
The case against GDP: time to change the way we measure the wealth of nations - fmihaila
https://www.ft.com/content/765781fe-f136-11e7-b220-857e26d1aca4
======
stretchwithme
If I invented a cheap machine that did all your housework and fixed your car
for free, GDP would fall. Despite the fact that everybody's lives would be
permanently improved.

Say a person saves his money and lends it to people in another country. He's
creating wealth for himself. The other country is getting further into debt.
Maybe the money is spent frivolously or invested in a soon-to-collapse bubble.
Or it's spent on productive investments. Either way, the effect on GDP is the
same. And it goes to the borrowing country, not the one accumulating assets
(unless the borrower makes successful investments).

As individuals, trying to maximize our own GDP would mean spending every
dollar we get and avoiding investments that could reduce how much we need to
spend to live our lives. That's the opposite of our best interests.

~~~
lordnacho
I think a more apt example is this.

It's definitely bad to live in a society where violence and robbery are
common. We'd rather be without those things.

But if everyone spends money on bodyguards, that ends up in GDP.

In a comparable society where violence and robbery was not common, you would
use the money for other things that are definitely preferred over giving it to
bodyguards, security camera shops, locksmiths, and so on.

So measuring GDP in the way we do is defective; it gives near equal figures
for both societies when clearly one is better than the other.

~~~
kaycebasques
Are there any GDP alternatives or variations that attempt to give more weight
to socially-positive output and less weight to anti-social output?

~~~
ferongr
What is "socially-positive" output and who gets to decide that?

~~~
naravara
Whatever consensus based decision making body your society uses to engage in
collective action.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Well, that would make it hard to impossible to compare different societies, or
the same society at different times.

Even if we ignore corruption and bad incentives, values change.

~~~
naravara
So change the metrics with them.

Cross comparisons are certainly not that valuable if the metric you’re using
to compare is motivating people to engage in maladaptive policy.

------
FiatLuxDave
A child goes to the doctor for a checkup. The nurse weights the child and
measures their blood pressure. After the doctor checks out the child, the
parent picks them up and asks, "So, how much bigger are you than last year?"
Smiling, child replies "120 over 80!".

GDP is important, because it is a measure of economic activity. That is like
blood pressure for the economy. Unlike humans, where our blood pressure is
pretty constant, the economy has periods of with lots of money flowing and
times with little. This is the reason why politicians and smart media people
focus on it, because it indicates are we in recovery or recession.

That is not the same thing as measuring change in wealth. That is like gaining
weight (in the healthy sense of a child growing). When the GDP goes up, it
doesn't mean more wealth, it means more money changed hands.

Like managers are taught, what you measure is what you get. We as a society
focus too much on moving money around and too little on generating wealth.

~~~
hammock
That is a wordy way to say that national wealth is a stock and GDP is a flow.
How does it relate to the criticism of GDP at hand?

~~~
neilwilson
National wealth is a flow. The supply of bread is somewhat more important than
creating piles of gold bars.

~~~
emiliobumachar
That's some extreme cherry-picking. What about sugary drinks versus house
construction? There are good and bad consumables, and there are good and bad
durables.

------
whack
The author brings up a good point wrt GDP not accounting for debt. If the US
were to borrow $1tn from China and splurged it all on military spending, we'd
see a massive increase in GDP next year, but we would only be impoverishing
ourselves in the long run.

Adjusting the GDP figures to account for foreign-debt, and investments held by
foreigners, seems like something that can be computed objectively, and would
still serve as a superior metric.

~~~
cryptonector
Another way to think of it is that China would be giving us $1trn worth of
stuff for only the cost of servicing that $1trn of debt (remember to subtract
inflation). Does that make us or them poorer? Think carefully.

~~~
shard972
So the only way the US comes out ahead in that situation is through playing
games with inflating the currency while lying about it to recoup the costs of
servicing the debt.

In the end, once the US is caught with it's pants down it will definitely not
be making the US any richer.

~~~
cryptonector
All fiat currencies have significant inflation though. Few also benefit from
mercantilists incessantly wanting to sell products for that currency.

Mind you, mercantilism can have significant detrimental effects on the
importer -- no doubt. But it's not all roses for the mercantilist exporter
either.

Really, a multi-decade trade imbalance is not a good thing for anyone, but
it's not that clear who is the worst off.

~~~
handsomechad
Why is a multi-decade trade surplus bad? Doesn't that mean you have an
extremely productive / competitive economic engine?

Is it bad because of the opportunity cost of not levering up and investing
research and future productivity growth?

~~~
fjsolwmv
You are giving goods to people in exchange for IOUs, but those IOUs can't be
redeemed for anything you want, by assumption

~~~
cryptonector
Correct.

The only way you can use those IOUs is if the roles are reversed and the U.S.
starts maintaining a trade surplus with the rest of the world (and so the rest
of the world a trade deficit with the U.S.).

Before the dollar became the reserve currency of the world, the world settled
trade in gold. With gold as the reserve currency it was very important to not
run out of gold, and this served to keep trade balanced in the long term (and
probably also served to keep the lid on growth of international trade, since
to buy one kind of thing you'd have to sell some other kind). Incidentally,
the concept of comparative advantages is probably a lot more meaningful in the
context of balanced trade...

But the dollar is the reserve currency. Which means that the world maintains a
trade surplus with the U.S. Which means they export things to the U.S. in
exchange for IOUs that will get them nothing much (it does help to defend
their currencies during crises, but not much more).

Meanwhile, Chinese people (in China) are effectively paid less than they
should be for the labor they put into manufacturing things to sell to the U.S.
This is obvious in that China forces exporters to exchange their dollars for
Renminbi, which means those exporters can't buy other things with those
dollars than Renmimbi. Also, all those factories in China make things people
want in the U.S., not things that people want in _China_ (though maybe there's
a lot of overlap).

So my take is that mercantilism hurts the mercantilist. It does also hurt the
importer in different ways: by reducing employment, for example, and removing
productive assets for another, and these things might hurt more when it comes
time to rebalance world trade. Who knows, maybe Chinese people in China and
Americans will gladly continue this state of affairs. But somehow I doubt it.

------
dilippkumar
GDP measures of the value of the total economic output. Take two countries
with similar population in 2016 [1] - Mexico (127,540,423) and
Japan(127,748,513) and compare it with the GDP of the two countries[2] -
Mexico(1 Trillion USD), Japan (4.9 Trillion USD).

This says nothing about the wealth of Japan or Mexico. It does say that the
Japanese economy is producing 4x more than the Mexican economy.

This metric is interesting in itself. When taken alongside the resources
consumed by Japan and Mexico, or the population of Japan and Mexico, one can
determine which country is using it's resources more efficiently and which
population is more efficient at producing things of value.

When historical GDP numbers are taken into account along with a history of
government policies, it provides insight into how efficient the government
bureaucracy is, how efficient the financial markets are, how education and
computerized tools are impacting the economy and so on.

The author appears to have completely missed the point behind GDP.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_\(United_Nations\))

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\))

~~~
dragonwriter
> This metric is interesting in itself. When taken alongside the resources
> consumed by Japan and Mexico, or the population of Japan and Mexico, one can
> determine which country is using it's resources more efficiently and which
> population is more efficient at producing things of value.

Except you can't, reliably. If I mow my lawn and cook my dinner, and my
neighbor does the same, it has no contribution to GDP. If I mow my neighbors
lawn for $5 and mow mine as well, and my neighbor cooks my dinner for $5 and
cooks his own as well, well, look, $10 of GDP.

GDP measured value of _traded_ output, not total output, and so doesn't
measure how effectively resources are used. You can make assumptions about the
relations between the two values being constant, but that's probably not true
across societies with different cultural patterns, or even in the same country
over time given cultural change.

GDP is, for many purposes, apparently the best measure we have. But we
shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking it tells us more than it does.

------
benjaminjackman
The best metric we used when optimizing low latency systems was fixing the
slowest outlier. Maybe a similar metric could be used for economies eg
focusing on the worse off person.

~~~
fjsolwmv
This is the Gini Coefficient

~~~
yorwba
The Gini coefficient is about the relative inequality in a distribution. If
everyone were brought down to the level of the person who is currently worst
off, the Gini coefficient would improve, although everyone's quality of life
decreased.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/vXmyX](http://archive.is/vXmyX)

~~~
tweezy
Thank you.

------
lkrubner
Related, an excerpt:

 _One of my pet peeves are people who try to reduce a vector to a scalar, with
no admission of the information loss. For some reason, this has become
accepted practice when it comes to estimating our standard of living.

Suppose the economy grows 5% but violent crime goes up 10%. Has the standard
of living increased?

Suppose the price of gasoline declines 30% but people stop going to church.
Has the standard of living increased?

Suppose the price of cell phone plans decline 90% but the people who speak
your language become a minority, and people who speak a different language
become the majority. Has your standard of living increased?

Suppose your wages increase 10% but the amount of air pollution increases
200%. Has your standard of living increased?

Suppose your wages increase 20% but the government changes the law to make it
easier for companies to fire workers, so you face a greater risk of losing
your job. Has your standard of living increased?

In every case, we are talking about a vector that can not be reduced to a
scalar without information loss._

[http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/if-women-had-
invented...](http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/if-women-had-invented-
economics-there-would-be-no-assumption-of-a-global-optimum)

~~~
jxramos
even with all these itemized points it's still not enough information, if
violent crime was already low, and a 10% bump of low is still low.

~~~
FabHK
> it's still not enough information

That's the point.

------
novaRom
The very first impression after I land at any US airport is - why everything
is so inefficient and of such a low quality? Roads, hotel rooms,
transportation, food - everything looks inferior to what you see in an average
European country. But still, US has higher GDP. Strange.

~~~
danans
The total US GDP is higher because the US population is gigantic compared to
typical European countries.

The US GDP-per-capita (adjusted for purchasing power) [1] is only somewhat
higher than highly developed European countries.

Given the relatively small GDP gap, the differences you are seeing have to
with different cultural and therefore political priorities around spending on
public infrastructure and social goods like education and job training.
Different as in less.

Also, a lot of the US pattern of production and consumption is based on
premise of disposability (with the notable exception of some infrastructure
built leading up to WWII).

That has an effect on the durability and perceived quality of the things you
see and experience in the US.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

~~~
andrestan
Even by your source, US GDP PPP per capita is quite significantly higher than
most European countries. Most larger European countries are ~75% of the US as
a rule of thumb.

~~~
sulam
Oil and finance distort things quite a lot. Therefore Norway and Ireland.

------
bcheung
The GDP is only an approximate measure and is only roughly correlated with
wealth.

There are many things that contribute to GDP but do absolutely nothing to
increase wealth, prosperity, or productivity.

This funny video reminds me of that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBgJqgUmSZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBgJqgUmSZE)

Summary from the video:

Person A says he'll pay Person B $20K to eat poop.

Person A does it.

Person B says he'll pay person A $20K to eat poop.

Person B does it.

Nobody is wealthier. They both ate poop. Yet $40K was contributed to the GDP.

Moral of the story: Don't eat poop.

~~~
epistasis
(I can't access this article, so I hope people will excuse this comment that
is not informed by the article.)

That all depends on how much Person A and Person B enjoy watching coprophagia
performances, doesn't it? If either Person A or B wanted something more with
that $20k, they could have gotten that instead.

The $2k I spend at the opera each year doesn't increase "wealth, prosperity,
or productivity" from the view of people that don't enjoy opera, but I
certainly feel that it increases my prosperity.

The bigger problem with the GDP is it not counting serious economic activity
that does not have an exchange of dollars, such as child care in a family. A
stay-at-home parent does not get compensated for their work, but that work
definitely has value as evidenced by the cost of day care.

~~~
brownbat
Yeah, the more canonical counterexample/paradox about GDP is different... and
you hint at it at the end.

Imagine I stay at home watching my kids and you stay at home to watch your
kids. Nothing is added to GDP.

However, what if I pay you $20 to watch my kids for the night, and you pay me
$20 to watch your kids for the night? The same amount of work was done, we
each up with the same amount of cash as before, but we've somehow added $40 to
GDP. (There are no new performance arts events in this case, everything's
literally the same as it was before.)

You might think at first this is a quirk of child care... but you can run the
hypo with other industries.

Imagine two bakers on the same street in friendly competition. Each of their
families goes through a loaf a week, one from their own production.

What if, one day, each baker wants to check out the competition, buys one of
the other bakers' loafs? Each family eats the same amount of bread and each
baker produces the same amount of loaves. GDP goes up by the full price of the
loaves.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
GDP does not have to be accurate to be useful, it just needs to be consistent
for comparison.

~~~
FabHK
Question is how strong the argument is that it isn't.

To pick up on the examples provided above, you could live in a friendly caring
community where you occasionally babysit family B's babies and they
occasionally babysit yours, for free.

Or you could live in a materialistic community where you won't babysit family
B's babies unless they pay you, and they won't either.

Community 2 will have a higher GDP.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
Couple of thoughts on this.

1\. GDP would still be useful to show growth in the same community over time.

2\. It sounds like an edge-case, and when talking on national scales across
most of the big economies very few countries actually operates like that to a
significant degree. GDP is of not too precise but still pretty alright on a
big picture level.

3\. If there is a demand for it an adjuster can be made. Well I'm not an
economist so there might already be one. I'm sure someone thought of this at
some point.

4\. GDP values are not cumulative, so even if there's an error in one year it
does not stack and fixes itself in future years.

~~~
fjsolwmv
A recent trend here on HN is complaining about the loss of free-range
childhood. Quality of life is dropping in this dimension, but it isn't seen in
GDP.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
It'll be in GDP eventually when the child ends up less productive.

------
credit_guy
The GDP is not invariant to the “Sound of Music” case: a widower marries his
children’s governess. Before the wedding, her work was paid, and it counted
towards the GDP. After the wedding she puts in the same work, or more, and her
implicit pay is probably higher, but she is completely invisible to the GDP.

Similarly, when a company aqcuires a supplier, the flow of products and cash
between them stops counting towards the GDP. Conversely, if Target creates a
real estate company and starts paying rent to it (Bill Ackman’s idea when he
was Target’s largest shareholder), a few billion dollars would show up in the
GDP from nowhere.

The GDP is an accident of the granularity of the economy. All things being
equal, a more vertically integrated economy will have a lower GDP than a more
granular one.

------
danieltillett
If we are going to stick with GDP we should at least use GDP per hour worked
[0] so we look at the only thing that matters in the long run - labour
efficiency.

Looking at this I am amazed how much more efficient Australian labour is than
New Zealand labour $55.87 verse $36.83.

0\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_hour_worked)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Except the easy way to increase productivity is to fire all the low paid
workers, productivity would go up but I'm not sure that would be desirable.

~~~
danieltillett
Or the alternative of raising the minimum wage.

No business is going to fire a worker they need to increase the nation's GDP
per hour worked, but as an aim for the nation it would be better if everyone
if we worked towards increasing the efficiency of labour.

------
maxxxxx
We should have a number that combines numbers like GDP, average net worth,
average wage and inflation. This may give a better balanced picture of an
economy. The current GDP growth is pretty useless if it goes mostly into the
pockets of a few.

~~~
dragonwriter
Or we could have multiple different numbers (including all the things you
describe, plis employment measures, plus medians where you've already named
averages, plus gini coefficients of wealth and income, plus other
distributional measures, plus...) and recognize that the economy is
multidimensional and how to balance the importance of those dimensions is a
matter of ongoing debate.

Which is what we—when we choose to look beyond what mass media focus on as the
headline number—already have.

~~~
maxxxxx
Totally agree. It just seems that public discourse likes single factors.

------
zeveb
This basically works out to the difference between income & net worth — and
it's as important to nations as it is to people.

------
freech
As soon as a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a useful measure.

~~~
dredmorbius
Goodhart's Law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
acd
The current economy including GDP does not account for garbage and co2
emisssions. If we only optimize in one dimension for maximum GDP output then
we will have huge economic output and also destroy the planet we are living
on.

We should optimize for gross happiness and long term sustainability. Gross
happiness include more vacation, using sustainable materials like wood and
metal instead of cheap plastics. Recycle more materials in the goods we
consume so that its a continuous cycle instead of buy consume and throw.

If we prized the carbon emission on the production and transportation of all
goods we would have a totally different economy.

The automation economy allows us to be both rich and have more spare time.

------
choward
While we're at it, can we stop talking about the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

------
yodsanklai
All of this seems to be well-known and convincing. Yet, GDP is still the only
metric media and politicians seem to care about. Is it a another case of the
"emperor has no clothes"?

~~~
gozur88
I think unemployment is more politically significant. The followup question
for anyone reporting a rising GDP is "sure, but what does this do for job
growth?"

~~~
vkou
Unemployment is even less useful then GDP. At least GDP is some sort of proxy
for how well-off a country is.

You can have 0% unemployment (I hear North Korea is currently there), with
mostly poverty-line wages with everyone making a meager third-world living, or
you can have 30% unemployment with everyone being relatively better off, with
fewer people working more productive jobs, and paying for an overall social
safety net/others to go to school/raise children/retire. I'd far rather live
in the second society, then the first.

~~~
gozur88
While it's true you can't have 0% unemployment in a free market, going from,
say, 8% to 5% is a big deal that helps in a lot of ways.

30% unemployment, the way it's normally defined, means 30% of your population
are looking for jobs and unable to find them. Which is an unmitigated
disaster.

~~~
vkou
There are millions of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, because
they are unable to find a job that pays enough for them to stop caring for
their children/relatives/take time off schooling/pay for costs of working.

They are not represented in unemployment numbers (Because as it turns out 'I
need to earn $25/hour to be able to afford daycare for the kids, but I could
never get a job like that, and I've stopped looking') does not get counted in
UE stats.

Putting those people to work would not actually make any of us better off...
Yet it would reduce unemployment.

The point of my post was that jobs are not created equal. 0% unemployment
because everyone is working jobs that pay very little is an unmitigated
economic disaster. 30% unemployment because a smaller group of people are only
working productive, highly remunerative jobs is an incredible economic
success.

It does, however, raise the hackles on a few people.

~~~
gozur88
>There are millions of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, because
they are unable to find a job that pays enough for them to stop caring for
their children/relatives/take time off schooling/pay for costs of working.

>They are not represented in unemployment numbers ...

Depends on the set of numbers you're looking at. DoL produces different
numbers that encompass different assumptions. Normally these people are not
considered unemployed, so putting them to work wouldn't change the
unemployment statistics.

And I don't believe having 30% of the population carrying the other 70% is at
all an economic success. That's an unstable situation that can't continue.

------
jgome
AFAIU (prolly not much), GDP measures money that comes and goes to/from a
country. If, let's say, products/services were exchanged directly, without
moving money, that wouldn't be counted; OTOH, if certain country, say the US,
gave money to another country only to buy products from US companies, that
would count doubly... Which is why it's really bad as a tool for comparing
wealth of nations.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

------
alex_young
I really don't understand the point of this criticism. Isn't GDP the best way
we have of measuring the volume of work being done?

If I exchange production of some craft for money in the bank and then exchange
that money for some other product I fancy, we've not only moved the money
around, but created real quantifiable new value through the production
purchased.

GDP - Gross Domestic Product. Producing things. That's what it's all about.

~~~
dredmorbius
Short answer: no.

It is, however, the _accepted_ answer in most parts.

------
based2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index)

------
asah
Related:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness)

------
nabla9
GDP is not measuring wealth. It's measure of market value of all final goods
and services produced.

National wealth is completely different measure.

~~~
dredmorbius
Adam Smith defined wealth ... well, several ways. But his initial definition
is "the annual produce of the land and labour of the society". Which, as
numerous commentators have comentatored, is a _flow_ rather than a _stock_.

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Introdu...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Introduction_and_plan_of_the_work)

In his other statements, Smith isn't consistent on this distinction. It's a
curiosity, however.

------
MarkMc
I don't have an FT subscription. Can someone tell me whether the article
suggest an alternative measure of wealth?

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://archive.fo/vXmyX](https://archive.fo/vXmyX)

------
pteredactyl
Thank you for sharing this. FT is the only print newspaper I’ll give at least
benefit of doubt when reading.

------
dredmorbius
For those looking to read the content but stymied by FT's paywall, the author
has just published a book, _The Growth Delusion_ , and discusses it in
numerous other articles.

Unpaywalled: [http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-03-31/the-growth-
delu...](http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-03-31/the-growth-delusion/)

------
dredmorbius
In the opening example, Pilling discusses income vs. wealth of a banker and
gardener. One of the more interesting (and novel) approaches I've seen to this
question comes from Yonatan Zunger based on discussions over the past few
years, and culminating in his _Medium_ essay, "What is Your 'Financial Shock'
Wealth?", which examines financial security by an individual's (or
organisation's) capability to withstand financial shocks of various sizes,
_and then looks at the likelihood of such shocks._

[https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock-
wealth-4845e6dc1...](https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock-
wealth-4845e6dc1d2f)

So far as moving the discussion of poverty forward, this strikes me as a
significant advance, and one I'm not aware of having been made elsewhere in
the economic literature.

But that's still not GDP.

On that front, I've been looking at combining a number of concepts, a key
element of which is the idea of tiers or levels of economic activity. There
are classifications ranging from 3-5. One of the first such I'm aware of comes
in Alexandre Dumas, _The Count of Monte Cristo_ (I'm exploring the origins of
that notion), and one of the latter being the one James Beniger gives in his
1986 book, _The Control Revolution_ Breaking that out as bullets, but other
wise quoting Beniger.

* The primary sector -- agriculture, fishing, lumber, mining, oil and gas -- represents the extraction of matter from the environment to produce energy, including the calories to sustain individual organisms.

* The secondary sector -- processing primary goods, as in construction and manufacturing -- represents the synthesis of matter and energy into more organized forms (negentropy).

* The tertiary sector, including transportation and utilities, represents the infrastructure for distributing matter and energy about the system, while ...

* the quaternary sector -- trade, finance, insurance, and real estate -- constitutes a parallel infrastructure for the collection, processing, and distribution of information that is necessary in all living system for the control of material flows.

* Finally, the "highest" of all sectors in its remove from the physical environment is the quinary sector, including government, law, and education, representing the societal programming -- socialization, education, law making -- and collective or representative decision making to effect control.

You can quibble over which activities should attend which tier (trade and
commerce are often classed with #3, giving #4 exclusive domain of the FIRE
sector, which has certain coherences). There's a strong correspondence between
these levels and classifications of industrial sectors (the SIC, NAICS, or
ISIC). There's also some correspondence to the classifications of goods early
classical economists derived (particularly Smith), and perhaps to
technological mechanisms.

What I see, though, is that actual useful benefit derives from the first two
tiers, with the others being _necessary_ but not _of themselves directly of
use_ \-- they're coordination, management, and information flows. Moreover,
you can divide the primary sector into _stocks_ and _flows_ , where virtually
all extractive material and energy sourcing _is drawing down of some natural
stock_ , whilst agriculture, forestry, fishing, and renewable energy are (or
at least _can_ be) sustainable, taking from a _flow_ as that flow is
replenished.

Accounting for the stock draw-down, and _not_ counting the outputs of the 3rd
- 5th sectors as "useful", would tend to arrive at a much-modified measure of
GDP. And one almost certainly much smaller than is presently computed.

I'm looking at how valid such measures might be, and the history of GDP
formulation. It's interesting. (Kuznets is among those who argued for a three-
tiered economic classification.) More discussion at the link below.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking_research_on_inclusive_measures_of/)

------
strongholdmedia
Or perhaps it is time to stop measuring them altogether.

~~~
FabHK
The approach of Sir John James Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong
in the 1960's, who famously "refused to collect economic statistics to avoid
officials meddling in the economy." He is subject of a recent well-received
biography, _The Architect of Prosperity._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Cowperthwaite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Cowperthwaite)

[http://architectofprosperity.com](http://architectofprosperity.com)

