We need to rate the performance of our economy not by how much we produce, but by how little.
Another problem is drugs. It's possible to manipulate people's happiness rather explicitly with that.
Edit: these are out there examples, but here's a more realistic one: borrow money from future generations. Set up a system that will eventually fail, but provide a lot of benefits/happiness in the present. When the long-term consequences arrive politics have already changed.
On your last point, Wales legislated for wellbeing as a guiding principle in the Well-being for Future Generations Act which incorporates that concern.
My other issues with wellbeing are ...
1. it's shaped by expectations. There are well known cases of people who have horrific life changing accidents yet after adapting to their new lifestyle are just as happy as before. We can also imagine very well off people being picky because the champagne and caviar are not up to standard.
2. we know how to measure it at individual level but don't have enough data on how we as a society think we should trade off between average levels of wellbeing and inequality of the same.
More on all this on my link in sibling comment. I'm interested to hear feedback on all the above as we're working on the next stage of this project now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD_Better_Life_Index
It's an alternative to macro-economic indicators such as GDP that measures quality of life across 11 dimensions (housing, education, work-life balance, health, environment, community,...).
The BLI is a set of metrics created in line with concepts such as Gross National Well-Being.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Well-being
A big criticism to this methodology is that it's hard to quantify a measure of quality because you can always keep on asking "What constitutes quality?" and "Did I accurately capture quality as the sum of it's constituent parameters I measure through quantification?" So, the hard part isn't the measuring itself, but finding common agreement on what gets measured, and whether those metrics match within a conceptual framework that underpins a shared understanding on how society functions.
At face value, GDP doesn't suffer from this problem of perception, because the measure of economic output is represented through an already widely agreed upon representation of economic reality that lends itself to quantification: currency.
However, GDP isn't free from the same criticism because you can always de-construct the relationship between currency and the value it represents. For instance, the U.S. ranks the top of nations measured by GDP, but when you take the Gini coefficient - which measures wealth inequality per capita - the U.S. ranks rather poorly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Framing the discussion as a question of "What am I measuring?" is that this is an alternate take on what's in essence Goodhart's Law. I think Goodhart's Law is basically a function of a form of fallacious thinking which is innate to human psychology: it's the preconception that "value" is something that exists outside of human experience.
For instance, it's the idea of gold or money being "valuable" in it's own right, regardless of how humans perceive it. Of course, it's the other way around. Value is an umbrella concept that signifies particular meaning or importance which is tied uniquely to the human experience. Value is a fluid concept with a myriad of understandings, definitions and feelings which get entirely steered by context and circumstances. Gold and money only are worth something when humans believe that it is worth something: by attributing value, through externalization.
And so, that's where you arrive at an inescapable conclusion: In order to define value, you have to dismiss the notion that anything - goods and services - have a fixed innate value, and that economic value is actually an ever-evolving fluid aggregate function based on a shared understanding and driven by compromise. So, why is this very hard to do? Because externalizing value to goods and services introduces a measure of certainty which human minds tend to crave. Whereas the idea that value is fluid introduces uncertainty, which is something our risk-averse thinking has a rather hard time coping with.
To go back to Goodhart's Law and your comment, overproduction isn't entirely preventable. It usually signifies a sort of irrational way of attributing value that isn't based on any shared understanding of value. In the case of the soviet nail factory, or the Great Leap Forward metal furnaces: those didn't serve any general purpose to those who produced or consumed them, but rather as markers for external validation of preconceptions held by the incumbent elites at the time.
In your statement, the "we" and the "everyone" are what really matter. Unless you define who these groups are, you risk falling into the same trap Goodhart's Law tries to point out.
The Covid crisis has shown how few people are actually needed in most western nations and how much activity is largely fluff.
If we were rational we’d be discussing that rather than trying to restore the status quo ante - which is nothing more that chasing a figure.