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The Living Diagnostic (PPT) (PDF)
The Living Blueprint for Life Coherence (PPT) (PDF)
Deep Diver | Why a booming economy feels like losing
Debate | Life Coherent Progress Beyond GDP
Critique | Making life-coherent progress actionable
Explainer | Life-Coherent Progress
Cinematic | Axioms of Flourishing: Upgrading the Beyond GDP Framework
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Executive Summary
Gross domestic product was designed to measure the scale of economic activity. It was not designed to measure whether people are healthy, whether communities are cohesive, whether institutions deserve trust, whether ecosystems are regenerating, whether care is supported, whether work is dignified, or whether future generations inherit viable conditions of life. Yet GDP and its growth have become the dominant public shorthand for progress. This has generated a deep measurement distortion: monetized activity appears as development, while many forms of life-support, harm, depletion, and repair remain secondary or invisible.
The United Nations High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP has made an important intervention into this historical problem. Its report, Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet, proposes that progress be understood as equitable, inclusive, and sustainable well-being. It organizes a dashboard of thirty-one indicators around four components: foundational principles; current well-being; equity and inclusion; and sustainability and resilience. The report further links future well-being to produced, human, social, institutional, and natural capital (High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP, 2026).
This is a necessary advance. It widens the field of visibility beyond economic throughput and creates an institutional opening for governments, statistical systems, civil society, researchers, and international organizations to ask richer questions about progress. It also recognizes that GDP growth has coexisted with inequality, environmental degradation, and declining trust in public institutions, and that GDP cannot capture the full range of outcomes that shape people’s lives (High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP, 2026).
However, the framework remains incomplete if it stops at broader measurement. A dashboard can reveal that inequality is rising, that loneliness is worsening, that ecosystems are degrading, that institutions are mistrusted, or that well-being is unevenly distributed. But a dashboard does not by itself determine what is ultimately valuable, what forms of capital are true or false, what kinds of harm are normalized, what policies must be de-implemented, or what relations must be repaired.
This white paper therefore proposes a life-coherent deepening of the Beyond GDP agenda. It does not reject the UN framework. Rather, it asks what deeper architecture is needed so that the framework becomes transformative rather than merely descriptive. The central claim is that progress should be evaluated by whether social, ecological, economic, technological, and institutional arrangements expand or reduce life-capacity: the real capacities of persons, communities, ecosystems, and future generations to live, heal, develop, relate, participate, repair, create, and flourish within the web of life.
The paper draws on four foundations. First, the UN Beyond GDP agenda provides the global measurement opening. Second, McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology supplies a criterion of value: what expands life-capacity is value; what disables it is disvalue. Third, Galtung’s peace theory shows that peace cannot be reduced to the absence of war or conflict deaths; it must include the reduction of direct, structural, cultural, ecological, institutional, commercial, and digitally mediated forms of avoidable harm. Fourth, Maturana’s relational biology reminds us that indicators are not neutral mirrors of reality. They are distinctions made by observers within histories of language, emotion, power, and relation.
The paper develops the concept of life capital as a deeper criterion for evaluating the UN’s five capital distinctions. Produced, human, social, institutional, and natural capital are useful categories, but they are not automatically life-enabling. Produced capital may destroy ecosystems. Human capital may be reduced to labor productivity. Social capital may protect exclusionary networks. Institutional capital may preserve power rather than justice. Natural capital may be treated as a substitutable asset rather than as the life-ground of all value. A capital stock becomes life capital only when it secures life goods, expands life-capacity, strengthens civil commons, regenerates through time, respects ecological thresholds, and avoids burden displacement.
The paper also reclaims efficiency. McMurtry’s principles of life-coherent provisioning culminate in a redefinition of efficiency: efficiency increases only when life goods are provided with diminishing ecological waste, reduced material and energy burden, less mandatory life-time loss, and expanded human development (McMurtry, 2018). This reframes efficiency away from cost reduction, profit margins, or output productivity alone, and toward life-good provisioning with less life-loss.
The paper then extends Galtung’s concept of positive peace. The UN Beyond GDP framework includes peace as a foundational principle, but its operationalization risks remaining too narrow if peace is measured primarily through conflict-related deaths. A life-coherent peace framework asks whether avoidable life-harm is being reduced across the full field of social and ecological life: food, water, housing, care, safety, dignity, institutional access, ecological security, public trust, and repair.
Maturana’s contribution deepens the argument further. If societies coordinate ways of living through recurring patterns of speech, feeling, attention, and relation, then the question is not only what indicators measure, but what world their use helps conserve. A GDP world brings forth producers, consumers, prices, outputs, and growth. A Beyond GDP world brings forth dashboards, well-being domains, and sustainability indicators. A life-coherent world must bring forth living beings in relation: persons, communities, ecosystems, care, repair, dignity, trust, participation, and future generations.
The resulting framework is organized around a generative logic: exposure, repair, margins, life-capacity, and flourishing. Life is enabled when harmful exposures are reduced, repair pathways are accessible, restorative margins are protected, civil commons are strengthened, and life-capacities expand. Life is disabled when cumulative exposures exceed repair capacity, when margins are depleted, when commons are enclosed, and when societies normalize adaptation to preventable harm.
The paper concludes by proposing a life-coherent action cycle: recognize, rename, measure, expose, de-implement, restore commons, redesign affordances, protect margins, coordinate, and learn. This cycle moves measurement from description to transformation. The goal is not merely to count what GDP misses, but to help societies care for, protect, and regenerate the conditions through which life becomes possible.
The central question is simple:
Does this way of living enable life to live?
Put more formally: do the dominant social, economic, technological, institutional, and ecological arrangements expand or reduce the life-capacities required for human and planetary flourishing?
Life-Coherent Framework Components and Core Concepts
Scroll to the right to see the right columns| Conceptual Domain | Key Indicators and Criteria | Life-Coherent Purpose | Associated Theoretical Foundation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Life Capital | Secures universal life necessities; expands life-capacity; strengthens civil commons; regenerates through time; respects ecological thresholds; avoids burden displacement. | To serve as the deeper evaluative criterion for judging all forms of capital (produced, human, social, institutional, and natural) to ensure they are life-enabling. | McMurtry |
| Positive Peace | Reduction of avoidable life-harm (direct, structural, cultural, ecological, institutional, commercial, and digitally mediated); presence of conditions for dignity, repair, and participation. | To move beyond the mere absence of conflict (negative peace) toward the active presence of life-enabling relations and the protection of life-capacity. | Galtung |
| Life-Coherent Efficiency | Increasing provision of life goods with diminishing ecological waste; reduced material/energy burden; less mandatory life-time loss; expanded human development. | To reframe efficiency away from mere profit or output productivity toward the art of enabling more life with less life-loss. | McMurtry |
| Relational Biology (The Observer) | Distinctions made in language and emotion; recurrent relations of coexistence; acceptance of the other as a legitimate other. | To recognize that measurement is not neutral but brings forth worlds; to ensure governance is a coordination of life-enabling conditions through legitimate coexistence. | Maturana |
| UN Beyond GDP | Dashboard of 31 indicators covering foundational principles, current well-being, equity/inclusion, and sustainability/resilience. | To provide the institutional opening and global measurement framework to move past economic throughput toward multidimensional well-being. | UN Beyond GDP |