GDP has long been treated as the headline measure of progress. Yet it tells us little about what truly matters: sustainable and inclusive wellbeing for people today and generations to come. It was never designed to reflect welfare or quality of life. Continued overemphasis on GDP growth risks widening inequalities and degrading natural systems.
The challenge isn’t in recognising GDP’s flaws, which is already widely agreed. The real challenge lies in agreeing on what should replace it. As the UN Summit for the Future highlighted, global leaders have already committed to developing indicators that better capture human and planetary wellbeing. But with hundreds of existing proposals in circulation, consensus has remained hard to achieve.
A new article by Kubiszewski et al., “Building consensus on societal wellbeing: a semantic synthesis of indicators to move beyond GDP,” takes this debate forward. The authors compiled a database of 213 wellbeing indicators proposed by governments, NGOs, academics, and businesses. Through semantic analysis, they identified overlaps and developed a 20-component indicator to serve as a model for building consensus and increasing the likelihood of policy uptake.
Key insights
- Despite their diversity, wellbeing indicators share strong conceptual similarities. This suggests that building international consensus is both possible and desirable.
- Indicators with around 20 components capture most of the shared ground. Adding more components increases complexity but little extra value.
- The 20 components span human, social, built/financial, and natural capital — covering themes like life satisfaction, health, education, crime, natural resources, and greenhouse gas emissions.
- Consensus regarding the 20-component synthesis indicator could strengthen balance, coherence, and potential for policy uptake.
How the study was conducted
The researchers began by collecting more than 400 indicators from governments, NGOs, academics, and international organisations. After filtering out those that were too narrow or situation-specific, they built a database of 213 broad wellbeing indicators. Each indicator consisted of multiple components, such as life expectancy, literacy, income equality, biodiversity, or civic participation.
To understand this diversity, the team grouped these components into clusters of similar meaning (for example, different education measures would fall into one education cluster). Each cluster was then represented by one key component, chosen in two ways: either automatically from the existing data (derived) or manually by researchers giving it a summarising label (created). Next, all these representative components were combined to form new “synthesising indicators.” By testing different numbers of clusters — 10, 20, 40, and 80 — they created four versions of synthesising indicators, each with the same number of components as clusters.
The analysis showed that an indicator with about 20 components provides the best balance: it captures most of the shared ideas across existing measures. Adding more components faces “diminishing returns.”
They also tested how well each framework reflected others and compared the new synthesis with widely known examples. Interestingly, visibility did not always match conceptual strength. Widely known indicators such as the SDGs and HDI were not the most holistic. Canada’s Quality of Life Framework, with 19 components, scored highly and came close to the study’s “sweet spot” of around 20.
“But moving beyond GDP requires more than a new indicator.”
The paper makes it clear that to change the system, indicators and metrics alone are not enough. It requires a shared understanding of what constitutes a good life. The persistence of GDP reflects the way its metrics and models interact with policies, institutions, and social norms to reinforce the narrow goal of growth (i.e., the System of National Accounts and macroeconomic models).
Transforming this requires aligning all three elements: new metrics, models, and policies. Only as an integrated system can they redirect societies toward the overarching objective of sustainable and inclusive wellbeing, rather than the singular pursuit of GDP growth.
This is a core mission of MERGE: to bring together diverse voices across academia, civil society and policy, harmonise data and insights, and build alliances to co-create policy solutions and tools that support sustainable and inclusive wellbeing.
| Authors: Ida Kubiszewski, University College London Robert Costanza, University College London Joseph Eastoe, University College London Tianchu Lu, University College London Kenneth Mulder, Hampshire College Grover Patteson Hernandez, Hampshire College Péter Benczûr, European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Sandrine Dixson-Dectéve, Club of Rome |
The MERGE project brings together scientists and policy leaders to support the consensus-building process around alternative indicators — those that reflect both human and ecological health.
