Guest “Let’s end poverty by redefining prosperity!” by David Middleton
Anything proposed by UN Secretary General Guterres and endorsed by the Nature editorial board should be ignored with extreme prejudice!
- EDITORIAL
- 01 October 2025
End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity
The obsession with economic output as a measure of human development puts sustainability on the back burner. Researchers can now help to devise better indicators.
Last week’s United Nations General Assembly, held in New York City, generated no shortage of headlines. But one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’.
[…]
Guterres’ project is called Beyond GDP because of the necessity of getting past the world’s go-to indicator of economic progress: gross domestic product (GDP).
[…]
The 14-member panel, co-chaired by economists Kaushik Basu at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Nora Lustig at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, is deliberating on a broad set of indicators, each of which should have equal weight to GDP. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking — and exceptionally complex.
Exactly how complex is set out in a paper in Nature this week1. Economists Andrew Fanning and Kate Raworth of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab in Oxford, UK, describe a set of 35 social and ecological indicators that attempts to provide some answers to the questions being examined by the panel. They report 13 ecological indicators that draw on the Planetary Boundaries framework, developed by environmental scientists.
[…]
This work extends Raworth’s original idea of ‘a safe and just space for humanity’…
[…]
The latest study and the UN initiative are an opportunity for researchers across economics to engage with each other to achieve the best possible outcome for people and the planet. As Raworth wrote in Doughnut Economics: “We have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive; what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.”
Nature 646, 7 (2025)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03144-y
Obviously if you replace GDP with “35 social and ecological indicators” the cost of the Quixotic fight against climate change would become irrelevant.
Here’s part of the very abstract abstract of their paper:
- Published: 01 October 2025
Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance
Nature volume 646, pages47–56 (2025)Cite this article
- 202 Altmetric
- Metricsdetails
Abstract
The doughnut-shaped framework of social and planetary boundaries (the ‘Doughnut’) provides a concise visual assessment of progress towards the goal of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet1,2,3. Here we present a renewed Doughnut framework with a revised set of 35 indicators that monitor trends in social deprivation and ecological overshoot over the 2000–2022 period. Although global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled, our median results show a modest achievement in reducing human deprivation that would have to accelerate fivefold to meet the needs of all people by 2030. Meanwhile, the increase in ecological overshoot would have to stop immediately and accelerate nearly two times faster towards planetary boundaries to safeguard Earth-system stability by 2050.
[…]
Translation: “Although global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled,” we don’t feel good about it and want GDP replaced with something that makes us feel better.
Here’s the “Doughnut of Prosperity”…
The inner ring of the doughnut is their arbitrary estimate a “social foundation.” The wedges inside the inner ring are their arbitrary shortfalls below that foundation. The outer ring of the doughnut is their arbitrary estimate of a planetary “ecological ceiling”… a “pre-industrial Holocene baseline.” The wedges are there arbitrary estimates of how much capitalism has caused overshoots above the “pre-industrial Holocene baseline.”
Obviously, the cost of fixing climate change, biodiversity breakdown, land conversion, freshwater disruption, nutrient pollution (WTF?), chemical pollution and shoring up the “social foundation” will be irrelevant if we simply start measuring prosperity with their “Doughnut of Prosperity” rather than good old US dollars… Brings a whole new meaning the the phrase “dollars to doughnuts.” Or maybe not a new meaning. Doughnuts are considered to be worthless in this rhetorical device… Despite the fact that doughnuts often cost more than $1 each.
Anyway, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that George Orwell would have this to say about the “Doughnut of Prosperity.”
Reference
Fanning, A.L., Raworth, K. Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance. Nature 646, 47–56 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09385-1
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It has a market of exactly two.
Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.
He who controls X gives a platform.
Or creates a cesspool.
Free speech isn’t always tidy
Guterres has probably been the most [obnoxious] disastrous general secretary of the UN.
His chief weapon is ridiculous hyperbole.
He, Starmer, Carney, Albanese etc are the epitome of ideological nonsense over plain old common sense.
Did he achieve peace in Ukraine? Anywhere? Dissolve the UN.
He can be effectively used for scale.
How long has he been standing there?
About 158 years.
And about half of The Battery tide gauge sea level rise over 158 years shown in the diagram is due to The Battery gauge sinking at about half the rate of the relative rise. PSMSL.org (Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, a UK organization) includes elevation change data for tide gauges where such data is collected (hundreds of them). NOAA, curiously, does not report it for any of the tide gauges in their data set. I wonder why.
“Our policies produce results that are horrific by the usual measures, so we will just change the scoring system”?
New and improved….
Orwell was right. Intellectuals are OK except those who think their ideas should be imposed on others, rather than offered as gifts. Any “theory” as complex as this is unworkable except by bureaucrats given the cover of official force (i.e., imposed by government, which is nothing more than the use of force that is effectively unopposed by the citizenry). And, when bureaucrat judgment is substituted for the free choices of tens of millions of people everyday….nothing good can happen.
But think of the millions of well paying union green jobs it creates! /s
LOL.
Like cleaning solar panels — very high tech !
All I know is never eat a green donut
This is no “doughnut” – it’s more of a “navel” concept
If you spend all your time in the faculty lounge bubble (possibly with access to recreational drugs) staring at your intellectual navel, then this sort of mindless, feelings-centered drivel is quite likely to emerge.
I already feel dumber just knowing about this non-nutritive doughnut
I need a medium-rare steak and a mellow Zinfandel to recover
I should have broken out the Billy Madison clip for this one.
I remember when new math was proposed a few years back.
1 + 1 = 2 … How do you FEEL about that?
When people want to junk the traditional method of measuring progress or decline, you have to ask is it because they can not come to terms with the brutal truth the traditional measure provides?
As for Gutter resident sorry I mean Guterres the incompetent head of the incompetent UN the less we hear from him the better.
Remember this is the clown who claimed the sea off Miami was literally boiling because he does not understand 100deg F is not the same as 100deg C..
When people want to junk the traditional method of measuring progress or decline, you have to ask is it because they can not come to terms with the brutal truth the traditional measure provides?
Or perhaps they would prefer to distort or even hide it.
Consumer Price Index (CPI) which is projected, by taking the average price of the economic output purchased by the consumers as a base, while Retail Price Index or RPI measures the variations in prices of retail economic output. – CPI v RPI
RPI includes things like mortgages etc, CPI does not. Easy to see why CPI is preferred..
I received a ton of pushback when I pointed out that the Hurricane damages were adjusted by using CPI. The pushback claimed CPI was the same as inflation.
The standard method of measuring hurricane damages over time is by expressing the damages as a percentage of gdp. Using inflation figures is pointless because this makes no allowance for the increase in population and property in the affected areas.
correct
There is a word for the fat little Portuguese sausage- execrable.
Doughnuts? Friday funny: The London Banana (Republic?)
The divisive London banana map explained, do you live in it?
[Spoiler, apparently in Wandsworth I do…]
“This is the London Banana. As long as you stay within the Banana, you’ll have a great time in London.”
“Almost everything outside the Banana is horrible these days; best avoid. Not clear why, or when this happened.”
https://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/25459969.divisive-london-banana-map-explained-live/
If one could provide evidence for why and when, would the ‘news’ media print it and allow discussion? There are topics and words in the US ‘news’ media that are ‘verboten.’ Were that not the case, many of the political left memes and platforms could collapse for lack of support.
would the ‘news’ media print it
No chance.
Nutrient pollution is used to refer to the excess of nitrogen and phosphorus in water bodies such as streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and marine coastal areas. The scientific term is eutrophication.
Ahh… synthetic fertilizer. We can fix that by killing about 4 billion people.
“Trends in human population and nitrogen use throughout the twentieth century. Of the total world population (solid line), an estimate is made of the number of people that could be sustained without reactive nitrogen from the Haber–Bosch process (long dashed line), also expressed as a percentage of the global population (short dashed line). The recorded increase in average fertilizer use per hectare of agricultural land (blue symbols) and the increase in per capita meat production (green symbols) is also shown.” Erisman et al., 2008
The climatariat modelers claim that fossil fuel emissions are killing 8 million people per year… While real world data demonstrate that 4 billion people would quickly starve to death without fossil fuels and the other 4 billion people would be deprived of damn near everything required for life in the modern world.
The Population Bomb requires reduction to ~ 0.5B people.
Trans people serve a purpose after all.
Unfortunately, the primary purpose is to make room for illegal aliens.
Then we should absolutely encourage them to become trans.
Nutrient pollution is hypertrophy or hypereutrophication. Eutrophication is production or used to be.Prefixes often don’t get used properly.
One of the wedges is “Biodiversity Breakdown.” Bio added to diversity according of my dictionary is dated 1986 and not recognized in ecology, later books not checked. Biodiversity went from a lab exercise to a degree. It’s part of a type of bigotry recognized by our department’s janitor about that time.
I sometimes have coffee with two in their high nineties. One brought up the geriatric privilege of complaint that should be recognized. I responded that we have an exceptional amount of material to work with.
Correct! The prefixes indicate the level of nutrients in the system. Hyper and oligo for a lot and too little respectively. They are not inherently bad or good respectively. It all depends on the system in question and how high or low the nutrients go. Particularly because there is no such thing as an ideal mean N:P ratio. Much like there is no ideal universal mean temperature.
Apparently you’ve seen these among others? Or done some of this research?
Duarte, C. M. 1995. Submerged aquatic vegetation in relation to different nutrient regimes. Ophelia, 41(1): 87-112.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00785236.1995.10422039
Duarte, C.M., et al. 2009. Return to Neverland: Shifting baselines affect eutrophication restoration targets. Estuaries Coasts 32(1):29–36.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-008-9111-2 “Like Peter Pan”
Everyone needs to reduce their standard of living, except those that are demanding that everyone reduce their standards.
These people always improve their standard of living. Never the other way. The Pigs have spoken.
Reading the passages quoted, I believe the writers learned their trade by listening to Kamala “word salad” Harris.
Perhaps they are her speech writers.
Excuse me Kamala, but could you explain to me what it is about passing a baby back and forth that gets you all emotional? You were drinking again, weren’t you.
Kamala Harris: The Magic of Community & Baby Passing??? #shorts
Not the first nor the last piece in ‘Nature’ waffling pseudo-scientific nonsense accompanied by fashionable simplistic soundbites.
The world is not the social experiment they are trying to make it. Those that endeavor to work hard and succeed will. Those that expect everything to be handed to them equally by someone else will fail.
Sooo … They are proposing replacing, “Let them eat cake!” with “Let them eat donuts!”?
“Anything proposed by UN Secretary General Guterres and endorsed by the Nature editorial board should be ignored with extreme prejudice!”
But when Guterres provides facts we should all listen as when he warned during a presser in July 2023:
Words of wisdom that should be on the cover of future IPCC resports.
Per Wikipedia:
‘Kaushik Basu (born 9 January 1952) is an Indian economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009 to 2012. He is the C. Marks [K. Marx?] Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University.’
I didn’t realize there was a such a shortage of Ivy League Nitwits that we would need to import Leftists from the ‘developing world’.
Btw, I don’t have any problem with updating GDP as an economic indicator as long as any successor measure of ‘national income’ excludes twice (*) the level of all government spending.
*-Twice the level because, not only is government spending unproductive, it is also demonstrably harmful.
This is just part of the “You will own nothing and be happy” nonsense. If you don’t believe them, they will just give you this doughnut (you won’t be able to afford a real doughnut) to prove you are prosperous. Therefore you must be happy.
Nor will you be able to afford a cup of real coffee to go with the fake doughnut.
Was there any economic, environmental or whatnot data of any kind used to produce this donut? None is mentioned so it seems not. It is just some foolish speculations of overeducated and overpaid academics that has produced something that is essentially unintelligible.
The real question is, what is the carbohydrate footprint of that doughnut?
/humor
The process to make this new marker for human wellbeing must be complex & arcane, otherwise everyone will see through their “preordained result evidence making”.
The majority of the public is not buying the Alarmist’s “climate crisis” based on the science, so they are trying to switch to moral grounds. Bingo! – no science necessary [they didn’t understand it anyway] and now anyone who disagrees is just evil thus can be ignored, canceled etc.
So I want a list of nations that come closest to meeting the new standards so we know what we can look forward to.
It would make more sense to replace GDP with just the private sector part of it. A major problem with GDP is that governments can increase it by spending money they don’t have.
Any time I hear Guterres open his mouth to advance some new theory or proposal, I know I’m guaranteed to hear a proclamation that’s at best laughable and more likely totally asinine. This one’s a typical example.
Homer Simpson approves.
In my younger and thus much more naive days I once believed the UN MIGHT be a ‘force of good’ for society. To the extent that it brought countries together to discuss their disputes, even if it was just talk, at least it was better than not talking at all….
I gave up that fantasy view of the UN years ago and now realize it has to be entirely, utterly disbanded like the League of Nations before it. It’s long outlived whatever use it may have had. Its funding should be entirely pulled, its staffed by a bunch of useless bureaucrats that are a net negative to the world GDP…the only measure of ‘worth’ that matters…
Doughnut Economics, by devised doughnuts.