The United Nations deserves credit for trying to dethrone GDP. As the New York Times reported this week, its new commission has released a dashboard of 31 indicators spanning peace, sustainability, quality of life and inequality, and the secretary general urged member states to adopt it. The impulse is right. GDP counts a felled forest as timber income and ignores the eroded hillside and fouled water left behind; it tallies hospital spending while saying nothing about whether people are well. These are not mundane accounting quirks. Rules that render nature worthless until it is cut down or paved over are quietly helping to kill the planet, and the people who depend on it most are the poor.
The trouble is that the UN cannot beat GDP while it keeps feeding it. As Marilyn Waring — the feminist, social scientist, former MP and activist New Zealander — argued decades ago (If Women Counted, 1988), the system began as a British wartime tool for financing the fight against Germany, which the economist Richard Stone then carried into the new United Nations and, in her words, “translated into a neocolonial exercise for the whole world.” By 1953 every country, the newly independent ones included, was expected to keep its books the same way. Waring puts the stakes bluntly: nations must conform “or they cannot belong to the United Nations,” nor borrow from the World Bank or the IMF. She overstates the rule — North Korea has held its UN seat for thirty-five years without ever adopting the system — but she is right about the gravity. Conformity is less a condition of membership than the price of functioning as a member. The UN calculates each country’s dues from its national-accounts data, and the IMF and World Bank make the same data a condition of credit. A country need not account this way to belong. It simply pays, in money and in standing, if it does not.
That machinery still runs. Each year UN statisticians collect national figures through a single standardized System of National Accounts questionnaire, and no alternative enjoys anything close to this status. The new dashboard is a recommendation; GDP is the default, gathered automatically and comparably from more than 200 countries while the rivals wait on each nation to volunteer. A contest between a mandatory metric and a menu of optional ones is not a contest.
So the obstacle is not indifference but architecture, and the UN built it. The organization can convene all the commissions it likes, yet as long as it keeps the SNA questionnaire as the one universal, mandatory-in-practice instrument while the alternatives stay voluntary dashboards, it has rigged the contest in favor of the very number it claims to be moving beyond. If the UN is serious about counting what matters, it must rewire the plumbing — make the collection of well-being and sustainability indicators as routine, as standardized and as expected as the GDP questionnaire already is. Waring saw the problem nearly forty years ago. The UN has spent the decades since proving her essentially right.