A swedish kind of death:

I am guessing (and I would appreciate being corrected if I am wrong) that GDP emerged or at least became important around the time that computerised records of transactionbased taxes came into existence.

GDP emerged out of the work of Simon Kuznets in the 1920's, I believe. Back then it was called National Income. In a way, from the point of view of tax base, replacing the hard to measure National Wealth with the easier to measure (transaction-based) National Income (which measures not wealth but economic activity) makes it easier to tax income than to tax wealth.

Kuznets is credited with revolutionising econometrics, and this work is credited with fueling the so-called Keynesian "revolution". An important book of his is National Income and Its Composition, 1919-1938. Published in 1941, it contains a historically significant work on Gross National Product. His work on the business cycle and disequilibrium aspects of economic growth helped launch development economics. He also studied inequality over time, and his results formed the Kuznets Curve.

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There are two developments at Kuznets time: the emergence of econometrics and the Keynesian Revolution, both of which found in Kuznets's data an important resource for their advancement. Kuznets, however, was neither a Keynesian nor an econometrician - he took his cues from Mitchell's Institutionalism - as exemplified in his 1930 methodological pieces. Whereas Mitchell devoted his life to the study of business cycles, Kuznets turned to other fluctuations - seasonal ones and secular movements - then to national income estimation, and later to studies of economic growth. As a result, his initial work was on the empirical analysis of business cycles (1930) - a 15-20 year cycle he identified was later attached to his name, the "Kuznets Cycle".

It'd be nice if the battle were only against the right wingers, not half of the left on top of that — François in Paris

The US switched off of GNP and onto GDP sometime in the eighties, I think; sorry I can't recall the date, but a quick browser search would nail it down.  My interest:  get off of GDP and onto something like the Index for Sustainable Economic Welfare.  This index corrects several flaws in GDP:

1. GDP doesn't count draw down of natural capital as an expense item.  We lose goods and services (and the quality of life they support) when we lose natural capital.

2.  GDP counts as benefits a lot of transactions that should be counted as costs.  You dent your car, and go get it fixed:  GDP goes up, though the accident was pure cost, not a benefit to you.  Pollution leads to lung disease, which sufferers seek treatment for:  the health care costs go into the ledger as benefits--additions to GDP--when in any sane measure they'd be counted as costs against the productive activity that produced them.

Changing from GDP to ISEW might be as simple as having a president appointing a council of Econmic Advisors who will support it.  There's no law that I know of that says we have to use GDP or GNP or any particular measure.  

And it would be great if NPR's "Marketplace" would start reporting the ISEW everytime they report on GDP.  Come to think of it, that's an idea I'll see if I can get anywhere with.

Industrial society is not sustainable. Unsustainable systems change--or disappear.