Wouldn't it be great if we decided who should run everything based on their IQ score? IQ is an intelligence measure right? Therefore the higher the IQ the smarter the person and the better they would be at running a company/the country/the world.

Even better, why don't we focus our society on maximising every individual's IQ scores? That way we get the smartest and therefore best people who can solve every problem and create the perfect utopia.

What's that you say? IQ tests measure one narrow cognitive skill reasonably well, but tell you nothing about creativity, empathy, wisdom, or character? Hmm interesting.

GDP measures transaction volume reasonably well, but tells us nothing about wellbeing, sustainability, or whether things are actually getting better. And yet we use it exactly like the absurd example above. It is treated as the be all and end all of any economic discussion. The economy must grow. GDP must increase. Big number good, small number bad. This is patently ridiculous. Even Simon Kuznets, who invented GDP in the 1930s, warned that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income." And yet decades later we are still doing just that.

In fact GDP is even worse than the IQ analogy - it counts genuinely harmful things as economic success:

• Oil spills create cleanup contracts, legal fees, replacement goods - all counted as growth. 
• Car crashes generate hospital treatment, vehicle repairs, insurance claims - a GDP bonanza. 
• Demolishing functional social housing to build luxury flats destroys communities but boosts the numbers. 
• Treating preventable obesity and pollution-caused disease costs billions and grows GDP while wrecking lives.

On the flip side there are plenty of things that lower GDP but are obviously good:

• Repairing your clothes instead of buying new ones - fewer transactions, lower GDP. 
• Cycling to work instead of driving - no fuel sales, no car maintenance, GDP falls. 
• Growing your own vegetables, cooking from scratch - reduces shop purchases, bad for growth. 
• Working a four-day week with better work-life balance - less production, economic "decline."

A forest standing is worth nothing. A forest cut down and sold is economic growth.

So next time a politician tells you we need growth, or the economy is in trouble because GDP is falling, ask them: growth in what? More car crashes? More demolished housing? More preventable disease?

Because if the only way to measure success is a number that goes up when bad things happen and down when good things happen, maybe we're measuring the wrong thing entirely.