Gross Domestic Product has become the dominant measure of national success, but economists Charles Jones and Peter Klenow demonstrate that it captures only a fraction of what makes life good. Their influential paper constructs a welfare metric that incorporates not just consumption but also leisure time, life expectancy, and inequality in the distribution of consumption. The results overturn conventional rankings of national prosperity. Western European countries, which appear substantially poorer than the United States in GDP terms, look much closer to American living standards once leisure and longevity are factored in. Europeans work fewer hours and live longer, compensating for lower output per person. Conversely, many developing countries fare even worse than their GDP suggests because high inequality means the typical person consumes far less than average figures indicate, and shorter lifespans reduce the years over which consumption can be enjoyed. Jones, of Stanford, and Klenow, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, ground their analysis in careful economic theory about what utility functions imply for converting different goods into comparable welfare units. They find that life expectancy improvements alone account for a substantial fraction of welfare growth in poor countries. The paper exemplifies how economic research can move beyond simple metrics to capture human wellbeing more fully, offering policymakers a richer framework for evaluating progress than GDP growth alone provides.