139
Zack Polanski wants to use wellbeing targets instead of GDP to measure growth. Is he right?
(www.bigissue.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
139 points (99.3% liked)
UK Politics
5455 readers
280 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
GDP in the UK is hugelly manipulated anyways.
I remember back in 2012 when in the aftermath of the 2008 there was a "double dip recession" (a bit of GDP fall, twice) according to Official figures. Well, a few years later a group of Economists calculated GDP from the very same source figures and the result was very different from the Official GDP, with Britain having actually had a Depression (a GDP fall of over 4%).
And don't get me started at the whole scam of using the CPI measure of inflation that excludes housing rather than the CPI-H that includes it in the calculation of the Real GDP (which is the official one) even though house prices go into calculating the Nominal GDP via a mechanism called "inputted rent". Housing inflation goes into the nominal GDP and then the Inflation figures which are used to strip out the inflation from it to make the Official GDP (using something called the GDP Deflator, were the higher the Inflation the lower the resulting GDP) don't include house price inflation.
Thanks to this scam, because housing inflation does go into the raw GDP and the inflation from housing which is never stripped out when making the official GDP figures from it, Britain's realestate bubble ends up at the other end of this process with politicians harping about how great they are at managing the country because GDP went up, the worse the realestate bubble the more they have made Britain "grow".
I suspect that most people in Britain (especially the younger generations) don't at all feel all that "growth", quite the contrary.