In fact, the GDP offers pretty much everything a journalist could want: hard figures, issued at regular intervals, and the chance to quote experts.

once there’s enough food on the table, a roof that doesn’t leak, and clean running water to drink, economic growth is no longer a guarantor of welfare.

“Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”

Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.

the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.

Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around–creating next to nothing of tangible value–that net the best salaries.

These pilots give us the opportunity to talk differently, think differently, describe the problem differently…” And that’s how all progress begins.

Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.

the welfare state has increasingly shifted its focus from the causes of our discontent to the symptoms.