Count longer work hours as contributions to economic growth and prosperity. Ignore the value of free time. Assign no value to health, security, wisdom, environmental quality or strong communities. Make no distinction between economic activities that create benefit and those that cause harm. But that's only the end of the pipe.
Fear of crime is worth more.
All that spending made the economy grow. American workers now work longer hours than in any industrialized country, producing more and more stuff. They have long passed the Japanese who used to be the world's longest-hour workers. All that extra work makes the economy grow, as does the spending on drugs and heart disease that follow. The principal architect of the GDP, Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets, warned 40 years ago that national income measures should never be used to assess the welfare of a nation the way they are today.