This is a comment on Katharina Lima de Miranda and Dennis Snower’s multidimensional approach for the assessment of human well-being. It applauds the authors for looking “beyond GDP” but urges them to go one step further and replace GDP as a measure of material well-being by growth national income and actual individual consumption. Unlike GDP, these alternative measures for material well-being can be used to single out activities by multinational entities that are largely unrelated to domestic well-being. I will show that multinational entity activities, like the relocation of corporate headquarters and IP assets to Ireland and Luxembourg, have grown in such a substantial way in recent years that they can bias assessments of both material and human well-being.

Compelling visions of how political institutions can be effective and democratic in handling globalization problems is one of our most important predicaments. Political institutions always were deficient in that they were hardly fully effective and democratic. During the prime of liberal democracies, their problem-solving capacity was limited, and the process of making decisions approached democratic ideals at best. Yet the current predicament goes deeper. We lack a compelling vision of ideal political institutions for handling global problems such as climate change. In order to develop this argument, first two criteria for a compelling vision of ideal political institutions are identified. In a second step it is argued that the two currently most crucial institutional visions do not provide convincing accounts for fulfilling these criteria. The paper concludes by suggesting that these weaknesses of both sides of the debate contribute to polarization, thus making the predicament worse.