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Those indexes are biased since they neglect key aspects of human happiness like community; health; external costs like pollution, systemic risk, and defense that businesses often pass on to society; and the corrupting effects of the concentraation of wealth in a few hands as the rich get richer -- things implicit in the original poster's comment.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

From:
    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"""
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
"""

Like many conservatives, they leave out community and health as part of a good life, but otherwise it's a great essay.

Hans Rosling has shown that many materially poor countries have made great progress towards building prosperous and healthy societies under a variety of political assumptions (often ones that emphasize social welfare).
    http://www.gapminder.org/
    http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

Another index:
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm

As the value of human labor continues to fall from automation, better design, and voluntary social netwoks, we will need new models of prosperity that are not mainly about "every person for themselves". Freedom is also not very secure or meaningful without face-to-face community, which is often just assumed, but seems rarer these days as our individualized consumer-oriented society fails in so many ways.

I agree most of the world's problems are social problems (even if better technology can make some social problems easier to solve through increasing abundance).

"1. Let me try to illustrate the problem another way:
From Google:
World GDP: $60.6 Trillion
World Population: 6.7 billion
If we confiscated all the wealth in the world and divided it up amongst us all that would be:
$9,045 per person
The poverty line for a 1 person household is:
$10,830
If we redistributed all the wealth in the world we would all live below the poverty line."

Several problems there.

GDP is just annual production measured in currency. It is not a good indicator of true progress:
http://www.rprogress.org/index.htm

Nor is GDP a good indicator of total wealth. Total wealth would include the biosphere, all ideas, all land, the moon, all genetic information, everyone's skills, all buildings, and so on.

Also, US$10,000 a year would go really far in India or China or parts of Africa (you'd live more like a US millionaire, assuming you were the only one with that, which you wouldn't be if everyone got it), so it does not account for wage differentials or living cost differentials. The first big problem here is confusing levels of reality. I talk about that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
"""

So, when talking about rethinking economics, it is easy to get confused about what currency is or what would happen if we moved it around differently. As Douglas Adams wrote: "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most

"Considering that the wealthy, the middle class, and much of the poor (who still drive cars, have air conditioning, and posses multiple TV's in the US) possess material wealth of a manner and quantity that didn't exist 100 years ago, who did they steal all that wealth from?"

You're certainly right in suggesting that the organization of matter into forms humans desire is the creation of wealth (the poster you are responding to got that wrong). And you are certainly correct that we have more stuff in the USA than ever (See Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey's "The Age Of Abundance").

But, as financial prospectuses always say: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". You can't conclude from the poor having more stuff now that things won't change dramatically in the near term unless we actively try to reform a winner-takes-all social ideology. Reforms might include instituting a "basic income" to keep the market working (funded by a wealth tax perhaps or other means), helping gift economies prosper like GNU/Linux by more supportive laws like shortening copyright length to a few years or limiting its scope to only commercial transactions, and helping people be more productive locally in various ways where they keep or share the results of their own production from home 3D printers or neighborhood TechShops or local farms by helping individuals relearn productive skills and have access to the resources they need to do that.

Also, while we have a lot more stuff, so much that we are getting buried in it in the USA and people make movies like WALL-e that don't even sound too far fetched, we also have a lot more cancer (half of which comes from environmental causes) and a lot more risk of global Armageddon from nukes, bioweapons, killer robots, and global financial panics. We also have a lot less species and less nature. One can argue if that was a good trade overall, but in any case, it is a done deal. But here is another way to measure progress than Brink Lindsey's approach:
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm
"We believe that if policymakers measure what really matters to people--health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being--economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability. Redefining Progress created the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) in 1995 as an alternative to the gross domestic product (GDP). The GPI enables policymakers at the national, state, regional, or local level to measure how well their citizens are doing both economically and socially."

Is Bill Gates lobbying for any of that? No, he is busy moving his R&D to India, trying to get more staff under H1B visa indentured servitude to get the most for the cheapest labor costs, trying to pay less taxes to support those workers that improved productivity from software makes redundant, and likely trying to extend the scope and duration of patents and copyrights he owns -- at least, until, like the Grinch who stole Christmas, he has a change of heart. Then, his vast talent and skills could help renew our society, physical infrastructure, and our ecology, like happened at the end of the movie WALL-e (if you stayed for the credits):
"WALL-E Credits"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6wgicmUAfw

The issue is, where do we go from here? Mainstream economists ignore the value of social capital, like intact extended families and intact neighborhoods. Brink Lindsey ignored social trends, for example, how the USA has one of the lowest scores on life expectance and childhood happiness of the industrialized nations, and how hundreds of years earlier the natives had a socialist economic system that was working so well that Benjamin Franklin borrowed lots of ideas from the Iroquois Confederacy to write the US Constitution. They also ignore systemic

doing a little more research

There is an FAQ
http://www.rprogress.org/newprojects/ecolFoot/faq/ index.shtml#accuracy1

that FAQ points to and xls file.
http://redefiningprogress.org/programs/sustainabil ityindicators/ef/ef_household_0203.xls
that does a more complex calculation.

and there are some suggestions at
http://www.earthday.net/Footprint/lowband/english/ individuals.asp

I understand your point.
GDP is a silly measure of the economy.
but at the time it was created and used there wasn't a lot of knowlege about other methods of measureing the economy.

Have a look into GPI!

http://www.rprogress.org/projects/gpi/
http://www.gpiatlantic.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_Progress_Indi cator

basically you start with GDP, and subtract all the useless stuff that your money has been spent on (ie oil spills)
then you subtract the value of any assests that can no longer produce wealth for you. (ie oil you have taken out of the ground)

See, problem is that today people stopped thinking for themselves. Each of us have a potentially powerful mind, you just need to realize that and start using it. How many of /. users have really asked - hey, what the heck is GDP? Is this accurate or not?

GDP was created in the '30s - and then it was accurate. Why? Because back then, basically everything was a physical good - cars, clothing, etc. There were of course services, but they didn't account for a lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_produc t

However, today there are different: services account for much more in the economy, at least in developed countries. GDP doesn't account the losses, only the money spent.

If - say - there is a meteorite wiping off half of California and then suddenly disappearing (or some other major major catastrophe), what will happen? People will come from everywhere to rebuild the place: construction, insurances, hospitals, town halls, fire fighers, mechanics - basically everything. According to GDP definition that would account for a tremendous growth - because GDP measures the interactions - and in this example, there are now lots of business interaction to rebuild.
  But, if you think of the whole - what did that group of people have and what do they have now? Which values most - what they had or what they have? Are they overall richer or poorer? Are they in debt where they weren't before? Trust me, it would take many year to rebuild everything AND pay the loans taken to do that. Many...

There are alternative economic indicators which tries to be better in measuring economic performance. One of them is GPI - Genuine Project Indicator - see here http://www.rprogress.org/projects/gpi/
That site is rich enough in information to keep you busy for a while. GPI does account for both good and bad things that happened.

However, I guess you can imagine that current governments use GDP because it can make the economy look good even when actually average people are worse off. http://www.rprogress.org/newmedia/articles/031130_ ftc.html

See, problem is that today people stopped thinking for themselves. Each of us have a potentially powerful mind, you just need to realize that and start using it. How many of /. users have really asked - hey, what the heck is GDP? Is this accurate or not?

GDP was created in the '30s - and then it was accurate. Why? Because back then, basically everything was a physical good - cars, clothing, etc. There were of course services, but they didn't account for a lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_produc t

However, today there are different: services account for much more in the economy, at least in developed countries. GDP doesn't account the losses, only the money spent.

If - say - there is a meteorite wiping off half of California and then suddenly disappearing (or some other major major catastrophe), what will happen? People will come from everywhere to rebuild the place: construction, insurances, hospitals, town halls, fire fighers, mechanics - basically everything. According to GDP definition that would account for a tremendous growth - because GDP measures the interactions - and in this example, there are now lots of business interaction to rebuild.
  But, if you think of the whole - what did that group of people have and what do they have now? Which values most - what they had or what they have? Are they overall richer or poorer? Are they in debt where they weren't before? Trust me, it would take many year to rebuild everything AND pay the loans taken to do that. Many...

There are alternative economic indicators which tries to be better in measuring economic performance. One of them is GPI - Genuine Project Indicator - see here http://www.rprogress.org/projects/gpi/
That site is rich enough in information to keep you busy for a while. GPI does account for both good and bad things that happened.

However, I guess you can imagine that current governments use GDP because it can make the economy look good even when actually average people are worse off. http://www.rprogress.org/newmedia/articles/031130_ ftc.html

I don't think we should kid ourselves. $5/gal gasoline is coming. Sooner than most probably hope. Personally, I think the sooner it arrives, the sooner my fellow Americans will quit buying SUVs.

err, actually, it's us in the US with the ridiculous gas prices, subsidized (see this also) to keep us happy.

Find your ecological footprint

and then...

compare it to the rest of the world's

A caluclation based on the amount of land used by each person based on their lifestyle, or their "ecological footprint" are available at redefining progress
To calculate your ecological footprint go here.

A caluclation based on the amount of land used by each person based on their lifestyle, or their "ecological footprint" are available at redefining progress
To calculate your ecological footprint go here.