

Speaker: Paul Allin, Visiting Professor, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College

There is increasing interest in measuring well-being and progress more widely than by the national economic accounts.

The ONS’s Measuring National Well-being programme and developments by the Welsh Government are exemplars in going ‘beyond GDP’. However, the many current initiatives on this front form the ‘second wave’ of attempts to usurp GDP, recalling the social indicators movement in the 1960s as the ‘first wave’. We add in Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland from the 1790s to reinforce the point that measuring things differently is not enough: new measures will have to be used in government, business and everyday life.