Among the many super­sti­tions doled out by the self-pro­claimed sci­en­tif­ic author­i­ties of mod­ern eco­nom­ics, per­haps no totem looms quite so large as the Gross Domes­tic Prod­uct. Cre­at­ed dur­ing the New Deal, the sta­tis­tic was meant to aggre­gate such nation­al eco­nom­ic indi­ca­tors as con­sump­tion and indus­tri­al out­put that had hith­er­to been com­piled in a scat­ter­shot fash­ion, if at all.

But like the crude growth figures of GDP, the HDI suffered from enormous blind spots—chiefly environmental degradation, something neoclassical economics oafishly regards as an uncontrollable “externality.”

But com­press­ing the diverse activ­i­ties and social forces of a sprawl­ing econ­o­my into a sin­gle num­ber is inher­ent­ly a griev­ous over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, as sci­ence writer Ehsan Masood demon­strates in his spright­ly and infor­ma­tive new his­to­ry, The Great Inven­tion: The Sto­ry of GDP and the Mak­ing and Unmak­ing of the Mod­ern World. As Masood explains, even the New Deal func­tionary charged with devis­ing the thing spent the bet­ter part of his career doing bat­tle with its offi­cial computation.

In 1933, at the prompt­ing of the U.S. Sen­ate, the Com­merce Depart­ment enlist­ed a young econ­o­mist named Simon Kuznets to patient­ly sur­vey the out­put of the chief agri­cul­tur­al and indus­tri­al sec­tors of the U.S. econ­o­my over the pre­vi­ous three years. As one might expect, Kuznets found the U.S. had lost almost 40 per­cent of its over­all income after the mar­ket crash, from $81 bil­lion in 1929 to $49 bil­lion in 1932.

But Kuznets, who had emi­grat­ed from Sovi­et Rus­sia in 1922, resist­ed count­ing gov­ern­ment expen­di­tures as part of over­all nation­al income. He had rea­soned, as do many mar­ket-besot­ted neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists today, that gov­ern­ment spend­ing crowds out more pro­duc­tive pri­vate invest­ment and serves as a drag.

It fell to British econ­o­mist John May­nard Keynes, in a 1940 tract called How To Pay for the War, to put for­ward a basic for­mu­la for tal­ly­ing a nation’s domes­tic prod­uct that includ­ed gov­ern­ment spend­ing. Eager New Deal­ers took up Keynes’ revi­sion and shunt­ed the GDP’s actu­al inven­tor to the mar­gins of pol­i­cy debate, where Kuznets would ful­mi­nate against his creation’s rude fate for the rest of his life.

These con­tentious birth pangs marked just the first dust-up over what the GDP should encom­pass. The mea­sure­ment was adopt­ed wide­ly as part of the post­war Mar­shall Plan, with growth in GDP a require­ment for con­tin­ued U.S. aid. To this day, a devel­op­ing nation’s attrac­tive­ness to for­eign invest­ment rests main­ly on its abil­i­ty to pro­duce a fast-grow­ing GDP.

But GDP is inher­ent­ly a polit­i­cal as well as an eco­nom­ic reck­on­ing, as anoth­er ear­ly defec­tor, Pak­istani econ­o­mist Mah­bub ul Haq, famous­ly argued in 1968. Haq explained how Pakistan’s wor­ship of the GDP was bad­ly dis­tort­ing the real Pak­istani econ­o­my. Draw­ing on research done by his wife, Khadi­ja, Haq revealed that a tiny clutch of 20 fam­i­lies had amassed most of the country’s resources: 66 per­cent of its indus­tri­al com­pa­nies, 79 per­cent of its insur­ance funds and 80 per­cent of its pub­licly trad­ed banks. The reas­sur­ing uptick in GDP by more than 6 per­cent each year was mask­ing a full-blown social cri­sis, Haq argued, and if the ben­e­fi­cia­ries fail to increase pub­lic invest- ment, then:

soci­ety has every right, in fact it has the duty to resist the emer­gence of a priv­i­leged class of entre­pre­neurs which is pam­pered by fis­cal con­ces­sions, which is shel­tered by pro­hib­i­tive tar­iffs, which is nur­tured by arti­fi­cial incen­tives and which makes its liv­ing on the basis of imper­fect and inef­fi­cient competition.

Haq went on to devise an alter­nate mea­sure of nation­al eco­nom­ic well-being called the Human Devel­op­ment Index, which, under the aegis of the Unit­ed Nations’ Devel­op­ment Pro­gram, uses the bench­marks of life expectan­cy, adult lit­er­a­cy and per capi­ta income. But like the crude growth fig­ures of GDP, the HDI suf­fered from enor­mous blind spots — chiefly envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, some­thing neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics oafish­ly regards as an uncon­trol­lable ​“exter­nal­i­ty.” Like many pol­i­cy thinkers in the devel­op­ing world, Haq viewed the effort to rein in car­bon emis­sions as a ploy on the part of devel­oped indus­tri­al pow­ers to pull the lad­der up after them­selves once they had prof­itably despoiled the planet.

With cli­mate change accel­er­at­ing, oth­er researchers have sought to fur­ther amend GDP by affix­ing a price to nat­ur­al resources. In 1997, Louisiana State Uni­ver­si­ty econ­o­mist Robert Costan­za and col­leagues assessed the dol­lar val­ue of the nat­ur­al world at around $33 tril­lion. This effort has touched off frac­tious debates on every­thing from his method­ol­o­gy to his alleged­ly cal­lous quan­tifi­ca­tion of irre­place­able nat­ur­al resources and species.

Against this infight­ing, Masood preach­es a sort of patient incre­men­tal­ism: ​“GDP is sim­ply too entrenched as a pol­i­cy tool to be aban­doned just because emi­nent aca­d­e­mics dis­like it,” he writes. And in 2013, the GDP was qui­et­ly revised to accom­mo­date anoth­er brand of expen­di­ture: mon­ey spent on sci­en­tif­ic research. Still, Masood con­cedes this shift took place only after five decades of internecine squabbling.

It’s clear we can’t wait anoth­er five decades to quan­ti­fy envi­ron­men­tal harm. As was the case at the moment of the GDP’s cre­ation, pol­i­tics con­tin­ues to play an enor­mous part in lit­i­gat­ing the prop­er domain and influ­ence of this pow­er­ful num­ber — and in all sorts of ways, the moment seems riper than ever to adopt an updat­ed ver­sion of Mah­bub ul Haq’s anguished call to action.