The biggest beef I have with GDP is that it does not capture how we run down natural capital to create financial capital. Pollute our seas, cut down our forests

The biggest beef I have with GDP is that it does not capture how we run down natural capital to create financial capital. Pollute our seas, cut down our forests, poison our air: this is all a capital loss, but reflected as a financial gain in GDP statistics, even though finance is a human abstraction and our natural capital is real. In Swahili, the word for nauture is maliasili, also translated as ‘genuine wealth’. We have something to learn from that.