A Government Changes What It Counts

Abstract

A city can draw a portrait of itself. A national government has a harder task, because it holds the purse, the statute book and the measures by which everyone else is judged. When a government changes what it counts, every ministry, council and contractor below it eventually changes what it reports, and a little later, what it does. That is the hope. The record is more interesting than the hope, and this chapter reads it from two places that tried: Wales, which wrote the future into law in 2015, and New Zealand, which organised a national budget around wellbeing in 2019. Neither government used the word doughnut in its founding documents, and neither drew Raworth's ring. They belong in this book because they did the thing the ring asks of any organisation in its first year. They separated the size of the economy from its purpose, they named a floor of human needs and a ceiling of living limits in the same breath, and they built machinery to keep both in view after the speeches were over.