written by Patricija Zizyte
“What does it mean for a country to be doing well?” It sounds like a straightforward question. But when we tried to answer it, GDP didn’t immediately come to mind. Instead, our first words were happiness, democracy, education, balance, social services and a good life.
That was a useful starting point for the first session of the oikos Squad for Beyond GDP – a new space for oikos members to explore economic paradigms beyond GDP and alternative ways of understanding prosperity, wellbeing and societal progress. The Squad is designed as a cross-chapter community of practice: a place to learn together, challenge assumptions and turn our shared thinking into something useful for the wider oikos community.
For the first session, we started with the subject at hand – GDP itself. Instead of throwing it away and starting from zero, we began by asking what it can (and cannot) tell us.
asking questions.
The first session was facilitated by Amaan (oikos Graz), who opened the session with an interactive exercise: a word cloud on what makes a country successful, followed by a game we called “Beat the GDP.”
The challenge was simple. We looked at five countries: Norway, Finland, the United States, Costa Rica and Vietnam, and tried to rank them first by GDP per capita and then by self-reported happiness.
The results were not exactly what our intuitions predicted. Finland, for example, ranked very highly in happiness despite being much lower in the GDP-per-capita ranking. Costa Rica was another striking case: its GDP per capita ranking was considerably lower, while its happiness ranking was among the highest. The United States showed the opposite tension, performing strongly on GDP while ranking considerably lower on happiness.
Suddenly, the question became less abstract. If two countries can look very different depending on whether we measure economic output or people’s happiness. Which one is the true indicator of a country’s success? And perhaps more importantly: why should we have to choose only one?
the complication of happiness.
The discussion quickly moved beyond GDP rankings. Diogo (oikos Lisbon) argued that happiness could be understood as the ultimate goal of a country: if people are happy, perhaps the country is doing well. But happiness itself is subjective. What makes one person happy, may not make another person happy.
That led us towards another idea: democracy. If people have the ability to participate in decisions about the kind of society they want to live in, then measuring wellbeing becomes more than simply asking people whether they are happy. It also becomes a question of whether they have agency.
Education emerged as another essential piece. Good education can support democracy by helping people develop the ability to think critically, understand problems and participate meaningfully in society. But our conversation also raised a more uncomfortable question: are our education systems actually preparing people for the world they are entering? As we discussed it, the issue wasn’t simply access to education. It was quality and relevance. It’s whether education helps people develop the ability to think creatively, critically and independently, rather than simply teaching them how to function within existing systems.
The Costa Rica discussion took us somewhere else too: perhaps we make wellbeing more complicated than it needs to be. Amaan (oikos Graz) brought up the idea of “sunshine countries” – places such as Costa Rica and countries in the Caribbean where strong community ties may contribute to high levels of reported happiness. We started talking about what people actually need to live a good life. And the answer sounded surprisingly simple: food, shelter, water, sleep, security and human connection.
We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to design new products, services and economic mechanisms to make people happier. But perhaps wellbeing is not always a problem waiting for a more sophisticated solution. Perhaps, before optimising economies for ever more consumption and growth, we should make sure that people can actually meet their basic needs and live connected, secure lives.
Costa Rica’s GDP per capita doesn’t tell us whether people have enough to live well. That is precisely the point: a number measuring economic output is not the same thing as a measure of a good life.
is balance an answer?
Another word that stayed with us was balance. How would a balanced country look like? Not a country that maximises one metric. A country with economic prosperity, but also functioning ecosystems. With production and consumption, but also human welfare. With industry/technology, but also nature. With economic activity, but also community. The idea was less about finding the one perfect indicator and more about recognising that wellbeing emerges from the relationship between different parts of society.
This feels particularly important when we talk about economic transformation. Many movements understandably focus on one dimension of change: climate, inequality, education, health, democracy or economic justice. But the systems we are trying to transform don’t operate in neat categories. That is why oikos is calling for systems change: not to dismiss the importance of individual movements, but to challenge the segregation between them and recognise how deeply their struggles are connected.
A country’s prosperity is also shaped by its institutions, its education system, its public services, its environment, its cities and the relationships between people.** The question isn’t which metric should replace GDP – it is why we ever expected one number to tell the whole story.**
invisible economy.
Our conversation then became even messier, in a good way. We started talking about the informal economy. GDP depends on what gets measured and recorded. Yet people’s economic lives don’t necessarily fit neatly inside formal economic statistics. We discussed examples from Portugal, Southeast Asia and India where parts of economic activity may happen outside formal taxation or reporting systems.
This raised an interesting tension. If someone has a relatively low reported income but owns assets, participates in informal exchanges and has access to resources that aren’t fully reflected in their declared income, what does their GDP-per-capita figure actually tell us about their life? And there is an even bigger question underneath it: What kinds of value disappear when they aren’t monetised?
Education that happens outside markets. Care work. Community support. Regenerative practices. Activities that improve people’s lives without generating a financial transaction. Yet, at the same time, GDP can count activities that are generated by problems as economic activity. A hospital treating illness creates economic output. Rebuilding after destruction creates economic output. Paying for services generated by social problems can increase GDP. The number tells us that economic activity happened. It doesn’t necessarily tell us whether life got better.
The group also noticed that these numbers don’t exist in a vacuum. Political systems, culture and the way societies organise land, prices, businesses and public services all shape the conditions behind both GDP and people’s experience of life. Vietnam, for example, offered an interesting reminder that the same economic indicator can sit within very different sociopolitical contexts.
good economy in a good place.
One of the most tangible parts of the conversation was about cities. Diogo (oikos Lisbon) pointed out how public policy and urban planning can dramatically shape people’s quality of life. Public transport, green spaces, infrastructure and the design of neighbourhoods can determine how people experience everyday life – regardless of the country’s GDP.
We compared examples of cities that have invested heavily in planning and public infrastructure with places where wealth does not necessarily translate into good urban environments. This brought another dimension into the conversation:
Economic wellbeing isn’t only about how much money exists. It is also about what we do with it.
Two places can have similar levels of wealth and produce very different experiences for their residents. That means that the institutions and physical environments surrounding an economy matter: a bus network, a park, a school, a neighbourhood where people can meet. And none of these things can be adequately understood by looking at GDP alone.
think globally, act locally.
The conversation eventually moved from measuring countries to something much harder: how do we actually act in a system this interconnected?
I shared a story from my time in the Philippines. While staying on the island of Siquijor, one evening I felt the wind like someone opened up the freezer. I then discovered that it had travelled all the way from Siberia. It was a small, slightly ridiculous reminder of something much bigger: natural systems don’t respect the boundaries we draw around them (and they can travel long distances).
The same applies to economies. Amaan (oikos Graz) introduced the idea of urban land teleconnections: the way consumption and decisions in one city can affect ecosystems and communities somewhere else. The coffee we drink in Europe may depend on land in Brazil. The bananas we buy may come from Costa Rica. What looks like a local economic choice can therefore have consequences across the world.
This creates an uncomfortable tension. We need to think globally, because the systems we are part of are deeply interconnected. But trying to act on everything at the global level can quickly become paralysing. The scale is simply too big. The challenge is to find the smallest meaningful thing we can change – while understanding that it is connected to something much bigger.
Act locally, but don’t think locally.
That distinction feels particularly relevant for oikos. Systems change doesn’t mean trying to solve “the global economy” in one heroic move. It means understanding the connections between our actions, the systems around us and the consequences they create elsewhere – and then finding where we can actually intervene.
the bigger picture.
By the end of the session, GDP was starting to look less like the problem and more like one very narrow lens through which we look at a much bigger system.
The deeper issue is that the things we choose to measure influence what we choose to prioritise. If economic success is primarily understood through growth in GDP, then growth becomes something worth pursuing almost by definition.
But what if the goal is different?
What if the goal is to create societies where people have their basic needs met, can participate in decisions that affect them, have access to meaningful education and social services, live in healthy environments and have strong communities – while staying within ecological limits?
Then we need to change the questions. And, inevitably, find different measures.
Towards the end of the session, Amaan (oikos Graz) introduced an OECD tool for comparing quality of life across countries. It was an interesting moment precisely because the tool comes from an organisation focused on economic development, yet looks at dimensions of life beyond purely economic indicators. The Better Life Index also entered our conversation as one possible alternative lens.
so… what comes next?
The first session didn’t give us a new definition of prosperity. Good, that wasn’t really the point. The purpose of the Squad is to build a shared understanding through continuous learning and critical dialogue, and to turn that learning into collective outputs over time.
Our next session will take us into Doughnut Economics, beginning with the basic ideas and building from there. We’re also interested in going deeper into the Sustainable Development Goals (particularly SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth) and exploring what happens when the frameworks designed to guide sustainable development meet the realities of economic transformation. The group is planning a special guest session with someone involved in the development of the SDGs, where we can bring together our questions and challenge some of the assumptions behind the current framework.
And there are questions already waiting for us:
- What should an economy actually be optimising for?
- Can we measure prosperity without reducing it to money?
- What happens when wellbeing, ecological health and economic activity are considered together?
- And if GDP is no longer enough, what comes next?
We don’t have the answers yet. But that’s exactly why the Squad exists.
