This is the kind of attitude that disturbs me about recent journalism and what appears to be the dominant opinion in the US.

Getting quantitative results is entirely useless if you don't want to think about the subjective qualitative reasons we thought some arbitrary metric might matter and how they might be limited. Having a high GDP or salary is about raising your quality of life and options. If you are actively prevented from living all sorts of other lives simply because they are not as profitable then you are poorer than the wild man.