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Among the welter of economic indicators, one dominates all others: Gross Domestic Product.

Better known by its acronym, GDP, it's the most widely used metric of any free-market government on the planet, claiming to compress the entire output of a nation's goods and services into a single dense number. Weak GDP from a big nation can bring markets to their knees. Currencies rise or fall. Central banks rely on it to steer economies. It makes or breaks boardroom decisions to invest and hire.

And so it stands to reason that everyone is pleased when it goes up and displeased when it goes down. At least that's the conventional thinking: a rising GDP tide lifts all boats - including overall quality of life and the advancement of human progress by extension.

Sorry, but that's not true, balk a chorus of economists, academics and many European political leaders.

Instead, there's growing interest globally in another measurement of productivity: happiness.

For all the infatuation with GDP, even the most wonkish economists admit the data is limited at best and misleading at worst. In 2008, two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, co-authored a book: "Mis-measuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up."

"For over half a century now, the GDP has been severely criticized as not adequately capturing human welfare and progress," according to the Journal of Economic Psychology.

The last recession laid bare one major shortcoming. In the United States, GDP turned the corner and began to grow by July 2009. But the nation appeared to ignore the data and hemorrhaged jobs for eight more months, often losing a quarter of a million jobs per month. When employers did begin to resume hiring in March 2010, job creation was so excruciatingly cautious that it failed to dent the pool of millions of unemployed - even as GDP continued its upward ascent.

Indeed, the root cause of the 2008-'09 downturn - rampant accumulation of consumer debt and overleveraged mortgages - showed up as a positive factor as far as GDP was concerned. Americans were spending beyond their means but spending nonetheless. The same holds true at the government level as well as the household level. Tea partyers and economists alike concur that the U.S. government remains dangerously dependent on daily loan transfusions from China, which in turn inflates the value of GDP. At first glance, that would seem positive, even though the debt imbalances put the nation's economic security at risk.

Other factors, which do little or nothing to advance human welfare, also skew the indicator. An oil spill will entail huge cleanup costs that inflate GDP, as will money spent on prisons, earthquakes, riots, nuisance litigation and medical treatment of epidemics or other unwanted health conditions. In theory, it's possible that widespread social misery can coincide with bullish GDP numbers.

While the criticisms are nearly as old as GDP itself - the measure was invented in the U.S. in the 1930s - what's new these days are a sudden slew of efforts to create a new class of growth statistics.

Those efforts are proliferating so rapidly that some leaders eventually might begin to shape public policy around factors that noneconomists call "happiness," according to researchers at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a global economic think tank. "GDP is flawed if you want an indication of what's important in people's lives, it's incomplete," said Martine Durand, chief statistician at the OECD.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and ousted French President Nicolas Sarkozy, both conservatives, have called for the creation of well-being indexes in their respective nations. The Canadian Index of Wellbeing was launched as a formal government initiative. Japan and Australia have followed suit, while Germany's parliament is studying the issue. China, which urgently wants to avoid the violent unrest that led to the 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square, began work on its own national "harmonious society" index of well being.

The Buddhist Asian nation of Bhutan, landlocked between China and India, goes further than others. It willfully ignores GDP and has developed a "Gross National Happiness" index.

The U.S., by contrast, has shown almost zero official interest at the government level, Durand said. But that hasn't stopped American academics. At Princeton University's Center for Health and Wellbeing, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton have been developing their own Well-Being Index.

It's unlikely that headlines for Gross National Happiness indexes flash on screens in trading rooms and move stock markets. But the new indexes are backed up by bulging banks of empirical data.

That's the case with the OECD's Better Life Index, unveiled last year. It goes further than national indexes because it comprises all 34 OECD members, which encompass nations from Turkey and Israel to the U.S., Mexico and Japan.

The OECD index allows citizens to compare lives across the 34 countries, based on 11 dimensions: community, education, environment, governance, health, housing, income, jobs, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance.

By that rank, the U.S. is mixed in its happiness.

In the life satisfaction component, the U.S. ranks No. 12 behind nations such as Canada, Ireland and Australia. Although the U.S. spends more on health per capita than any other nation, it has below-average health metrics. It ranks low on the sense of personal safety, which is influenced by high crime statistics, but high on housing and a sense of community.

"Americans are not too dissatisfied, but they are not the happiest people," said Durand at the OECD.

Perhaps the biggest critic of GDP, however, is the man who invented it.

Russian-born economist Simon Kuznets won the 1971 Nobel Prize for standardizing his growth index. Kuznets created the index in the 1930s, at a time when the nation kept swooning back into depression and even a blunt barometer was deemed useful. But even he was worried about his own creation.

"The welfare of a nation," he warned, "can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income as defined by the GDP."