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As the number of household surveys has steadily increased over time, available measures of economic development are now greater in number and more detailed than ever before. They provide not only data on household incomes and expenditure, but also direct measures of health, and in particular with regard to anthropometrics, child and youth mortality and self-reported levels of wellbeing and emotional experience. For the first time we are able to compile global maps drawing on multiple components of human wellbeing. The latest round of the International Comparison Project (ICP) collected prices of comparable goods across 146 countries, many of which had not previously been surveyed. These new data open up a number of avenues for understanding the economic development of nations and individuals. Yet problems of interpretation and consistency between the different types of data remain. Why is global poverty not declining as fast as might be expected given the rate of global economic growth? Why do the inhabitants of India consume fewer and fewer calories when their nutritional status is poor and their incomes are increasing rapidly? Why does economic growth not always go hand in hand with an improvement in self-reported wellbeing? How should the marked increases in estimates of global poverty and inequality that derive from the latest ICP data be interpreted? This paper addresses these questions and identifies key issues that need to be resolved.