The observation that “what ismeasured counts” underpins much of the dissatisfaction with national accounts and gross domestic product.

Attempts to maximise the growth rate of GDP – which measures the value of an economy’s total output – can arguably encourage traffic congestion through the higher production and sale of petrol. It can foster crime as the work of the police, the insurance industry and fixing physical damage counts as output in GDP. It can help generate inequality since only the total matters, not its distribution across the population.

Dissatisfaction with national income measures is also nothing new. In the 1960s Robert Kennedy criticised those who judged the US by its GDP, arguing that it counted pollution, cigarette advertising, special locks in jails, napalm and nuclear warheads among other evils – but not the beauty of poetry, wit, the strength of marriage, courage, wisdom, learning or compassion. “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile,” he said. “It can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”