At the beginning of this year, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum announced an initiative to look “Beyond GDP”, the now-ubiquitous measure of economic progress that, in the words of Robert Kennedy back in 1968, “measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile”. Seven months later, with virtually every economy reporting a pandemic-induced trauma that has stalled progress and been most costly in GDP terms, the initiative looks prescient. What better time to audit how accurately gross domestic product measures our progress – or setbacks – and how we can measure our well-being more meaningfully as we emerge from the worst economic setback in perhaps a century. And surely there is no better time for Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to think long and hard, as she prepares for her October policy address, about how best to define and measure recovery from the most tumultuous year of upheaval in our lifetimes. She won’t be able to sell us on economic growth, with Hong Kong’s economic contraction perhaps reaching double digits for the year, so why not examine instead those issues the community most values and devote the policy address to how she can deliver on these. Remember her key promise in last year’s address? “I hereby set a clear objective that every Hong Kong citizen and his family will no longer have to be troubled by or preoccupied with the housing problem, and that they will be able to have their own home in Hong Kong, a city in which we all have a share.” I am sure she will argue that a year of extraordinary and unprecedented challenges have prevented her from delivering any progress towards this objective, but she should be ashamed nevertheless of the absolute absence of progress. In this most difficult of times, she needs to focus harder than ever on those things that make life worthwhile for Hong Kong people. Not least, she must look beyond GDP. As Hong Kong economy slides, all the more reason to tackle housing crisis Simon Kuznets , who was asked in the 1930s to build the GDP measure as a way of tracing the US’ economic recovery from the Great Depression, warned that it only measured market activity, good or bad – what Kennedy later called “the mere accumulation of material things” – and should not be mistaken for a metric of social or even economic well-being. Since then, numerous leading economists have tried – so far largely in vain – to dissuade governments from using GDP as exactly this – a metric of social and economic well-being. They have warned that GDP indiscriminately includes crime, prostitution and defence spending. The millions spent to repair damaged MTR stations during last year’s riots count towards GDP, but not the lost schooling during this year’s pandemic. Eating at home, as we have been doing during the pandemic, contributes nothing to GDP, but eating out does. Leisure, good health and a trustworthy administration also go unreflected. No one has been more prominent in the battle to get us to measure what matters than Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. He was one of the authors commissioned by French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 to study the GDP measure, and they produced a report titled Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up . In Scientific American magazine this month, Stiglitz reminds us of the imperative to escape GDP thinking. The coronavirus pandemic, he argues, is an important moment to re-examine our economic and social priorities. “GDP should be dethroned,” he writes. “In its place, each nation should select a ‘dashboard’ – a limited set of metrics that would help steer it toward the future its citizens desired.” Such a dashboard could include metrics for values such as health, sustainability, education, leisure, environment, equality, governance, political voice, social connectedness, physical and economic security, as well as indicators of harms the public sought to diminish. If GDP doesn’t add up, how is the world to measure true progress? Although Carrie Lam is faced with the huge, daunting challenge of addressing this year’s pandemic-induced damage, she needs to remember that the civil strife of 2019 cuts to the heart of a fundamental divide that jeopardises the future of Hong Kong. To lay the foundations for rebuilding the city, restoration of GDP growth is beside the point. She must instead measure – and develop policies for – those concerns that truly matter to Hongkongers. For this, a valuable starting point is perhaps the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Better Life Index, a dashboard of 11 issues that seem to sit at the heart of community well-being worldwide: housing, stable income, secure employment, a sense of community, sound education, an attractive environment, extensive civic engagement, good health, life satisfaction, personal safety and work-life balance. Since the Asian financial crisis of 1998, Hongkongers have, by these measures, taken a terrible beating. Inequality is deep. Incomes have stagnated. Employment has, for many, become deeply insecure. Confidence in the education system has been badly undermined. The sense of personal safety has been undermined. Trust in government has been hammered. Perceived freedoms have been dramatically eroded. But of course, worst of all, the hopes of so many families for homes of their own have been dashed – and it is perhaps in this area that Lam absolutely must make urgent process. She has a clear road map drawn by the Task Force on Land Supply, headed by Stanley Wong Yuen-fai, but she has procrastinated for far too long. Her promise in last year’s policy address was clear: families “will no longer have to be troubled by or preoccupied with the housing problem”. A year later, this promise of accessible housing is glaringly unfulfilled. I can forgive her a poor GDP performance, but when it comes to measuring what matters, there may be no more important measure of her credibility than her commitment to the housing issue. David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view