The health of a nation

Subject: The health of a nation

"It's the economy stupid" Bill Clintons famous rebuff highlights the importance we attach to economics and economists in their pronouncements as to our success or failure as nation state. 
The measurement of an economy in terms of GDP, Gross Domestic Product says much for how we value success both in our personal lives as well as as a nation. When GDP is up we are all expected to applauded even if the growth which it is supposed to represent, is not a characteristic of our personal experience. If we are poor we will not find any growth in our own income or lifestyle other than perhaps the benefit cheques are maintained. Perhaps this is all we can expect since our position within the economy is only peripheral to the success of the economy and as the world economy changes and automation and artificial intelligence start to make people redundant, what reference will we, the common or garden humans, have to GDP.
The measurement of the 'total value of everything produced' is fine when measuring widgets flowing off a production line but how does it measure the dedication of a violinist playing for a symphony orchestra or a nurse tucking up her patient in bed.
The word "value" has more than an economic ring to it, but thank god nations should be measured by more than their GDP.  The value of a social conscience is immeasurable, it's a marker for the civilised refinement within a society as to how it's

citizens judge and evaluate not only their own lives but also those around them as fellow human beings.
The insistence that everyone has a right to procure arms in the US, ostensibly for their own self defense has to have the caveat that lives are at risk and that other people's lives has less value than your own. Of course this is the natural presumption right across the animal kingdom but in a civilised country attempts are made to alleviate the 'them and us scenario'. 

The Japanese had a remarkable period of growth in the 80s far out pacing every country in the world in terms of economic growth and then came the strange economic phenomena "stagflation'. Their economy has stubbornly refused to grow in terms we would normally attribute to GDP and yet the society has in someways prospered by socially sidestepping the personnel accumulation of wealth as an indicator of a successful nation. The plateau which the people had reached and stayed on has produced a normalisation, a sort of breathing space where enough is determined by the population as a whole and not driven by outside economic forces. Admittedly the Japanese always a very private and individualistic nation is not the norm but it shows that in terms of measurements of other factors of a nations health such as diet, longevity, personnel finance the Japanese are extremely wealthy and only in so far as the stock market and the economic volatility  which the investors find so attractive because of their opportunity to manipulate an often artificial volatility and make massive profit. Only this concept of Western Capitalism where GDP is the main sometimes only indicator of the health of a nation.