 A subfield of welfare economics focused on the possibility of making social welfare judgments on the basis of national income. An increase in national income may reflect an increase in social welfare under some stringent assumptions, most conspicuously the assumption that the distribution of incomes is socially optimal. Although very restrictive, this kind of result has a lasting influence, in theory (international economics) and in practice (the salience of GDP growth in policy discussions). There exists a school of social indicators (see the Social Indicators Research journal) which fights this influence and the number of alternative indicators (of happiness, genuine progress, social health, economic well-being, etc.) has soared in the last decades (see e.g. Miringoff and Miringoff 1999, Frey and Stutzer 2002, Kahneman et al. 2004 and Gadrey and Jany-Catrice 2006).