Social production and the Mental Wealth of nations

This strand develops Mental Wealth, a measure of national prosperity that captures the value of both economic and social production. Social production is the unpaid work people do for one another, including caring for children and older relatives, volunteering, and taking part in community groups. GDP does not record this work, so a policy assessed against GDP alone cannot show whether it increases or reduces it.

I worked on the Mental Wealth programme as systems architect at the University of Sydney's Brain and Mind Centre from 2020 to 2025, and I have been Chief Advisor on AI to the Mental Wealth Initiative since 2024. The papers in this strand set out how Mental Wealth can be measured, modelled and forecast (Frontiers in Public Health, 2022), propose a practical way to value social production and add it to GDP (Nature Mental Health, 2023), and discuss its implications for resilience and productivity (BMJ Global Health, 2023).

The recent work applies the measure to policy. In 2025 we made a submission to the Australian Bureau of Statistics consultation on measuring unpaid care in its Labour Account, and Governing the social production of care (Nature Medicine, 2026) treats unpaid care as part of the foundation of health systems. A further line concerns the transition to generative AI. The iScience paper (2024) proposes Mental Wealth as a framework for a stable transition, a commentary in The Policymaker (2024) asks whether national time banks can strengthen wellbeing economies, and a European Policy Centre commentary (2026) asks whether time released by AI will go to care, volunteering and community participation or to unemployment and inactivity, and argues that social production has to be measured to tell the two apart.