After the Great Depression, economist Simon Kuznets was asked by US officials to develop an accounting system that would reveal the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in the economy. He developed a metric called Gross National Product, which was a precursor to GDP. Kuznets was careful to point out that GDP is flawed, because it tallies up all economic activity, without asking if it is useful or destructive. Furthermore, it leaves out a lot of non-monetised economic activities such as growing your own food. He warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress, but should try to improve it to account for the social costs of growth. However, WW2 struck, and his concerns took a backseat to the Nazi threat. Governments needed to count all economic activities - even negative ones - because they wanted to identify every shred of money and productive capacity available for the war effort. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, world leaders sat down to decide on the rules that would govern the world economy. They enshrined GDP as the key indicator of economic progress, precisely what its inventor had warned against. GDP was a metric that came into its own in a time of global war, and it bears its wartime legacy today in the environmental destruction that is caused in its name. --- Source: [[Reference Notes/Less is More]]