Resilience or Rhetoric
The politics of moving past GDP.
The world has been reshaped by crisis after crisis: financial turmoil, pandemic, war, climate emergencies and now the disruptive wave of AI. Each has revealed the limitations of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the primary measure of progress.
This is part of the series on rethinking value beyond GDP. Read the other articles in the series:
Europe’s recently adopted 2025 Strategic Foresight Report argues that resilience today means transforming forward, building systems that are sustainable, fair and democratic. Central to this ambition is a shift in how Europe defines and measures progress. The proposal for a dashboard of sustainable and inclusive wellbeing indicators is not revolutionary in technical terms. The OECD, the UN and many national governments already experiment with alternatives to GDP. The real challenge is political: how to elevate such a dashboard from background statistics into a genuine driver of policy choices, budget allocations and investment priorities.
That requires embedding wellbeing indicators into the European Semester, the EU’s central mechanism for coordinating economic policy. If reforms and fiscal policies were judged not only against deficit and debt targets but also against metrics of social inclusion, education quality or environmental sustainability, the policy conversation would change. Yet this shift will face resistance. Some member states treat GDP growth as the only legitimate proof of success. Others worry that broader indicators could expose uncomfortable trade-offs between competitiveness and sustainability, between fiscal discipline and social investment. Turning the dashboard into a real decision-making tool would thus mean challenging entrenched hierarchies of what counts as value.
Knowledge and innovation policy illustrates the stakes. Today, universities and researchers are judged by publication counts and citations rather than by contribution to public value. The foresight report points to a European alternative: values-based innovation, particularly in governing AI. If Europe ties its funding and regulatory muscle to human-centric metrics—dignity, fairness, solidarity—rather than market outputs alone, it could shape global standards and reclaim purpose in the knowledge economy. But again, the obstacle is political: balancing ambition with the industrial and geopolitical pressures that drive a race for competitiveness.
The same applies to intergenerational fairness and democratic resilience. Climate action, demographic shifts and disinformation all demand decisions that extend beyond electoral cycles. The EU can propose frameworks to account for future generations and strengthen democratic debate, but their weight will depend on whether governments treat them as binding criteria or as aspirational add-ons.
Resilience can then be seen as a political project of redefining progress. For Europe, that means confronting the limits of GDP, embedding wellbeing into the core of economic governance and accepting the trade-offs this implies. Markets will remain powerful, but they cannot be the sole arbiters of value. The choice now is whether Europe is willing to rewire its policy machinery to reflect this reality or whether it remains just another report on the shelf.