The Moral Complexity of GDP Calculations

Welcome back to Origin Story, where we’re discussing the concept of economic growth. Growth is the world’s great obsession. When it’s booming, it makes everything easier. When it stagnates or goes into reverse, everybody panics. But what exactly is it, what drives it and what does it cost us?

For most of human history economic growth didn’t exist. The average person was no better off than their distant ancestors. Even when the age of growth began with the Industrial Revolution, nobody knew how to measure it or control it until the 1940s. Enter GDP, which quickly became the most important number in the world despite its creators acknowledging from the start that it was both artificial and deeply flawed.

We talk about what GDP does and does not measure and how it has adapted to an increasingly complicated global economy. We meet the economists who created it (hello again, John Maynard Keynes) and those who tried to reform or replace it. Robert F Kennedy claimed in 1968 that GDP “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile”. Is the number that rules the world really fit for purpose?

Then we explore our addiction to relentless growth and ask if there is a more sustainable way to thrive: green growth, slow growth or degrowth? Preserving our natural resources without risking economic and political disaster is the great challenge of our times.

Is growth essential to the survival of democracy or the cause of many of its problems? What fuelled the miraculous growth of previous eras and why isn’t it working anymore? Can advanced economies escape the low-growth trap or do we need to rethink our whole approach to growth and prosperity? Does GDP still tell us what we need to know? And are we valuing the right things?

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Reading list

• Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (1972)

• Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology (1971)

• Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (2014)

• Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters (2025)

• Ehsan Masood, GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change (2021)

• Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020)

• John Maynard Keynes, How to Pay for the War (1940)

• Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist (2017)

• Daniel Susskind, Growth: A Reckoning (2024)

Articles

• John Cassidy, ‘Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth’, The New Yorker (2020)

• Herman Daly, ‘The Canary Has Fallen Silent’, New York Times (1970)

• Editorial, ‘Pandemic Calls for a New Approach to Growth’, Financial Times (2020)

• Editorial, ‘Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50 year argument’, Nature (2022)

• Idrees Kahloon, ‘The World Keeps Getting Richer. Some People Are Worried’, The New Yorker (2024)

• Carolyn Kormann, ‘The False Choice Between Economic Growth and Combatting Climate Change’, The New Yorker (2019)

• Katy Lederer, ‘The End of G.D.P.?’, The New Yorker (2015)

• David Marchese, This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession with Growth Must End, New York Times (2022)

• Bill McKibben, ‘To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower?’, The New Yorker (2023)

• John Merrick, ‘The prophet of the new right’, The New Statesman (2025)

• Peter Passell, Marc Roberts and Leonard Ross, ‘The Limits to Growth’, New York Times (1972)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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