PERSON

Diane Coyle

The Cambridge economist who has spent two decades proving that the dashboard governments use to navigate the economy is measuring the wrong things—and that the AI transition is now blowing the gap between what is counted and what matters to a scale that governance can no longer afford to ignore.

Diane Coyle has spent her career saying the same thing in different rooms: that the metrics nations use to evaluate their economic health were designed for an economy that no longer exists, and that the gap between what the metrics measure and what citizens actually experience accumulates silently until it becomes a crisis. Gross domestic product—the number that dominates every budget debate, every central bank model, every politician’s talking points—was invented in 1934 to help Franklin Roosevelt count wartime production capacity. It measures market transactions and nothing else; it cannot see household work, consumer surplus, quality change, wellbeing, or sustainability. For most of the twentieth century the omissions were tolerable because the relationship between market production and human welfare was roughly stable. The digital economy strained the relationship. The AI transition is breaking it. Coyle’s argument, developed across GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, Cogs

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