In the opening example, Pilling discusses income vs. wealth of a banker and gardener. One of the more interesting (and novel) approaches I've seen to this question comes from Yonatan Zunger based on discussions over the past few years, and culminating in his Medium essay, "What is Your 'Financial Shock' Wealth?", which examines financial security by an individual's (or organisation's) capability to withstand financial shocks of various sizes, and then looks at the likelihood of such shocks.

https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6dc1...

So far as moving the discussion of poverty forward, this strikes me as a significant advance, and one I'm not aware of having been made elsewhere in the economic literature.

But that's still not GDP.

On that front, I've been looking at combining a number of concepts, a key element of which is the idea of tiers or levels of economic activity. There are classifications ranging from 3-5. One of the first such I'm aware of comes in Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (I'm exploring the origins of that notion), and one of the latter being the one James Beniger gives in his 1986 book, The Control Revolution Breaking that out as bullets, but other wise quoting Beniger.

* The primary sector -- agriculture, fishing, lumber, mining, oil and gas -- represents the extraction of matter from the environment to produce energy, including the calories to sustain individual organisms.

* The secondary sector -- processing primary goods, as in construction and manufacturing -- represents the synthesis of matter and energy into more organized forms (negentropy).

* The tertiary sector, including transportation and utilities, represents the infrastructure for distributing matter and energy about the system, while ...

* the quaternary sector -- trade, finance, insurance, and real estate -- constitutes a parallel infrastructure for the collection, processing, and distribution of information that is necessary in all living system for the control of material flows.

* Finally, the "highest" of all sectors in its remove from the physical environment is the quinary sector, including government, law, and education, representing the societal programming -- socialization, education, law making -- and collective or representative decision making to effect control.

You can quibble over which activities should attend which tier (trade and commerce are often classed with #3, giving #4 exclusive domain of the FIRE sector, which has certain coherences). There's a strong correspondence between these levels and classifications of industrial sectors (the SIC, NAICS, or ISIC). There's also some correspondence to the classifications of goods early classical economists derived (particularly Smith), and perhaps to technological mechanisms.

What I see, though, is that actual useful benefit derives from the first two tiers, with the others being necessary but not of themselves directly of use -- they're coordination, management, and information flows. Moreover, you can divide the primary sector into stocks and flows, where virtually all extractive material and energy sourcing is drawing down of some natural stock, whilst agriculture, forestry, fishing, and renewable energy are (or at least can be) sustainable, taking from a flow as that flow is replenished.

Accounting for the stock draw-down, and not counting the outputs of the 3rd - 5th sectors as "useful", would tend to arrive at a much-modified measure of GDP. And one almost certainly much smaller than is presently computed.

I'm looking at how valid such measures might be, and the history of GDP formulation. It's interesting. (Kuznets is among those who argued for a three-tiered economic classification.) More discussion at the link below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking...