[p0pularopinion]

GDP is not useful to measure how good an economy works. The core problem of GDP is that it does not account for usefulness of spending.

GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.

[gadders]

If you had a Rawlsian veil pulled over your eyes and someone said to you "You won't know how rich you will be in that society, but would you rather live in a top ten GDP per Capita country or a bottom ten?" I think we all know what we would reply.

Granted it might not be fine grained enough to distinguish between Number 4 and Number 5 on the list.

[p0pularopinion]

Might still be a useless indicator considering that many of the low GDP countries also rank badly in other indicators that are often taken into consideration more broadly, like quality of life indicies, corruption indices or just the Gini coefficient. Correlation does not mean causation