For decades, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been a standard yardstick for measuring living standards around the world. (The U.S., at $14 trillion, remains far above any other single nation in GDP.) Martha Nussbaum would rather use something that actually works. This is the topic of our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the link in box at right, or read the transcript here.)

Nussbaum is a philosopher by training and a professor of law at the University of Chicago. In her new book, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, she argues that we should listen less to economists who tout GDP as a valuable measure of human welfare and look at all the things that GDP fails to capture — like what sort of opportunities are available to people, or as she puts it, “What are people really able to do and to be?”

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