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“Our standard of progress was conceived for a different era with different problems. Our statistics no longer capture the shape of our economy. And this has consequences. Every era needs its own figures. In the eighteenth century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the nineteenth century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the twentieth century, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state. But today it's no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros. From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we're all still fixated on 'efficiency' and 'gains,' as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it's precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail... It's time for a new set of figures.” — Rutger Bregman