Nigeria, May 9 -- The President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwunmi Adesina, ruffled presidential feathers on Monday when he said in a speech during the 20th Anniversary dinner of the financial services company, Chapel Hill Denham, that Nigerians were better off in 1960 than they are today.

The Special Adviser to the President (Information and Strategy), Bayo Onanuga, immediately disagreed, saying that Adesina used a narrow, perhaps one of the most contested metrics, to measure the country's progress. Both Adesina and Onanuga were right and wrong.

What's In a Measure?

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the most common measure of the size of an economy, measures the size of goods and services produced by that economy in a given...