Value Efficiency and the Durable Flourishing Indices: Macroeconomics for a Commonwealth

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been criticized for ignoring human well‑being, but its deeper limitation is teleological: GDP optimizes for monetary throughput rather than the conditions that enable human flourishing. By treating all monetized activity as positive output, it obscures what this paper terms the attentional cost of abstraction—the systemic displacement of human and ecological realities by symbolic representations such as prices, metrics, and algorithmic scores. This cost generates rising defensive expenditure, cognitive burden, and institutional fragility, all of which GDP records as growth. To diagnose this structural failure, the paper introduces the Durable Flourishing Indices (DFIₓ) and Flourishing Cost Indices (FCIₓ), a measurement framework that shifts evaluation from output to value efficiency: how effectively societies convert material resources and human time into flourishing lives. The DFI family isolates productive, defensive, cognitive, extractive, and coordination costs that remain invisible in GDP, while the complementary FCI indices reveal the cost per flourishing life. Grounded in an interdisciplinary account of flourishing as an empirically assessable institutional output, the framework provides a diagnostic architecture for distinguishing growth that enhances human development from growth that monetizes friction, opacity, and repair.