Using GDP alone to judge countries is a huge value judgement. You're saying profit/productivity is the only thing that is worth measuring. This type hyper-capit

Using GDP alone to judge countries is a huge value judgement. You're saying profit/productivity is the only thing that is worth measuring. This type hyper-capitalistic framing is what is causing a lot of our current problems, specifically because things like "higher ed, access to information, discrimination, democracy" end up being ignored while everybody focuses on profit. > leaving (most of) value judgements to buyers A working, fair market is a law of nature; assuming that markets will fix everything is a just-world hypothesis[1]. Markets (and capitalism in general) work wonderfully as a way to efficiently allocate scarce goods, iff the buyer has access to good information and the opportunity to shop around. For things like "democracy" and "discrimination", these conditions usually do not exist or they require some significant additional cost. For example, moving to another city for a job can be costly, but is done by people all the time; moving to another country to "shop around" for democracy is difficult and often impossible. Capitalism - in a pure form that is judge only by GDP - is the wrong tool for this kind of goal. That said, I am not familiar with the specific index mentioned in the article (SPI), so I can't say anything good or bad about it. My point here is only that while GDP is certainly useful, other goals need to be included as well when we consider how to judge a country (or state, or city, or business, ...), or we end up getting what we asked for: a society that is very productive, at the expense of everything else, which usually ends badly. Instead, I suggest at least some type of balance, pragmatic approach where many topics are considered. Yes, it will include value judgements - just like the value judgemet to exclude those topics. Solving this kind off political mess is time consuming and annoying, but it's a maintenance cost of running a free society. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis