“Many of us think we would benefit from a multi-dimensional approach that captures things people care about,” Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize laureate who is also an emeritus professor at Stanford, told me. “Missing from growth are many things: health, distributional aspects of growth patterns, sense of security, freedoms of various kinds, leisure broadly defined, and more.”

Spence and others who agree with him aren’t saying that the economy should stop growing or even shrink (though there is a group of people who do believe that). What they are arguing is instead that it may be more healthy economically to accept a slower growth rate, but still a positive one, while prioritizing policies that address things like inequality and access to services. This idea is, admittedly, somewhat utopian, but giving it serious consideration can illuminate the shortcomings of the current growth-first approach.

It’s not just that maximizing growth doesn’t necessarily help people, but also that rapid growth can itself come at a cost, such as when the pursuit of growth is used to push through policies that are expected increase the GDP but may have negative consequences for millions. For example, companies often say they could grow more quickly and produce more with fewer regulations, but loosening those regulations might also lead to more pollution and accidents in factories. Other times, policies that might be necessary for the country’s long-term survival are avoided because of fears they might harm GDP. For example, conservatives criticize climate accords because they say that cutting greenhouse gases will reduce GDP by trillions of dollars. “The pursuit of growth can be quite dangerous,” Peter Victor, an economist and environmental scientist at York University in Toronto, told me.

Victor, Spence, and other economists have begun to think about what a society that doesn’t prioritize growth would look like. It’s possible, they say, for a nation to thrive even when growth is slow. A country could instead work on making its residents safe and content, and pursue policies that would achieve those goals. That may mean helping people to work fewer hours, or consume fewer resources, or spend more time with their families. Such a nation, they say, would be a better place for everyone.

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It was in the sluggish days of the Great Depression that the idea of measuring total output came about. After a group of experts were called into a congressional hearing and couldn’t answer basic questions about the state of the economy, the Commerce Department commissioned the economist Simon Kuznets to create a system that accounted for what was happening in the nation’s economy. The system he designed, which measured what people were producing in the economy, is now what we call the gross domestic product (GDP). It helped determine economic policy during World War II and in its aftermath, when policymakers were convinced that a country that kept making things and then buying more goods was one where all residents prospered. Yet Kuznets was skeptical about using his system to gauge the success of a country. “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income,” he wrote in 1934.