Britain only listens to arguments it can price

Ask people what they want for their country and you get an answer about safety, about order, about the street they grew up in. Ask a government the same question and what comes back is a number.

Somewhere along the way we decided that an argument only counts once it has been turned into money. Everything that won't turn is filed under feeling and quietly set aside. That habit has an author, and the author objected to it.

The measure we now argue by was built to order. In a slump, Congress commissioned an economist, Simon Kuznets, to create a system that would measure the nation's productivity, so that a government could see how much damage had been done. It counted what the country made and sold, and it counted those things well. That was the job it had been given. It was never built to say whether the country itself was in good health.

The man who built it said so at the time. In his second report to the U.S. Congress in 1937 he set out the limits carefully, and the last of them is the one nobody ever quotes. The welfare of a nation, he wrote, can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.

They kept the measure anyway. In 1944, GDP became the main tool for measuring a country's economy, and from there it became the tool for measuring everything else. Not because anyone won an argument for it. Because it was the only number that fitted on the page.

They say that number is the only honest check on a promise, since everything else is just how somebody feels. That's half right, and it's the wrong half. It checks the cost of a thing. It says nothing about whether the thing is worth having, because it wasn't built to and its author said so.

Watch what that does to an argument. It was reported yesterday that millions of people in this country would accept being poorer in exchange for a border that works. That's a trade-off, stated plainly, and the kind of honest sum a serious politics is supposed to be made of. The answer came back as a growth figure, as though the objection had been an accounting error rather than a preference. Nobody has to tell you that your priorities are wrong. They only have to say that they don't show up.

A measure can't see what it wasn't built to count, and this one was built to count transactions. Trust between neighbours doesn't appear in it. Nor does whether a town still feels like itself, or whether a promise made at an election was kept. Those things are real. They are simply not priced, and in a politics that only hears prices, unpriced is the same as unreal.

There's nothing wrong with the number. There's a great deal wrong with a country that has forgotten it ordered the thing, for one job, and was warned.

An opinion of the house.