What indicators could replace the GDP to measure how well a nation is doing?

Quality of living, Low environmental impact, distribution of wealth, healthy people, whether or not strangers smile at you on the street.

Personal happiness.

Too much trouble to sample the population. I suggest picking an exemplar and using that.

I humbly offer to take the burden of being that exemplar.

Now, MAKE ME HAPPY!!!!

First, I will tell you from your list what I do not think should be included and why. Presuming this measure would be used for all countries around the world. Quality of life – the parameters of this would have to be clearly defined and it is difficult to judge quality of life for differing areas in the US let alone all the countries in the world. Number of fundraisers – I could see percentage of GDP donated annually. (Adding up every single person and corporation’s donations.) Or maybe number of charitable organizations per capita. General well-being – highly subjective. Low drug usage – drug usage would have to be defined and all nations would have to agree on the legalities of drugs, problematic at best. Low levels of superstition – someone’s religion is someone else’s superstition, as demonstrated many times on this site alone. Number of Nobel prize winners – this could and probably would create a problem with corruption. Number of medals at the Olympic Games – this is hardly an objective source of information for an entire population.

Now, the ones I can think of and I know they probably need tweeking.
1. Percentage of population above poverty line – poverty line would have to be defined internationally and may be problematic as countries could lower poverty line to make themselves look better.
2. Percentage of population requiring government financial assistance. In this I include only monetary type assistance i.e. welfare, food stamps, unemployment, SS for disability (but not retirement, I will explain this later). Many countries have national health care and this should not count as government assistance as it would create 100% in many nations, but it could be used as an additional note in this or another category. I would not count SS for retirement as people have paid into this particular program and it has become a safety net for many individuals.
3. Percentage of retirees living at or below poverty line – this would assist with not counting SS in government financial assistance. A subset (just because it may be enlightening) – retirees who would be at or below poverty line without SS. Another subset – retirees whose only source of income is SS or any form of government assistance.
4. Infant/child mortality rates – shown as a percentage of population below a certain age.
5. Longevity – the average age of death not including the population counted in the infant/child mortality rates.
6. Educational levels – percentage of population with varying levels of education. This would indicate how important education was in a country as well as the ease in gaining the education. I am making the assumption that if a country values education it should/would make it easier for everyone to attain education.
7. Unemployment – percentage of job seeking population unemployed. The distinction would need to be made for job seeking. I currently do not work outside of the home, but nor am I trying to find a job so I would not count. There are also students who are unemployed who are not seeking employment. There are also those who are independently wealthy who are voluntarily unemployed.

These are just my thoughts I am sure there are more and some may be entirely irrelevant.

@optimisticpessimist – quite clearly wrong. It entirely misses my previous post. That didn’t make me happy. Get with the program. -1 on the happiness scale.

Percentage of incarcerations to total population.

@gmander – Make you happy? Well, a good way to increase your happiness is having a job that allows you to use your strengths every day. Is that the case?

@optimisticpessimist – Thanks for sharing your views. They do make a lot of sense. For longevity I think this should be combined with reasonable health at an old age (to discount prolonging pain unnecessarily).

@gmander I did say they may need some tweeking so you just tweeked and simplified the entire process. Good job! A lot of money saved by avoiding all such statistics which require multitudes of data to be processed.

@Cruiser That’s a good one.

@mattbrowne Parameters of reasonable health would need to be defined.

@optimisticpessimist You didn’t leave out too many indicators…all good ones too! ;)

To go along with what @Cruiser said, would also add crime stats based on percentage of population. Including only crimes which are illegal in all countries i.e. murder, rape, theft.

I would add to @optimisticpessimist one other – access to health care.

Poverty is relative—some people living below the poverty line in the US are wealthy compared to others in third world countries. Drug usage is not necessarily undesirable—a huge percentage of the US population use prescription drugs, and many of the problems associated with illegal drugs stem from the fact that they are illegal.

Good point, @ratboy – How about personality-modifying drug use?

Although not technically (as far as I know), poverty is relative even within the US. Earning $60,000 is not the same in rural America as it is in most urban settings. It is more about what you can purchase with the same amount of money than the actual amount of money. When I said, “poverty line would have to be defined internationally,” I meant a global accord would need to be reached on what constitutes poverty as in purchasing power (which would vary widely even within a country) not an actual dollar (or other currency) amount.

Access to health care was also mentioned by @zenvelo. Although it is a good thing to have noted, it would also cause problems. Some nations have universal health care, others have insurance based. In some countries, you would probably be fortunate to have a doctor or hospital within an hour’s drive let alone free access when needed.

There are hardly any areas of completely objective data to determine how well a nation is doing. Even in the areas where completely objective data is available, many variables exist and the amount of data processing required to crunch all those numbers would invariably leave something out.