The Number the World Is Still Missing
GDP measured what we produce. HDI measured the foundations of a good life. The next measure has to capture something both leave out.
For most of the last century, the world measured a nation's success with a single number. Gross Domestic Product told us what an economy produced. It became the number that governments chased, that headlines reported, and that careers were built on defending. GDP is a powerful measure. It is also a narrow one. It counts what we make. It says nothing about the people who make it.
In 1990, the United Nations offered a correction. The Human Development Index kept income in the picture but added two things GDP had ignored. It added health, measured by how long people live. It added education, measured by how long they learn. The power of HDI was its simplicity. It was one number, standing beside GDP, making a quiet but radical claim. Development is about people, not just output.
HDI changed the conversation. Thirty-five years later, it is one of the most cited measures in the world. But HDI stops where the interesting question begins. It tells us whether people live long, learn, and earn. It does not tell us whether they are actually flourishing in their daily lives. It does not tell us whether they have the freedom and the drive to build something new. HDI measures the foundations of a good life. It does not measure the life itself.
So I have been sitting with a simple question. What comes after GDP and HDI?
My recent paper in the Journal of the International Council for Small Business took a first step. It introduced the Human-Centered Entrepreneurship Index, a new framework that brings two global measurement systems into a single view. The Gallup World Poll provides a reading of human flourishing. Are people thriving in how they see their lives? Do they hold secure, meaningful work? Are they engaged in what they do each day? The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor provides a reading of entrepreneurial dynamism. Do people innovate? Do they act on opportunity rather than only on necessity? Do they move first?
What the data showed was sobering and clarifying at once. Across forty-three economies, these two things rarely rise together. Most economies are strong on one and constrained on the other. A society can flourish without creating. It can create without flourishing. The comfortable assumption that more entrepreneurial activity automatically produces better human outcomes does not hold. The relationship has to be measured, not assumed.
That was the first step. What it revealed led to a larger question.
The progression is worth stating plainly. GDP asked what economies produce. HDI asked whether people have the foundations for a good life. The Human-Centered Entrepreneurship Index asked whether flourishing and entrepreneurship actually coexist. And the answer it gave, that they so rarely do, opens the next question. Can we capture both in a single headline measure of human-centered progress? One number, standing beside GDP and HDI, that holds together whether people are flourishing and whether they have the freedom, agency, and opportunity to build what comes next.
That is the question I am working on now. It is my new work with Ki-Chan Kim and the International Council for Small Business, the focus of our summer, and it will move through a sequence of events this year. We begin the conversation in Washington, DC. We carry it to Seoul. And it lands at the ICSB-OECD SME World Forum in Paris, where the beyond-GDP conversation lives at the level of policy, and where the next step in measuring human progress belongs.
I am not going to give away the answer here. The answer is still being sharpened, and it deserves to arrive complete rather than early. But the question is the important thing, and it is a question too few people are asking.
GDP measured what we produce. HDI measured whether people have the foundations for a good life. Now we need to ask whether people are flourishing, and whether they have the freedom, agency, and opportunity to build what comes next.
The human is not a constraint on the economy. The human is its purpose.
This year, with Ki-Chan Kim and ICSB, from Washington to Seoul to Paris, we begin to answer what comes next.