Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the numbers announced in her monthly jobs report.

The bureau reports not only on jobs, but also on inflation and compensation. All those numbers affect policy and politics. Slowing job growth might encourage the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Higher inflation might call into question the Trump administration’s tariff policy. Compensation growth rates might affect voters’ choices in next year’s midterm elections.

And yet, there’s more to making the United States the kind of country we want to live in than can be found in economic indicators alone. Of course, it’s vital that Americans have enough to eat, a place to live and a job. But there are other vitally important numbers that should also affect our national policies.

Back in 1968, one of my political heroes made a speech at the University of Kansas during his campaign for the presidency. Then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy spoke first of the national shame when Americans, especially children, were not adequately nourished. Even after poverty is wiped out, though, he believed, “Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.” He goes on to point out that building prisons, manufacturing bombs and guns, running cigarette ads and cutting down redwood forests all count toward the gross national product. Measuring economic output alone does not account for:

“The health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the slain president and the father of the current secretary of Health and Human Services, was no naive, airheaded politician. The adjective most associated with him was “ruthless.” He took on Fidel Castro, the Communist dictator of Cuba, and Jimmy Hoffa, the boss of the Teamsters Union, as well as Lyndon B. Johnson, the formidable vice president and then president of the United States.

So, 57 years after RFK spoke out, shouldn’t we put the government’s statistics people to work on measuring what makes life worthwhile? If we did, we might have a different country. One that values educating children over mining coal. One that cherishes its novelists, poets, musicians and painters. One that looks to public figures for integrity. One that cares for the unfortunate. One whose citizens empathize with their political opponents rather than demonize them.

If ranked by gross domestic product per capita alone, the United States is in fourth place among the world’s nations. But the World Happiness Report adds five more criteria to the ratings: social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make one’s own life choices, generosity of the general population and perceptions of internal and external corruption levels. With those criteria included, the U.S falls to 23rd place, while the top five slots are held by Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Israel.

It’s time to listen to what Robert F. Kennedy told us.

Hanging on my office wall is a quote from the ancient sage Ben Zoma. He asks, “Who is wealthy?” and answers this way: “Those who are happy with what they have.” Seeking to measure what makes life worthwhile is no easy task, nor is adjusting government policies to foster that goal. But these are challenges we Americans should undertake.

Trump may not like the numbers that are being reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but he’s not even looking at so many of the most important ones.

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard.