Accounting for national success and failure: Rethinking the UK case

► Using the British case we reveal that the standard measure of GDP is a misleading indicator of success and failure. ► The national accounting aggregate of GDP abstracts from specific economic context(s) and challenges facing the British economy and limits policy options. ► Policy makers should engage in national specifics and a more sophisticated deconstructed reading of measures such as GDP. ► What is needed is a progressive kind of bricolage where financial and physical numbers generated by socially minded accountants are deployed to inform a new political arithmetic in the aftermath of the financial crisis.