Why GDP Is a Terrible Metric for Success and Wealth IDEAS Pilling is an associate editor at the Financial Times and the author of The Growth Delusion Shortly before British voters took what most economists regarded as the suicidal decision to leave the E.U., Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at King’s College London, was in the northern city of Newcastle. A long way from prosperous London, Menon gave a talk in which he echoed the standard economists’ view that a vote for Brexit would damage Britain’s gross domestic product. A woman in the audience heckled back, “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.” Just as in America, in Britain too the story told by official statistics does not always match people’s lived experience. That is especially true in places like Newcastle, a former shipbuilding city, which lost out to competition from Asia in the 1970s and has seen living standards stagnate ever since. As in parts of the U.S. where opportunities for non–college graduate
