Shoes and the GDP

If you want to bash GDP with an alternative, I prefer the fetching simplicity of Mr. Masood’s “shoe” index. Ministries in poor states would simply report on how many of their citizens went barefoot, how many trod in soles made from recycled automobile tires and how many wore commercial shoes.

--Roger Lowenstein, reviewing Ehsan Masood's The Great Invention: The Story of GNP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World, Wall Street Journal