All these elements are often but imperfectly correlated with measures of economic activity like the gross domestic product, itself a useful but limited indicator whose utilisation as an exclusive gauge has at times come under comprehensible criticism. In this regard, let us start with two issues. The first concerns labour, work.
As Voltaire’s Turk explains to Candide, work serves to ward off not just need, but also boredom and vice. If our living conditions have improved so enormously over the past few centuries, we owe it largely to one fundamental institution, the market, which made it possible to transcend the old subsistence economy based on barter.