I wrote recently about how the USA is a third world country by a lot of measures, and that it ranks low in most other comparisons with developed, healthy countries. You can read more about that here: Is the US a third world country?

I feel commended now that Andrew Yang’s new Forward Party has said something similar. Here’s what they say on their “American Scorecard” page:

You can’t fix something if you’re not measuring the right things. Right now, we use the stock market and GDP to measure our economy and the well-being of our people.

But even the creator of GDP thought it was a terrible measure for national well-being. This can easily be seen today. As the stock market and GDP have grown, life expectancy and mental health have declined.

Which is no wonder, as the bottom 80% of Americans by income own only 8% of stocks.

In short, we’re looking at the wrong things to measure how we’re doing as a country, and it’s quite literally killing many of us.

It’s time that we expand how we measure our economy to reflect how we’re doing. We need to look at life expectancy and freedom from substance abuse, childhood success rates and meaningful retirement rates as key indicators of our economy. And we need to implement policies that improve these metrics – not how rich a few stockholders get.

https://www.forwardparty.com/american-scorecard

Read more at ForwardParty.com.