The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, as it eventually came to be known — its official title was the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress — grew to about two dozen members and met in Europe and the U.S. several times in 2008 and 2009. Many of the members leaned to the left, even as Sarkozy is characterized in French politics as leaning to the right. Stiglitz brought in, among others, the Princeton psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman, as well as Enrico Giovannini, the president of the Italian National Institute of Statistics and the international economist most closely involved with the indicators movement over the past decade. In September, the commission issued a formidable report, nearly 300 pages long, that offered an exhaustive list of suggestions, some methodological and some philosophical, for measuring the progress of nations in the 21st century. “We very quickly came to a consensus that you weren’t going to get one number for a new G.D.P. number, but that it would have been nice,” Stiglitz told me. In fact, the commission endorsed both main criticisms of the G.D.P.: the economic measure itself should be fixed to better represent individuals’ circumstances today, and every country should also apply other indicators to capture what is happening economically, socially and environmentally. The commission sought a metaphor to explain what it meant. Eventually it settled on an automobile.

Suppose you’re driving, Stiglitz told me. You would like to know how the vehicle is functioning, but when you check the dashboard there is only one gauge. (It’s a peculiar car.) That single dial conveys one piece of important information: how fast you’re moving. It’s not a bad comparison to the current G.D.P., but it doesn’t tell you many other things: How much fuel do you have left? How far can you go? How many miles have you gone already? So what you want is a car, or a country, with a big dashboard — but not so big that you can’t take in all of its information.

The question is: How many measures beyond G.D.P. — how many dials on a new dashboard — will you need? Stiglitz and his fellow academics ultimately concluded that assessing a population’s quality of life will require metrics from at least seven categories: health, education, environment, employment, material well-being, interpersonal connectedness and political engagement. They also decided that any nation that was serious about progress should start measuring its “equity” — that is, the distribution of material wealth and other social goods — as well as its economic and environmental sustainability. “Too often, particularly I think in an American context, everybody says, ‘We want policies that reflect our values,’ but nobody says what those values are,” Stiglitz told me. The opportunity to choose a new set of indicators, he added, is tantamount to saying that we should not only have a conversation about recasting G.D.P. We should also, in the aftermath of an extraordinary economic collapse, talk about what the goals of a society really are.

Taking the Environment Into Account

The report from the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission isn’t a blueprint, exactly — it’s more like open-source software, posted online for anyone to download, discuss and modify. It doesn’t tell countries how they should measure progress. It tells them how they should think about measuring progress. One challenge here — something that the commission’s members well understood — is that recommending new indicators and actually implementing them are very different endeavors. Almost everyone I spoke with in the indicators movement, including Chris Hoenig at State of the USA, seems to agree that at the moment our reach exceeds our grasp. When I met with Rebecca Blank, the under secretary of commerce for economic affairs, whose job it is to oversee the data agencies that put together G.D.P., she noted that new national measures depend on more than a government’s willingness; they also necessitate additional financing, interagency cooperation and great leaps in the science of statistical analysis. Blank wasn’t averse to some of the commission’s recommendations — indeed, she recently endorsed the idea, proposed by Steve Landefeld at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, that our national accounts add a “household perspective” that represents individuals’ economic circumstances better than G.D.P. “But some of the constraint is we don’t have the money to do it,” she told me, referring to various new measures. “Some of the constraint is we know how to do it, but we need to collect additional data that we don’t currently have. And some of the constraint is that we don’t really know how to do it quite yet.”

Environmental and sustainability indicators offer a few good examples of how big the challenge is. A relatively easy first step, several members of the Stiglitz commission told me, would be to build in a “depletion charge” to G.D.P. for the natural resources — oil, gas, timber and even fisheries — that a country transforms into dollars. At the moment, we don’t do this; it’s as if these commodities have no value until they are extracted and sold. A charge for resource depletion might not affect G.D.P. in the United States all that much; the country is too big and too thoroughly based on knowledge and technology industries for the depletion costs of things like coal mining and oil drilling to make much of an impact. On the other hand, in countries like Saudi Arabia and China, G.D.P. might look different (that is to say, lower) if such a charge were subtracted from their economic outputs. Geoffrey Heal, a professor at Columbia who worked on the environmental aspects of the commission’s report, told me that including resource depletion in the national accounts — something the U.S. considered in the early 1990s and then abandoned for political reasons — could be implemented within a year if the world’s developed nations agreed to do it. After that, he suggests, a next step might be to subtract from G.D.P. the cost of the health problems — asthma and early deaths, for instance — caused by air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

But environmental accounting gets more difficult. “We can put monetary values on mineral stocks, fisheries and even forests, perhaps,” Heal says. “But it’s hard to put a monetary value on alteration of the climate system, loss of species and the consequences that might come from those.” On the other hand, Heal points out, you have to decide to measure something difficult before you can come up with a technique for measuring it. That was the case when the U.S. decided to create national accounts on economic production during the Great Depression. What the Stiglitz commission ultimately concluded was that it’s necessary to make a few sustainability dials on the dashboard simply raw data — registering things like a country’s carbon footprint or species extinctions — until we figure out how to give the effects approximate monetary values. Maybe in 10 years, Heal guesses, economists would be able to do that.

To Heal, making a real and rapid effort at calculating these costs and then posting the information is imperative. According to Heal, we have no sense of how much “natural capital” — our stocks of clean air and water and our various ecosystems — we need to conserve to maintain our economy and our quality of life. “If you push the world’s natural capital below a certain level,” Heal asks, “do you so radically alter the system that it has a long-term impact on human welfare?” He doesn’t know the answer. Yet, he adds, if we were to pass that point — and at present we have no dials to indicate whether we have — then we couldn’t compensate for our error through technological innovation or energy breakthroughs. Because by then it would be too late.