Want to know how society"s doing? Forget GDP – try these alternatives | Mark Rice-Oxley

Here are the week’s leading indicators. The Dow Jones industrial average topped 20,000 points for the first time. British GDP grew 0.6% in the final quarter of 2016. The FTSE 100 and Germany’s DAX 30 persisted close to record highs, while US GDP softened slightly.

Bored yet? I am. As a former financial journalist, I’m well acquainted with the merry-go-round of indicators that blip in and out of our lives like digital dopamine, telling us how well we’re doing. As a human being, I’m increasingly alarmed that these are just irrelevant numbers that have little or no bearing on how well we are really doing.

Stock market indices have long been decoupled from what is happening in the real world. All they reflect is the performance of big private pension pots belonging to the haves (in Britain only 58% of people have private pensions and the majority of those really very small), and how big the bonuses of a few thousand money men (yes, mostly men) will be this year.

Indeed, a company’s share price rising might be an indication of a round of redundancies or other cost-cutting which makes shareholders richer at the expense of staff. The number of people who should celebrate the Dow hitting 20k is truly tiny. Most of them wouldn’t be much fun to go out for a beer with.

As for GDP, has there ever been an acronym as spellbindingly dismal as this? GDP goes up if you sit in traffic for an hour with the engine ticking over. It doesn’t if you stay at home, caring for a sick child. GDP has soared in China over the past 20 years. Now its people wear masks in the street to filter the smog. GDP can’t measure the things that are really important to us – our health, relationships, environment – but can and does measure when industries strip-mine the Earth to make gimcrack that nobody wants but which people buy anyway, and then throw away.

This is not to deride the herculean efforts of journalists who follow this stuff, like our own Graeme Wearden, who tries to makes sense of the blizzard of financial data spewed out every day here.

Instead, I’d rather suggest a series of other metrics that give a clearer indication of where humanity is at. Perhaps these are the key performance indicators we should hardwire into our reporting calendar:

If we must focus on financial instruments, make it edible commodities. You can’t eat a Treasury bill, after all

One of the lessons of the 20th century was that inequality breeds revolt and revolutions never end well. One of the lessons of the 21st century is that people seem to be determined not to learn the lessons of the 20th century. The Gini coefficient is a crude measure of how unequal societies are becoming. Some economists have been toying with another measure, the Palma ratio, which is better at discerning how much richer the richest cohort are getting, compared with the poorest. Both tell us much about our direction of travel.

If we must focus on financial instruments, edible commodities are surely more interesting than stock and bond prices. You can’t eat a three-month Treasury bill, after all. In 2007/08, a wave of riots swept the developing world as the cost of basic foodstuffs soared. Governments fell. A dotted line joined that manifestation of unrest with the Arab spring four years later. Food matters. We routinely write that as many as a billion people on the planet are hungry, malnourished. That’s far more than the number with Dow Jones tracker funds.

The most scary dataset of all. It goes up every year. And so do global temperatures. If this carries on for another couple of decades, people won’t be inspecting their portfolios – they’ll be foraging in the woods. Has anyone read The Road?

Carbon dioxide graphicCarbon graphic

A veritable bellwether for so much – from the wretched state we’re in psychologically to the inadequacies of our healthcare systems. Prescriptions have doubled in England in the past decade. An interest to declare: I take them, and believe they work for me. But I also firmly believe they are prescribed far too readily, by overstretched GPs who have only six minutes to speak to patients and little recourse to anything other than pills. Personally, I’d be willing to shave a couple of points off GDP in return for a more comprehensive programme to address this 21st-century epidemic.

Not just in the UK, where it’s risen for six years in a row, but in California, Paris, Moscow. Surely, one of the first questions a newly arrived alien might ask upon landing in Britain would be “why do so many of you earthlings live outside?”, and not “how are my BT shares doing?”

Admittedly, this is not a thrilling one to monitor as it doesn’t move much. But it is moving – and in the wrong direction for lots of developed countries. The dependency ratio is the number of working-age people compared with the number of children and those over retirement age. According to the Resolution foundation, there are currently seven dependants for every 10 working-age Britons, but this will increase to eight in the 2020s and nine by 2050.

I’ve barely scratched the surface. Everywhere you look, there are better benchmarks than these tired old financial yardsticks. Let’s retire them, and find a new set of data to measure the performance of our leaders.

Want to know how society"s doing? Forget GDP – try these alternatives | Mark Rice-Oxley

How to escape the overthinking trap: stop judging yourself | Mark Rice-Oxley

Before Christmas I took a young relative to a jazz concert. The thought of it ruined his whole day. He scuffed around the house like an alt-right voter at a refugee camp.

In the event, even he acknowledged that we had a fine time. But neither of us would ever get back the dreadful hours that preceded it. He’d fallen prey to a cardinal paradox – poisoning the present by agonising over a future hardship that never materialised.

We’ve all done that. The homo sapiens is so damn clever, and yet sometimes so stupid with it. We are the only species that can really think “offline” – wrapped up in things that haven’t yet happened or things that are long gone but can never be changed. This makes us excellent problem solvers, but appalling worriers at the same time.

Thinking is what gave humans ascendancy. But overthinking is threatening to bring us down. Critical thinking has undoubtedly advanced our cause and become one of the essential assets of being so brilliantly human, but introspective thinking – our near constant self-evaluation, who we are, where we fit, how we compare – is becoming one of the most destructive aspects of modern life. We must purge it.

We are in thrall to the rigid, judgmental thoughts we think about ourselves, prisoners of the sinewy web of cogitation that tells us we are strong, clever, important, unassertive, patriotic, hopeless, old, fat, hard done by, forgotten – when actually we may be many of these things rolled into one. This narrow view of ourselves shapes impossible expectations that can only lead to disappointment. It ripples outwards into our emotions and our behaviour. The results are to be seen daily on our front pages. A father thinks he is the ultimate authority in his family. When his daughter challenges him, he has her killed. A young man thinks he is strong, identifies through his supposed manliness; it directs his violent behaviour.

Our obsessive thinking about ourselves even informs the air of political revolt that made 2016 such a big turning point. In the richest, healthiest, most prosperous era we have ever known, people punish themselves by ruminating and finding that their lives don’t match up to those they think others are leading. It’s a short step from disappointment to blame, and a protest vote.

Too much of our behaviour is determined not by how things are, but how we think things are

But this overthinking tendency is not limited to politics. It embeds personal misery in an era in which we are tempted, even encouraged, to compare ourselves with other people: the teenager who feels low because of what her Instagram feed makes her think; the thwarted youngster, demoralised by the success of others; the employee who feels insecure because she thinks the boss blanked her on the stairwell; the hypochondriac who thinks he is dying of everything. Think bad, feel bad. Compare and despair. It’s no wonder there is a mental illness epidemic out there. Time to wake up, people. The voice in your head is not who you are. It’s just an excitable commentator. You are the game.

Too much of our behaviour is determined not by how things are, but how we think things are. But this thinking is not worth paying too much attention to, for two reasons. First, it is probably incorrect. Let’s face it: we are hardly objective in evaluating ourselves. We overexaggerate both our talents and failings. This is the original fake news.

And second, whether right or wrong, these self-evaluations simply are not helpful. They just make us feel worse.

We need a completely new relationship with our thoughts. Instead of viewing the world and our experience as we think they ought to be, we need to treat them as they actually are. We need to recognise when we are ruining a day, a week, a moment or a relationship with catastrophic thoughts and judgments, and understand that often it is the thought itself that makes us feel bad, not the experience itself.

But how to cultivate that sense of detachment from a poisonous, unhelpful or just plain wrong stream of thinking? Visual clues can help: a post-it on a computer screen (mine just says “thinking …”) or a screensaver on a phone. I wear a black wristband to remind me why I do this. A discreet tattoo might do the same, if that’s your thing.

Habit is even better: get used to observing, say, the first three thoughts you have upon waking every day – were they functional, workaday, banal; or were they judgmental, apprehensive, punishing? Some people like to use motifs – thoughts as a torrent of traffic, cars driving past, and you don’t have to get in the passenger seat. And that same recurring, corrosive notion can be an ugly polluting SUV that comes, stays and moves on again, without really affecting you. Or else thoughts are a busy stream, chattering away in front of you, often pulling you under. But each time you are submerged, eventually you notice and pull yourself out and sit undisturbed, again and again until it starts to become habit to notice the thought rather than believe it.

Happily, some schools are starting to teach this important element of psychological flexibility. It should be compulsory in secondary schools.The myriad apps that teach the practice of being present in the now are another entry point, helping us cultivate our observing selves, rather than our thinking selves.

Instead of obsessing, fuming, curdling about things we don’t have, we need to accept and celebrate what we do. Instead of worrying about things we can’t control – people’s opinion of us, for example – we need to direct our attentions to things we can influence, and leave the rest be. Instead of judging each other, and – worse – ourselves, let us simply take as we find. Instead of ruining our short time alive by setting expectations of how we think everything should be, from our jobs to our love lives, our children to our prospects, let us accept that some things will not always go as we wish.

You’re not who you think you are. You’re so much more than that.

How to escape the overthinking trap: stop judging yourself | Mark Rice-Oxley

Men – don"t be squeamish, have the balls to have a vasectomy | Mark Rice-Oxley

Vasectomies can go wrong. But then so can crossing the road and eating cashew nuts. It’s a small thing, gents, let’s face it, a very small thing.
Mine took place in 2008. Yes, I had to wear two pairs of tight pants for a few days, and refused to stand in the wall at free-kicks for weeks. Yes, I took a couple of days off work and sat on the sofa watching movies and eating painkillers. But other than that, it was a rather unremarkable experience.

I’d like to be able to report that my surgeon had a twinkle of irony in his eye as he said: “You may feel a little prick.” But he didn’t. He was a humourless fellow. I didn’t mind. A sense of humour is not important in a man who is soldering your vas deferens shut with a red-hot implement (actually the smell of burning is the least pleasant part of it all).
And what are the alternatives? I was never comfortable with my partner taking the pill year after year. Condoms are a drag. Other options seemed rather medieval by comparison. I’m not really one for airing details of my sex life in public, but I think it’s fair to report that things have been quite satisfactory ever since. You just don’t notice the difference. You still ejaculate, it’s still messy. There are so very many worse things that can happen to a man.

There may be good reasons to not opt for the snip. They’re pretty hard to reverse, apparently, even more fiddly than pushing out an elastic drawstring that has been pulled round the back of a pair of tracksuit bottoms. So if there is any notion lurking in the back of your mind that your fathering days might not be over, then think twice. With three kids under five, I knew my procreational phase had to come to an end. I just wanted someone to make it stop.

Vasectomy is not totally infallible, but that’s no reason to procrastinate. It’s still better than any other birth control method – your chances of a surprise are less than 1%.

It’s not clear to me what aspect of having one’s testicles singed has become less appealing to men. Numbers have apparently fallen by two-thirds in a decade. Perhaps it’s a sociological thing. People are having children much later than they used to a couple of generations ago. Millennials who don’t have homes and jobs are eschewing children – and so are hardly likely to opt for the snip before they’ve even started. There are more cases of men having second families than there were 30 years ago, though I’m not sure about cause and effect here.

I’d like to think it’s not because we’ve suddenly become squeamish about this. Because, honestly, there’s nothing to be squeamish about. Trips to the dentist will cause you more discomfort than this. My tonsillectomy was far worse. Now that hurt.

Go on, men, grow a pair, and then have them surgically disconnected.

Men – don"t be squeamish, have the balls to have a vasectomy | Mark Rice-Oxley