Ezra Klein notes that out of all the OECD countries, America is alone in refusing to mandate even a single day of paid vacation for the workforce. Laws elsewhere run from 39 in Finland (the country where I want to be) to ten in Japan.

Of course, America is also the most productive nation in the world for essentially the same reason. The question, though, is whether this is really in the best interests in the nation. GDP growth has essentially operated as a de facto measure of the health of the nation, based on the economic assumption that it envelops both material improvements in living standards and robust employment figures. But we seem to have gotten caught up with guideposts and lost sight of the sole element worth examining: life itself. If you’ve been productive for 50 years of your life and you live miserably unhealthily for the rest of your life because you never had a paid vacation, it doesn’t matter how much you added to the economy—you’re still old, unhappy, and on your way to being dead. From a societal perspective, it may as well have been that you didn’t live at all.

As Robert Kennedy famously put it:

[GNP] does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials… GNP measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile; and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.

It’s perfectly possible to refuse the reduction of positive value to economic growth while still maintaining a belief in positive scientific measurement of national well-being (and even easier if you hew from the narrow lens of vulgar positivism). Plenty has been written about how it’s extremely difficult to measure something ambiguous like ‘happiness’ or ‘satisfaction’. What this misses is the fact that because something is difficult to measure does not mean that it’s fictitious. In fact, it may possibly be that ‘happiness’ is a discrete quantity, and we merely lack the apparatus to measure it. While I don’t necessarily agree with that, what I do agree with is that stopping at GDP merely because it’s easy or convenient to measure is not only lazy—it’s misleading.