This point is a bit of a rorschach... is that an over-estimation or an under-estimation? Sounds like a massive under-estimation to me, in the same sort of qualitative way that it's silly to try to quantify the economic effect of the internal combustion engine in terms of horses displaced... it's measuring something kinda relevant but totally missing a qualitative shift that unlocked impossible-to-quantify economic activity (for better or worse is up to us).
Yes, exactly. My point is that I wouldn't call measuring actual value instead of a pretty meaningless "output" metric a "mistake".
The original point of the pre-existing "output" metric was to approximate actual value creation, after all...
If we treat each computer made in the US today as equivalent to a thousand 1980s computers, then I'd hope to see the weighted data show that US manufacturing has massively increased as a result of making an exponentially larger number of exponentially faster computers. Rather than seeing it stagnate despite weighting each computer as worth so many old computers.
Why would you hope for that?
> a lot of the manufacturing output growth since the mid-1980s, when the BEA started factoring quality improvements in computers into its measures of real output, has been driven by the rising quality of computers and electronic products, not by increases in actual, you know, output.
i.e. one Intel chip produced today is considered to be thousands of times more output than one Intel chip produced in the 80s, because it's thousands of times faster.