Gross Domestic Product is the scourge of the modern world. Well, maybe that’s a bit strong. But an economic obsession with GDP, as it’s more commonly known, is at the root of almost every problem facing humankind today.

It’s pretty simple as a concept — GDP is merely a tally of the monetary value of all products and services produced and sold inside a country over a specific time period (usually a year).

So simple, in fact, that it dates back farther than you probably imagine. English economist William Petty came up with the concept in the 17th century as a method for defending landlords against disproportionately high taxation during a war with the Dutch.

As a landowner himself, Petty asserted that the government’s income should equal its spending. Breaking apart the figures necessary to calculate GDP, he argued that since a far higher share of Britain’s spending came from paying wages, the tax burden should be shifted accordingly—that is to say, tax the workers instead of the assets of rich landowners. Back then, such thinking was used to fight the government. Today, it couldn’t be more politically mainstream.

Later that century, Charles Davenant further refined Petty’s work. Still, the modern concept of GDP didn’t emerge until 1934 — when Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets prepared a report for the U.S. Congress. Kuznets’s goal was to measure the nation’s productivity in the hope of developing a solution to the Great Depression. His work was so precise and comprehensive that it set the standard for such calculations. Today, Kuznets’s version of GDP is by far the most popular method for judging a country’s success.

Which is a problem. Because it’s awful. The way it’s calculated — by adding up every occasion when money changes hands — means that disasters and crime are treated as economic gain. It ignores crucial societal roles like childcare and volunteer work (because they don’t generate a salary), not to mention concepts like tolerance, freedom, and human rights. It whizzes past any concerns about income inequality. It increases with pollution, and then again with the subsequent cleanup. Worst of all, it treats the exploitation of natural resources like coal, oil, or rainforests as mere income — not the slow disappearance and devaluation of valuable environmental assets.

I’m not the first to call for its obliteration. In 2007, the European Union convened a conference trying to move “Beyond GDP.” In a 2014 Nature article, an influential collection of development economists urged the world to jettison the measure. That same year, Nobel laureate in economics Joseph E. Stiglitz lambasted the United States for its “GDP festishism.”

Don’t blame Kuznets, though: He himself warned of relying on single numbers to represent complex systems like economies in his report, writing:

The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent upon oversimplification. The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.

Today, several alternative metrics have emerged that aim to replace GDP for better comparing nations. Each comes with slightly differing objectives and worldviews. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks. All are worth considering to get a full picture of the state of the world.