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For the better part of a century, Gross Domestic Product has served as the preeminent metric by which nations gauge their economic health and societal progress. Yet a growing cadre of economists, ecologists, and policymakers are mounting a cogent challenge to this orthodoxy, arguing that GDP is not merely an incomplete measure of well-being but a fundamentally misleading one. The post-growth movement contends that the relentless pursuit of economic expansion is ecologically unsustainable, socially inequitable, and, beyond a certain threshold of material sufficiency, fails to correlate with improvements in human happiness or quality of life. The limitations of GDP as a welfare indicator are well-documented. It counts expenditure on armaments and environmental cleanup as positive contributions to the economy, while assigning no value to unpaid domestic labor, volunteerism, or the preservation of natural ecosystems. It is indifferent to the distribution of wealth: a nation in which a tiny elite captures the vast majority of income growth will register the same GDP increase as one in which prosperity is widely shared. The economist Simon Kuznets, who was instrumental in developing the national income accounting system, himself cautioned that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income." Post-growth economists propose an array of alternative frameworks. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) adjusts GDP by incorporating factors such as income distribution, the value of household work, and the costs of environmental degradation and crime. Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index foregrounds psychological well-being, cultural preservation, ecological resilience, and good governance. Kate Raworth's "Doughnut Economics" model envisions an economy that operates within a "safe and just space"—above a social foundation that ensures basic human needs are met, and below an ecological ceiling that respects planetary boundaries. Critics of the post-growth paradigm raise several objections. They argue that economic growth remains indispensable for lifting populations out of poverty, particularly in the Global South, and that technological innovation can decouple growth from environmental destruction—a process known as "green growth." They also contend that abandoning the growth imperative would be politically untenable, as it undergirds employment, investment, and public finance structures. Nevertheless, the post-growth discourse has gained considerable traction in policy circles. The European Commission has explored "beyond GDP" indicators, and several governments have begun publishing well-being budgets. Whether the post-growth critique will catalyze a fundamental restructuring of economic governance or remain a heterodox intellectual current is a question whose answer will profoundly shape the trajectory of the twenty-first century.