UKH

It definitely is.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49798357

But it does sound like basically removing 20% of the economy, which doesn't strike me as a particularly great idea.

It would be absolutely fine if we all had really well paid jobs and we were just spaffing 20% of our income on spurious consumerist shite - which of course many of us are. But by no means all of us! I'd be well up for reducing demand for consumer goods, and basically shrinking the economy, but only if the economy distributed the available wealth so that we were all quite comfortable in terms of paying for our housing, food, heating etc, and having rewarding leisure time. But that's just not the case.

In a society that runs on a system that generates grotesque inequality, how the hell would this work? Those at the top could obviously work fewer hours, earn less and buy less stuff, but that's going to reduce GDP and tax revenues. But for everyone else, where's the money going to come from for employers to pay people more for less work? How are public services going to be funded with less coming in?

Don't get me wrong, working a four day week is still a bit too much, but it's  a marked improvement on 5. Unfortunately, that's not quite enough to convince me it's a sensible economic policy. The system - which we are tied into globally - is built upon the whole foundation of worky-worky/spendy-spendy/growthy-growthy. If you start knocking down the worky-worky bit, surely it kind of falls over, as we become less competitive, get poorer, can't afford our public services, get more unhealthy, more divided and more miserable...it really doesn't have the feel of good idea to me!

Can anyone explain why I'm wrong?

Isn't it going to fall over eventually anyway, when we're so busy spendy-spendying and the world runs out of resources. Spendy-spendy needs more things to buy all the time.

Eventually, we run out of things to makey-makey things with.

Can't remember where I saw it, but recently, someone said that measuring a society's success in terms of things like GDP is becoming a thing of the past.
The way the world is changing, and how radically it may have to change in the forth coming decades, we need new measures to judge success.

The days of how many zeros you've got on your bank account bottom line may well be coming to an end.

Well yes, you're right, but that's looking a lot further ahead than 10 years. What I'm saying is that if you could get a really good distribution of resources (that is, no poverty), then you're in a position to start dismantling the worky-worky/spendy-spendy model, because all that worky-worky is just being "spaffed up the wall" on pointless crap. But when people are doing an awful lot of worky-worky just to pay their basic bills, and there isn't enough in the treasury to pay for people's healthcare and pensions and whatnot, reducing the amount of worky-worky is very unhelpful in the short term.

The fact that we're all going to die doesn't stop us from going to the shop to get groceries, or from wiping one's arse after going for a shit. You still need to deal with practical short-term needs even if the long-term outlook is one of annihilation and despair.

Isn't Labour's budget plan also relying on growth to eventually cover the costs of all their initial borrowing? 

4 days or 30hrs have already been trialled in sweden and Finland, they went back to full time. It didn't work. 

Lots of people here work 80 or 90% hours after having a family, but this is reflected in their pay, as productivity obviously drops proportionally too. Most return to fulltime when the kids are 7 and start proper school 

I absolutely agree. But my response to krikey above applies. That's all very well, but what do you do if you're working all the hours you can to pay the bills? Where's the money to allow you to work 32h instead going to come from? How are we going to pay for the NHS and pensions if everyone is doing less and paying less tax, yet the bastards refuse to stop getting older? 

It's the practical short terms problems that worry me, not the completely valid but rather abstract idea that worky-worky/spendy-spendy is an unsustainable economic model. 

More realistically that's only an hour less a day for me.  UK workers might work 42 hours a week but productivity says a lot of that time is spinning wheels, 

Aren't you an employer yourself?
Could you afford to pay your staff the same but for them to work less and therefore reduce your profits?
The other alternative would be to employ more staff to make up the shortfall, which again would hit your profits.

Didn't they do five-day six-hour trials in Sweden? Not quite the same thing.

Low productivity isn't just the result of your workforce tossing it off. Loads of stuff from low levels of investment in plant and training to highly congested transport systems, all have a big impact on levels of productivity.

I seem to be saying this in response to every proposal out of this bloody party conference, but tackle the problem at it sources…

If people could really learn to have fun and be happy without excessive spendy-spendy, if house was pricing was uniformly sensible and not back shit crazy like it is in parts of the south-east, if we didn’t live against the backdrop of a pointlessly inflationary economy et cetera et cetera then I think people would naturally adjust to working less and having more fun. My suspicion is that people’s productivity in their remaining working hours would go up even with out new technology, And the public health will get up with illness down.

There’s probably £3Tb of perceived value in over-priced housing in parts of the UK.  The people who want to buy those houses have to earn even more than that over their working lives to buy those houses. That’s work that nobody should need to do, but I bet the people who bought the houses 30 years ago and are selling now aren’t complaining as they drop down to part time or early retirement...

I think the theory is high-end thinking type jobs are best done with shorter more productive working schedules, and there is evidence for this.

https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/experts/research/four-day-week-more-prod...

I can't see how this works with say shelf-stacking or, from the other thread, GPs

Couple of studies out there showing increased productivity, less absence and improved employee wellbeing for those working four rather than three days. I believe a study one of the Scandi types got the similar results from reducing to six-hour days.

When the robots take over it'll all be moot anyway.

I work 6 or 7 day/nights a weeks, I don't know what I'd do with myself with 3 days off. Probably just irritate the climbing community by posting (even more!) on here.

Isn't this part of Labours manifesto, to attempt a better distribution of wealth?

A national supplier of electricity, water, transport, bank etc. at least to give us an option of using a non-privatised supplier.

We've lived under the capitalistic mantra for so long though, it's going to be hard to break that cycle and there's a lot of power (money) trying to stop this happening.

Whether any of it can happen is a different matter.

This makes intuitive sense. When I was a civil servant, I did jack shit most of the time, except when I was about to go on holiday and everything needed sorting out before I left. That afternoon I was probably about 5x more productive than normal. I would guess this is the case for a lot of officey/managerial jobs, and the less meaningful and rewarding, the lower the productivity, for sure.

There is the problem here though that an awful lot of jobs are pretty meaningless and unrewarding, and officey. The only thing that keeps people showing up in the morning is the prospect of more spendy-spendy. So, if you had less time, you'd still just work at the same dogshit rate, and even less would get done.

Now I work as an optometrist, for every hour I don't work, 3 fewer patients don't get their eyes tested, and fewer pairs of specs get sold. If I worked fewer hours (well, actually not me 'cause I already do 4 days, so optometrists in general), then my employer would want to make more money out of every sight test I do, and the quality of what I do would go down while the pressure on me to sell pointless crap that people don't need would go up. It would be shite for everyone.

As you say, for all those jobs where you do actually work flat out producing outcomes per hour, rather than doing vague stuff at a desk and in meetings, it's plainly just less work being done, and that's a problem in the (fatally flawed) worky-worky/spendy spendy system. And we can't just opt out of it, no one's got a better suggestion, sadly.

Not really. There isn't anything I can see in their policies that's going to eradicate poverty so everyone's sufficiently well off to just stop spaffing all their unnecessary earnings

That's the most sensible way to run those things IMO, but it's not going to alter the distribution of wealth.

There are no realistic plans to achieve it. As I said, we're tied in to a global system that is totally dependent on a foundation of worky-worky/spendy-spendy to provide our basic needs of housing, food, healthcare, education, etc. That can't be wished away.

There's a lot of good stuff on youtube, you know. Since I stopped working full time, I got into classical music. Before that, I just looked at porn.

all the grunt stuff (shelf stacking, road sweeping, delivery etc.) will be taken over by robots, and possibly sooner than we think.

Good on you. Music's better for the soul.

I think they have done various studies, because as i said many people naturally drop their hours when they become parents. The studies were to see if people compressed the same work into less time, worked more efficient and so on. The results from my understanding was it didn't. For output to be maintain you need to employ more people. Ie. And somebody needs to pay them. The Swedish study was state workers, they weren't trying to make a profit,  just provide a service. 

The full results of the Finnish study aren't out yet, only the initial report stating it didn't have the benefits they thought it might. 

I think this is a really important point. 

There are probably going to be many fewer hours of work that actually need doing in 10 or 20 years time. The problem I see with the idea of the 4 day week is that this reduction isn't going to spread evenly across sectors or roles. Some things are going to require 0 hours work, some are going to require that optimal 30ish hours of productively spent time programming and maintaining the robots, and working out what to do next with them, or just that marketing gash that people do now.

But in other sectors, like healthcare, the numbers of hours that need doing is just going up and up, and no one seems particularly bothered about doing them. 

A policy that says "everyone will work a bit less" is just plainly garbage. The policy we need is a plan and the resources in place to train the next generation for all the jobs that will constitute the economy in 10 or 20 years, along with some way of making sure that a lot of people want to be nurses, and not many people want to do driving or making stuff - jobs that are going to be automated.

We're not going to get it from the Tories - they're not bothered about there being enough healthcare workers for the NHS, or what's going to happen to all the people that would go into manual jobs. And the best Labour can say is that everyone should put their feet up one day a week. What a load of bollocks!

You've hit on a really important point. Healthcare is understaffed. The politicians aren't helping as you rightly say but also there is a societal issue at play. Everyday people don't seem motivated to pursue a career in the field. Society is sick and the "politicians" are a reflection of this.

When I was a civil servant I worked all hours of the day frequently in evenings and weekends to meet really demanding deadlines set by ministers and seniors. Maybe if you'd pulled your finger out we could have both worked four days.

On the plus side, after Brexit this is going to be less than you might think.

Why not do both at the same time? Solos, duets, trios, ensembles...all good whilst listening to music

4 days is inevitable. We've dropped from 7, 6, 5 over time.

Some jobs will be covered with more people, just as 7 day shops are now. Employment would increase, or at least offset unemployment from automation / AI/ robots.

Reduced taxation, more leisure time, healthier population.

We can all try to project how society might be moving in the future, but one thing we can not ignore is we work in a competitive world. So Brits might decide that they can get by with, say, 32 hours a week, but the harder working countries with whom we compete might be working more like 50 or 60 hours a week in order to get ahead. 

One system I personally liked a lot (in the last American company I worked for), was the 9-day fortnight, in which we got every other Friday off (i.e., a long weekend every other weekend) by working 9-hour days on the other 9 days, rather than 8 hours per day in 5-day weeks. 

Terrible idea. Interventionism and central planning always goes wrong. Individuals want freedom to decide - just imagine being told you could only climb x routes in a week.

You're overgeneralising there. How do you think markets work? Not by having no intervention. If it wasn't for the rules and regulations that govern them they would fail. That's intervention. And how do you think huge companies like Amazon, bigger than some nation-states in economic terms, work? By extensive central planning.

I'd go further and say that the only way we will solve the global warming crisis will be with more intervention, not less 

If only - its a pipe dream for many. I know several people who do two jobs to get enough money to simply live and support their families. 

At minimum wage and zero hour contracts in many sectors I think the affluent few may benefit but hard to see how to helps the many.

Looking across Europe there are multiple examples of countries that manage to have a shorter working week, lower unemployment, higher wages and GDP. The factory act of 1833 restricted the working week of children to 69 hours.

Can you link showing which countries these are? I may consider a move.

Been working 4 on 4 off for years , its fantastic,  although the 12 hour shifts drag at times

The figures used and quoted by McDonnell are questioned for reliability by the OECD, who say this:

"Because of these different ways of gathering the statistics, the Eurostat data is a good source for comparing one country's working hours over time, but not so good for comparing different countries with each other.

The OECD attempted to make adjustments to the figures to give more comparable estimates.

It estimated UK employees worked 38.4 hours compared with, for example, 38.6 in Spain, 40.9 in Portugal, 41.1 in Luxembourg and 42.4 in Poland.

No country, either in the Eurostat or OECD data, worked close to a 32-hour-week average.

Those in the country with the shortest full-time week, the Netherlands, work, on average, 34.9 hours.

Although France is known for having a statutory 35-hour working week, workers actually put in an estimated 40.4 hours on average.

The 35-hour limit is the point at which workers should qualify for overtime".

For UK to cut back to 32 hour would provide a land of opportunity for citizens who are still prepared to work a 50-60 hour week in order to get ahead in life. Something I feel is rather frowned upon by the far left.

And that was the start of the slow decline to where we are now

"Can anyone explain why I'm wrong?"

Well it would be a 50% reduction for many professionals for starters.

Any British worker who doesn't vote for that is a beepin idiot. 

They work 8 days a week? That's hardcore!

But you try and tell people on UKC that... and they won't believe ya'

And any British worker who believes that it's even remotely deliverable within 10 years, is an even bigger idiot.

And I am sure MPs will vote for it, up the workers

I heard a report saying that 4 days a week made for improved productivity.  Personally, I would love a 4 day week and would happily forego lunch hours and increase my working day to achieve this. That said, work for me never stops and I am often working late, early and into the weekend so I dont really have a 5 day week already.

I did 6 day working for a few years which is 3 shifts of 12 hrs and 20 min and 4 days off a week which was the best shift I ever done in my life and the period of time where I got the most climbing done by a long way. 

There's a fair bit of discussion above about how this can't be generalised across sectors. I work as an optometrist, and if I do an hour's less work, 3 fewer people get their eyes tested. (I could of course reduce the amount of work I do for each patient, and test more of them per hour, but that's just doing less work, it isn't being more productive!). This is going to be the case across healthcare - in this sector you just work flat out for outcomes per hour, and the output is directly proportional to how long you work for.

It's vague, officey/managerial work that could be more productive with fewer hours worked. And that is a big chunk of the economy, but it's not everyone. A mechanic isn't going to get more work done in 80% of the time. Like me, they're going to get 80% of the work done, because the amount of work doesn't shrink and grow depending on your motivation and energy levels like it does when you're sat in an office - it just is the amount of work, regardless of how you feel, and the stuff needs fixing at the same level of urgency. Possibly your work rate as a mechanic changes dependent on mood (unlike mine, I don't have a diary with longer appointment times after lunch so I can chill out a bit), but the workflow management presumably isn't designed around this.

As such, Labour's plan needs to consider how the NHS and all front line public services are going to survive when they have to recruit thousands more staff, still paying the existing workforce the same. The costs to the public sector are beyond unbelievable, at a time when I just don't believe that explosive growth is on the horizon to make it all affordable. It's a really dumb idea which might sound good at some abstract, averaged out across all sectors level dominated by the managerial sector, but practically, for a hospital, school, or garage, or barbers, or police force to implement, it is pie-in-the-sky bonkers insanity.

We've gone from an economy where only one household member needed to work to live the working/middle class dream (dad), to having both parents working to sustain that level of lifestyle. 

This, along with in-work poverty, makes me think that efforts to address this exploitative trajectory, have some merit.

I agree wholeheartedly with the aim. It's just that when I consider how it could possibly work in, say the NHS, the policy instantly unravels because it's just wishful thinking. For a policy to be good it doesn't just have to be well-intentioned, it must also pass a few other tests. Like for example not leading to the immediate collapse of all public services.

In the 70's/80's when the working/middle class dream was achievable on one salary, there simply wasn't the level of consumerist expenditure there is today. Nobody was walking around with the equivalent of a few weeks wages of electronics in their pockets, designer labels were niche, designer handbags unheard of, 2 car families a rarity. UK households increasingly have more stuff than they can keep at home, in just a couple of decades self-storage has gone from 0 to a £500,000,000 industry. Even our school trips have gone supersize; my daughter is in year 8 of a normal state school, so far this year she's been on a sports tour to Marbella, a WW1 battlefield tour of France and Belgium and we balked at a trip next month to visit Auschwitz. I think the most exciting school trip I went on involved 5 days in Tenby.

It's not a case of people having to work harder to sustain the same lifestyle we enjoyed decades ago. The reality is that the 'average lifestyle' has changed beyond all recognition.

Edit:typo

I hope you don't mind the observation that your perspective here is wholly middle-class. 

You're right that the average lifestyle has changed but it was always thus. Owning an oven or having a suit of armour would have once denoted your class.

Crucially, I agree "it's not a case of people having to work harder to sustain the same lifestyle we enjoyed decades ago". Lifestyle changes, but being bound by in-work poverty is an indicator of an unsustainable model.

That's a whole lot of assumption to make about someone based on what exactly? 

But that rate of change has been exponential over recent years.

Really? in-work poverty is unsustainable? It's been the common experience of the vast majority throughout history. Here in the West we had a brief blip of a few decades worth of relative post-war prosperity, the rest of the world? not so much.

It's a worthwhile aim to give better quality of life to the workers but I was referring to everything in the link and not just that one issue that is why I only used the link in my reply, perhaps I should have made it clearer. 

No way am I going to start working a whole four days each week

Thanks for clarifying. But honestly Pefa, I'm shocked at the callous nature of your reply. Only the workers deserve a better quality of life? what about the infirm, the disabled, children, retirees, the unemployed for god's sake?

Always knew you were a capitalist 5th columnist in disguise. You've well and truly Ley the mask slip now!

Sort of.

GDP is an excellent way of measuring progress in developing countries.  Its at least as effective as HDI or other measures, or at least they are no better despite purporting to be more holistic measures of development.  The unfortunate truth is more money = better life up until you earn a reasonably high figure.

The question is more one of whether GDP continues to be a useful measure after a certain level of development has been obtained.  It also has some obvious flaws regardless of development (if we all crash our cars tomorrow and are forced to buy new ones this is great news for GDP).

As to the OP, half my office work 3 to 4 days a week only.  Seems its perfectly possible without the need for govt intervention.  The devil is in the detail though; only my female colleagues do so and their husbands/partners still work full-time.  Even dispensing with frivolous expenditure and consumer non-essentials, a full-time median wage can evaporate.  I don't see how dropping to 30 hours a week and presumably needing money to fund the activities done in those remaining hours, is a way forward.

I'm not sure that's true. Technological change has been exponential but as an ordinary life lived?

"Blip" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You probably need to define poverty because it's (arguably) relative. 

You're wrong to say, "in-work poverty is unsustainable? It's been the common experience of the vast majority throughout history." We're using 'work' in it's modern contractual form. What's now different is that the contracts governing employment are regressive in the employer's favour.

Try staying sober so that you can knead faster and not mess up your oven settings! 

As in an ordinary life lived. To give an example: I went to university in 1989, most of my mates were wearing second hand clothes, holidays were spent working, nobody ate out and if the walls of your digs were mould free and you had central heating, then you were living the high life. 

Fast forward 30 years and I go back to university in 2017. Designer clothes are a common sight on campus, a couple of weeks on the med normal enough during the holidays, eating outs a normal thing if not a weekly occurrence and student accommodation with concierge service has become an actual thing.

Poverty as in owning f*ck all as a normal part of everyday life. It's been normal throughout human history and its still normal for at least 50% of the world's population.

You might be using work in its 'modern contractual form', whatever that means. I'm using work as in how its experienced by most of the globe's population, whether that's as one of India's estimated 18 million slave labourers, some 13 year old making trainers in Vietnam, somebody processing scrap in China or harvesting bananas in Brazil. In work poverty is common place, it always has been.

🙂

So you'd equate a tribal/ Hunter Gatherer from the Amazon of PNG as living in poverty? It's meaningless. Poverty needs context not least because whilst you CAN/COULD live an ancestral lifestyle in PNG or the Amazon, you can't in the UK. You're obliged to play the capitalist game and as such,  poverty has context.

What are you on about? Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, all multi-billion dollar companies harvesting bananas in Brazil and the guys with machetes aren't driving to work in nice cars and planning their family holidays at Disney World. They are experiencing in work poverty. You wrote:

"being bound by in-work poverty is an indicator of an unsustainable model."

You might see it that way, but this is purely a modern, Western, middle class perspective. In work poverty has not only proved sustainable, it's been the reality for 99% of people for 99% of human history.

Defining a working week by a certain number of hours has always been bullshit for many. Who's to say workloads will drop 20% when moving from a nominal 40 hours to a nominal 32 hours. It could well be 20% less pay for say 10% less work. Labour need to sort out unfair employment systems that produce excessive workloads that amount to forced unpaid overtime, before they make such moves. If can't be beyond the scope of modern IT systems to do this for most professional or managerial workers.

GDP is not an excellent way of measuring progress - that's not what it does. It measures economic growth - not the same thing. 

"GDP is a good indicator of what it is intended to measure; the aggregate output produced by our economy. Yet national accounting’s founding fathers – Hicks, Kuznets, Samuelson, Tinbergen – were always clear GDP was not a good measure of economic wellbeing, let alone a wider measure of social progress. That is not a criticism, just a warning not to use GDP for what it is not intended. It’s like saying a speedometer is of no use because it doesn’t show how much fuel you have. That’s why you need a fuel gauge as well as a speedometer. "

From this interesting debate:

https://economia.icaew.com/opinion/march-2014/debate-gdp-as-a-measurement

Damage limitation...

Agreed. But not what I'm on about. I'm on about indigenous lifestyles. Not having a TV, phone or healthcare is immaterial if you're living indigenously. Poverty is defined by the economic model you live in.

I really don't know what point you are making here.

That, despite your assertion otherwise, in work poverty is an entirely sustainable model. It takes considerable push back from from an organised workforce and progressive political parties to raise average living standards in the face of typical capitalist drivers to maximise profit.

Employees in the West have benefited hugely from the development of unionised workforce’s and mass movement political parties. This lead to a few post war decades of relative equity in living standards in the West. The subsequent decline in unionised labour and widespread membership of political parties has seen a corresponding reversion to historic norms of in work poverty.

And for developing countries economic growth and progress are tightly linked.  This is why all manner of alternative measurements have repeatedly proven to be no better at predicting development than raw GDP.  It works - a fact begrudgingly accepted by the creators of alternative systems who clearly wanted their "better" metrics to achieve better results. 

It is unwelcome news to some that increasing incomes and economic activity really do dramatically improve people's wellbeing, self-determination and life chances in a way that no other single improvement manages.

I’ve recently dropped my hours ( and salary ) by 20% and have been working a 4 day week for a few months...couple of points.

i’m more efficient now at work. I go in and crack on and get things done.

i’m spending more money. I was too busy before to take a step back and do things/go out/visit places/go swimming so didn’t spend as much.

i put it to the team that they all did the same and we employ one more person to make up the shortfall...they were not that keen at all due to the drop in salary they would have to take.

Evidence? Plenty of arguments as to why that's wrong - eg.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/five-measures-of-growth-that-are-bet...

Not what the people in that article I linked earlier said.

Irrelevant rhetoric. 

Unfortunately, the link in that paper to what exactly the NEF's proposes for its five preferred measures is broken. 

I can't quote the evidence directly.  I'm going by what my PED module spent several weeks teaching.  Given SOAS's Development Studies MSc degree programme is unashamedly left-leaning and would clearly have loved to have consigned GDP to the scrap heap, it was illuminating that the conclusions at the end of the module were pretty much unanimous that GDP, for all its flaws, is the most effective measure for judging developemtn.  Better than the Human Development Index and a raft of others (which I now can't remember).

You can of course claim GDP is flawed if you wish.  But pointing that out and coming up with a wish list of intangibles to replace the "basket of goods" doesn't produce a better alternative to GDP.   The problem remains that encouraging less economically active behaviours does have a negative impact on development.

So I'm sorry to say, incomes and economic activity are not "irrelevant rhetoric".  They are front and center in improving the vast majority of the world's lives.  It is a middle-class luxury to turn our noses up at the vast benefits capitalism has brought us, and which GDP measures, and claim we are hard done by.

You already work a 4 day week! Haha. No wonder you ain't keen .

Edit: actually is it 3? 

The link worked for me just now from my post - don't know what's going on there. You should read it - it's interesting and useful. The title was 'Five measures of growth that are better than GDP' - maybe try searching for that?

I'm not claiming GDP is flawed - experts in the area, not all left-wing, say it is. 

I did not say incomes and economic activity are "irrelevant rhetoric" - it was the whole sentence that mentioned it. Not the same thing at all. 

Not yet. One day... 

But that's still about 3 more than you. 

The link is their own one to the 2015 report (https://neweconomics.org/projects/entry/five-headline-indicators-of-nationa...).  The detail of GDP, or HDI, or GNH is complex.  If the NEF is proposing some five-indicator index using "good jobs", "wellbeing", "fairness", etc., while these sound nice, they are going to have to come up with something a bit meatier.  Just listing out some ideals doesn't equal a better measure.

They look good, and easy to agree with, on a webpage but how is this being measured and do the outcomes work? 

For instance, "good jobs" may mean a high minimum wage and low hours, which may also mean high barriers to work-force entry and therefore higher unemployment.  Bung unemployment, or "wellbeing" from coercive health interventions, or "fairness" from retributive balancing into an index for measuring a nation's wellbeing and, as was discovered with the proposed alternatives to GDP, you end up with either worsened outcomes or measures that don't seem to fit actual outcomes.

Lots of experts criticise GDP.  And lot of people point idealistically to things we would like to be better measures of wellbeing.  But what we would like doesn't necessarily match up to what is.  

You point out the complexities but you're happy to stick to a narrow and simple measure. That doesn't make sense.

I'm not happy with it. But the simple fact is, GDP works and works well. The only explanation I can think of is that we don't appreciate just how important wealth and economic activity really are and the disproportionate positive impact they have on people's lives.

Concepts such as "wellbeing" are at best luxuries you can start to play with once you have accumulated wealth. But by far the biggest advantage a society can gain is material improvement. Perhaps because our lives are fortunately so distant from the rest of the human population we've forgotten the deprivation that blighted earlier times. That childhood mortality rates in Africa are now apparently at the level of Europe in the 1950s is evidence of the dramatic changes taking place and how bad things once were.

...my employer would want to make more money out of every sight test I do, and the quality of what I do would go down while the pressure on me to sell pointless crap that people don't need would go up. It would be shite for everyone.

You basically just described NHS dentistry.