But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity?

See:

The Solow Productivity Paradox: What Do Computers Do to Productivity?

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...

McKinsey wrote this in 2018, predicting a productivity boom was coming soon, though of course this prediction has been made often since 1973, and the only time it was even slightly true was during the boom in big box retail 1995-2005:

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital...

It's well known that in the 1800s the telegraph and then the telephone allowed a large scale re-organization of capital, and capital invested heavily to take advantage of the new technologies, but it was impossible to see a productivity benefit. These technologies allowed new systems of control, but not necessarily any productivity benefit. Since 1970 computer network technologies have offered a similar reorganization, but they are vastly more powerful than the telephone, and they allowed a re-organization that was vastly more profound than any previous reorganization of capital. Millions of jobs were outsourced to India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and then Brazil, Russia, Romania, etc.

Just going by eye, there is a pretty sharp trend upward from about 1990-2005, which I think roughly corresponds to the period when the bulk of computerization happened in homes, offices, schools, as well as being put to use in many of the most important embedded applications -- factories and machinery, automobiles, etc.

Eyeballing the trend before 1990 has it continuing to low-$50s, instead it's mid-$60s, a 20% increase.

So why do you think this graph shows computers don't seem to add anything to productivity? I'm not saying they have, but I can't see how that graph demonstrates they haven't.

The uptick in productivity between 1995 and 2005 is mostly attributable to 2 sectors:

retail

finance

In retail, it was the era of big boxes, lead by WalMart. Basically, it was the era when big retail learned how to take advantage of big databases to better manage inventory. Sadly, this did not seem to be the beginning of a sustained period of higher productivity trends. Rather, it was a one-off innovation.

In finance, much of the uptick involved HFT. Some economists feel this contributed to the crash of 2008, so how much we should celebrate this particular uptick is open to question.

140 years ago generators were 60% efficient. 20 years later 96% efficient. That's big close to 40% better. 20 years after that 98% efficient. 4% better... Now maybe 99.5% so 1.5% better.

I feel like a lot of things they through computers at to improve productivity are kind already efficient. My mom's first washing machine washed clothes. Mine with a microcomputer also washes clothes. Parents first microwave had a power dial and a mechanical timer. You reheat food in it. Mine with a computer also reheats food.

There is no real fundamental change here.

Even if we ignore that both of those were probably only made possibly with computers, that seems astounding considering retail and finance makes up less than 20% of the economy by GDP.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/reagan-mythbust...

But that was written in 2009, before it was clear that productivity slowed again after 2005.

In a later post, Krugman analyzed the higher productivity of 1995 to 2005 and shows much of it was simply big box stores and HFT.

In general, the period since 1973 has been disappointing for productivity. And as yet, computers have not brought us the kind of sustained productivity growth that we saw in the early to mid 20th Century.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/opinion/03krugman.html

> It’s hard to imagine a better illustration than high-frequency trading. The stock market is supposed to allocate capital to its most productive uses, for example by helping companies with good ideas raise money. But it’s hard to see how traders who place their orders one-thirtieth of a second faster than anyone else do anything to improve that social function.

> What about Mr. Hall? The Times report suggests that he makes money mainly by outsmarting other investors, rather than by directing resources to where they’re needed. Again, it’s hard to see the social value of what he does.

> And there’s a good case that such activities are actually harmful. For example, high-frequency trading probably degrades the stock market’s function, because it’s a kind of tax on investors who lack access to those superfast computers — which means that the money Goldman spends on those computers has a negative effect on national wealth.

He was still against HFT, that was part of his point. He was saying that even some of the surge of 1995-2005 might have been an illusion, because it was "only" HFT. If you feel that HFT really does raise the USA standard of living, then of course you are free to view the surge of 1995-2005 as entirely real.

solow hft retail site:krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

At the moment Google is acting as if Krugman never mentioned HFT or retail.

Adding to the problem, the New York Times is giving 503 errors over most of Krugman’s old weblog, so perhaps the Times has given up on maintaining the old blog.

Am I allowed to make the joke that Solow’s Productivity Paradox is mostly explained by rampant link rot? But I’m only half kidding, because the rapid way technology breaks down is an obvious hindrance to productivity.

No one ever suggested that. It’s the excess productivity growth of 1995-2005 that is largely attributable to retail and what improvements there were in the productivity of trading financial instruments.

EDIT: going back and looking at the actual numbers rather than eyeballing it's more like 10-12% excess. That's across the entire economy of course, so it would still be a massive increase to attribute that mostly to a subset of retail and finance sectors.

The math is so complex they could not draw any conclusions.

Understand; we listened to lesser educated men of the previous generation about building business and economy. Men who missed out on our early education in science, and who were often far more religious. Men who had much different political narratives to satisfy; IBM was gifted government research. How many of our startups are?

Brookings conveniently avoids discussing the weakening political power of the US over the decades; easy to grow when the world needs you to manufacture for it after WW2.

It’s not hard for me to believe much of our economic theory is bullshit, and output is driven by political arrangements. Humans will generate economic activity naturally to survive. One can only induce so much superfluous activity beyond that.

Humans have a history of ignorantly extrapolating the wrong conclusions from reality.

This isn't to be confused with the economic definition of GDP per hour worked - which has far more to do with the sectors of industry that a country has.

After all, a few financiers doing million-dollar deals is always going to generate more GDP per hour than coltan miners, even though it's not obvious which is actually generating more wealth. Robert F Kennedy famously said the GNP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile".

Actually the assumption in the post is the exact opposite: that productivity has increased.

The question it poses then is "so what do we have to show for it?".

I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death.

I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many.

If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.

So, not much then.

For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades.

Likewise, cheap clothes mean diminishing quality (regardless of price bracket, from $5 items to $200 brand-name ones, they are all most often than not made in sweatshops in the developing world, often with the same materials and processes). Plus tons of clothes thrown, which is an environmental attrocity.

(As for cheap music and movies, that's a byproduct of one basic delevopment: high speed internet, which enabled a new delivery method. Not the best example of an increase in productivity, not to mention those are passtimes).

As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century, so 100+ years ago, and it was due to running water, bathrooms, hand washing, and a few such things. Low hanging fruit. Certainly not due to the last 70+ years of "increased productivity".

Meanwhile we pay more for healthcare, housing, and education (the 3 things that matter more), wages have stagnated since the 70s, and work-life balance has gotten infinitely worse, depression ever more prevalent, the middle and working classes have collapsed, and so on. No savings and no chance of retirement at any reasonable age for the majority as well.

>I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off.

Probably it's from people who are not impressed by more and cheaper trinkets.

In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.

Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.

Why did we make more progress before and less later? We have better tools, computers, and software. We have more people, both in the US and coming in from worldwide along with a greater portion of the population being college educated and free to work on scientific and engineering problems. We have better developed theories of biological, chemical, and physical systems. And yet, when we knew very little, had little resources, and few people working on the problem - we made huge strides. Now, not so much.

Maybe this issue is that we've already plucked the low hanging fruit. That doesn't seem quite right to me though. Even if we have, we should be equipped, via the advantages I referenced earlier, to pick higher fruits.

That having been said, for this particular example (life expectancy) it's typically a bit better to look at life expectancy at age x, often 5, 10 or 15 are chosen.

It's because infant mortality used to be sky-high, as 25% (one in four) in 1900 and 16% (one in 6) in 1950 worldwide, to < 2.9% today, with the best countries now around 0.2%.

If say one in four humans becomes virtually zero years old, that skews the average down a lot, e.g. from 65 to 40. But it doesn't mean that the average person who makes it through the first few years would've died at age 40.

If we look at improvements of life expectancy for those who already raeached age 10, it looks like this and is a pretty straight line with fewer indications of slowing down. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10...

Not to sound harsh, but the main economic benefit is that now people need to have fewer children to maintain a stable population.

A lot more of my relatives died of heart attack or cancer in the 80s than those from the next generation did in the last ten years. In fact in the last few years I witnessed many people getting surgery for those same heart issues or cancer that would have killed you a couple decades back.

Which appear to be uniquely dangerous and ineffective, so it's odd to use them as an example of progress. Besides that, mRNA is not a new thing. What's new is the EUA.

This has nothing to do with productivity rise and where do we see its results (what is discussed here), but about the merits of technology.

Even so, the raise in life expectancy at birth is about those low hanging hygiene practices (nothing to do with post 1950 techology) and a few vaccines (most of which available before 1950s).

Not any big technological breakthroughs, like artificial hearts and so on (which hardly make a dent), and with extremely little to do with any post 1950s tech.

So the question of the article in the domain still remains, where's all this benefit from the productivity rise.

You continue to make claims that are inconsistent with the data.

But can you show me the exact breakthrough that came by this pouring of resources into the research, and that enabled such vaccines, by removing blockers that blocked such vaccines for decades?

So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)

So as I doubted.

Naturally, the next question would be "What was the questionable bureaucratic barriers" that was temporary suspended. It really blows my mind that the answers to this is not widely known. It is kind of disturbing..

What about the quality of life? We know that people are getting sicker at a younger age, and if we consider that in addition to the ever increasing cost of the treatments, it does not appear to be a net positive.

Let's say hypertension is now diagnosed at 50 instead of 70. How many people used to die of a stroke between 50 and 70 due to undiagnosed hypertension?

So it technology take away some and then give back some (not without a huge cost, mind you), how can you evaluate its impact on human existence?

It's possible that the amount of single mother suffering has increased even though the suffering per single mother may have decreased. (No change, I expect, in the children's suffering)

1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-percentage-of-...

Of the people I know with kids like 50% of them were not married when they started having kids. They either got married latter or never married because there was no advantage to do so and they didn’t care.

Yet none of them are what you would call “single mothers”. They are all still together with the fathers of their children.

So basically it says more about marriage than it does about parenting.

Table CH-1 from this census website shows that children living with a single parent goes from 10% in 1960 to 36% in 2020. (=E13/C13) I'm not certain but I think they are accounting for cohabiting parents here because they don't use any language related to marriage and the census could tell if the parents were cohabiting or not.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families...

Drug use, gang activity, and other criminality are all positively correlated with single-parent households, and some data shows even MORE positively correlated with single-mother, as opposed to single-father, households.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/single-p...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316649639_The_effec...

https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-real-r....

https://ifstudies.org/blog/children-in-single-parent-familie...

I don’t remember where I saw the numbers, but in 1980 a microwave cost more than a months (average) salary. Today I can buy a good one for less than half a day’s earnings.

The answer might suprise you...

I have never heard anyone say, "Bosh made my life easier"

And it reminds me I'm on my second pump for a E12 error.

(After tossing too many Bosh appliances, I finally got lucky repairing one. The guys on the internet helped.)

How nicely should a consumer device be made? I feel like technological improvements make the device obsolete and disposable, so making the build quality higher just artificially slows down iteration time. (Why will 5G be widely adopted? Because eventually everyone will drop their 4G phone down the stairs or the battery will be uneconomical to replace.)

If you go back and look at old appliances, they basically have no value despite being well built. They don't solve the problem they were designed to solve anymore. A shitty laptop from Amazon is a whole different piece of technology compared to a hand-crafted Apple 1 from 1976, enabling you to do things that people wouldn't have even dreamed of when the Apple 1 came out. So making it "survive the test of time" is futile -- that computer isn't garbage because it was put together sloppily, it's garbage because technology advanced past it. (Probably a bad example, I think the Apple 1 was just a circuit board cobbled together in a garage.)

I feel like even consumer appliances have changed. Clothes washers use significantly less water. Stoves use precise electronic control instead of burning flammable gas that gets piped into your home. TVs display content on-demand, with 8.3 million individually-colored pixels and 6 channels of sound. Computers connect to a library where you can read pretty much any book ever written, right in your home. Technology changes so people discard their old devices and replace them with new ones. It's not just some scam to make companies that can't innovate some cheap money. Everything has a lifetime, and sometimes it's shorter than the lifetime of the physical materials that the device is built from.

Maybe you don't need any of that, and just want to read novels from the 1950s with your dog in a log cabin. That's totally legit, but where you think people excited about 4k TVs are weird, they probably think you're weird.

Honestly, I think phones are something people hate the most for being a little too breakable, but thinking about it more deeply, I think the right tradeoffs were made. They last as long as they need to on average. 10 years ago, the technology (hardware, software, connectivity, design, everything) was immature. So they broke more and cost less, because you were going to need to upgrade. Now we have $1200 phones, and they are a little nicer, and the technology isn't changing enough to make them obsolete every 6 months. This all sounds about right to me. I have a $1000 phone and thoughts about upgrading it haven't crossed my mind in the ~3 years I've had it. That is very different from the phones I had before that, where I felt like they were compromises on the day they came out. (And hey, I only paid $300 for them.)

TL;DR: maybe everything isn't awful all the time.

Hell, I was happy kid watching free cartoons on the Zenith?

While tech got bettter talent seems to have nosed dived? (exception being a lot of free talent on youtube)

The pure talent of the 60's-70's was magic, and that era was before my time?

I think we should reject 5G as a community.

Not because any danger of radiation. But I think people should be able to say "This is enough", and stop ourselves to be forced to think "We need moar!", thus put some block to this progress for the sake of progress..

May be it was.

You make a poor argument, because resources are limited, and "progress" will have to wait at some point. Human race can either opt into slower progress to match the available resources, or be selected out.

Indiscriminate growth is a hallmark of cancerous things. You can detect it, cut it out and attempt to survive, or surely die with it.

Finally, with regard to poor arguments, you should probably read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Obviously that is not the kind of progress we were talking about here in the context of transitioning to 5G here.

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/9/energy-consumption-5...

It is the first time I hear this: the usual narrative is that it would require more towers. (And the idea of the emitters being more pervasive in the territory is one of the main concerns of some).

True.

> Up to 15 percent energy savings with software features

'Upto 15 percent' sounds alike it is a very optimistic estimate, (you know when they advertise 'upto 50% discount' most of the products are discounted at much lower rate). And it does not seem that this power saving is also dependent on network traffic. So I am not really convinced.

On top of all this so many people are doing more interesting work. My father didn't just work 7 days a week, sometimes 16 hour days but he did that doing something so boring to me I would rather be homeless or dead.

Healthcare is more expensive because it saves people's lives.

Healthcare is really the best example that we are just spoiled children who can not be satisfied no matter what Santa brings for Christmas. Even getting extra years of life isn't good enough because it "cost too much".

You know what? I paid double what my parents paid for the house I really think of as my childhood house that they bought in 1989, and I paid more than quadruple what they paid for our actual first house in 1979. But my house is also double the size, it's downtown in a major metro, I'm not going to have to rebuild it from the inside out because it's not falling apart and everything already works. There is no asbestos in my walls, no lead in my paint.

I guess I'm paying more for healthcare, but I also get better healthcare. I suffered severe spine damage in the Army, but I'm basically fine now thanks to procedures and techniques that didn't exist 20 years ago. I had severe pneumonia when I was 5. If I'd been born prior to 1928 when antibiotics were invented, I would have just died as a child and wouldn't even be here to be paying for anything.

My grandparents, man. One of my grandfathers effectively worked, grueling manual labor, until the day he died. The other one died with nothing, left in a nursing home rotting with Alzheimer's for the last decade while con-artists tricked him out of what little he could have left to his children. And he experienced unimaginable horrors as a young adult. His ship in the South Pacific in 1945 was destroyed and he survived for six weeks on a raft drinking fish blood. I served 8 years in the Army on a tank crew and I can't even imagine what these people from earlier generations went through. My grandmother literally murdered someone when she was a teenager. I guess it's a minor miracle she never went to prison, but I suppose the police just didn't bother policing the segregated Mexican neighborhoods back then, which is probably why she was killing people.

I have no idea where this idea comes from that we're worse off than our parents. I guess it's because the people believing this kind of thing are mostly writers in a collapsing industry who came from upper middle class highly educated backgrounds? Well, guess what? A lot of us didn't and we're way better off than our parents and grandparents.

College got more expensive. Great, but I was the first person on either side of my family in any generation to even go to college. The idea of getting educated at all and not working your entire life doing manual labor would have been an unimaginable luxury to my great-grandfather who grew up picking cotton and taught himself stonemasonry.

These people who think it's been so downhill since the 70s. Do you seriously not remember the 80s and 90s? I was with my dad and got trapped doing side jobs during the LA riots. Over 60 people were murdered. The National Guard enforcing curfews and perimeters in the nation's second largest city. Nowadays we flip out that a single woman died trying to break into the capitol. My school got shot at in drive-bys more times than I can remember. We weren't allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys because the school district was so afraid gangs would kill us for it. My sister's best friend was murdered.

I guess life was great in the 70s for the 0.0001% of the world population employed on the factory floors of major US auto manufacturers, and it sucks those opportunities dried up, but man is it myopic to act like that's the only thing that has happened in the last 50 years.

The average American is something like 39 years old atm. That means the average birth date is 1982 so most people probably do not remember the 80s and only barely remember the 90s. If you were alive when your parents bought a house in the 70s then you have lived a life that most Americans don’t have a connection to. You were in the golden years and wonder why people don’t have the same view you do?

Hmmm. Old enough to remember the 70s (and 60s and a bit of the 50s).

It's easy enough to cast about for a few real advantages of modern times.

. The ability to type to this forum. Essentially a Usenet group with a different interface.

. Replacement of Sears with Amazon

. Video on demand

. LED lightbulbs

. Greatly improved medical care in some areas, particularly surgery.

. Faster closing on stock trades.

A time traveler from 1965 would notice nothing unusual about my house aside from the flat panel TV.

I think that aside from some healthcare tech, I'd willingly trade cheaper beachfront property and skinnier / more athletic kids for 99% of modern advances.

If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.

I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3.

I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough.

But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger?

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

[1] One way to think about that is you force people buying new cars to be carbon neutral by paying to retire existing cars.

I think that your suggestion, while I guess it's mainstream and basically what's already being done in most places, is guaranteed to fail in both respects.

If we tax one thing and subsidize another, without any linkage to CO2 emissions, then we will not get the reductions we need.

We cannot reconcile the idea that CO2 is the problem, while maintaining that some CO2 is more equal than others.

Can you explain further why you do not like the idea of pursuing the goal that matters, and prefer substituting one that doesn't?

Do you personally, at work, observe how metrics and KPIs that aren't chosen well, lead to bad behavior?

Putting an excise tax on new fossil fueled cars would discourage manufacture and sales. Using the revenue to help working class people retire and replace their older fossil fueled vehicles with zero emissions ones reduces the number currently in service. The key word with that is 'help' as in help that do what's needed. Instead of carbon taxes which punish working class people for not doing something unspecified to fix the problem.

That said I also support banning production of fossil fuel powered cars with enough forewarning that industry and the economy can adjust.

I don't think you're wrong, but an opinion like you're expressing doesn't say what, who, how it should be done. It doesn't set a goal that can be achieved, and it doesn't imply that success would solve the problem of reducing global CO2 levels.

Have you ever had a project manager tell you how to write code?

>carbon taxes which punish working class people

That's why the revenue needs to be sent right back to the people in equal amounts.

If that isn't good enough, it doesn't mean carbon taxes are less necessary. You haven't stated why it won't work or is not necessary in a way that I can understand yet.

Doing other things seems to me like the ultimate example of "looking for your keys under the streetlight even though you dropped them in the dark".

Or, it's like the joke "we must do something; this is something, therefore we must do it".

Building things produces CO2. People will argue endlessly about how much. It's impossible for everyone to agree on the facts, but the quantity matters.

We don't want any particular activity or product to be generated, we want less CO2. If we reward specific things that are associated currently with less CO2 but don't logically entail it, it will be a very short time until people optimize those goals by producing more CO2.

If the US had better public transit options, then maybe. But you have to do that first.

Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?

I don't see any feasible alternative and I'm getting cognitive dissonance from people who are getting more vocal about climate change being an emergency and aren't pushing this.

The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend) is kind of inconsistent - it says that a revenue neutral tax is a "conservative" idea, then it has more about a "universal climate income" under "social justice".

Widespread is not the same thing as generally accepted. I think I've been reading vaguely hostile stuff recently about carbon taxes from vaguely progressive sources, but I'm not sure why.

I'm wondering if progressives are against it because it's considered conservative.

I don't see how that hypothesis is compatible with regarding climate change as an existential threat.

I mean, maybe it is potentially the end of the world for practical purposes, and maybe it isn't.

But if it is, then concentrating on behavior modifications that are appealing to impose independently of CO2 levels seems like an expression of either a desire for human extinction or of a disbelief in the problem.

It might also be things like higher quality food, varieties of food, yachts for the rich that most of us don't ever see, or things like that, things that are either consumed and don't accumulate wealth, or things that are relatively long lived and durable but not part of most people's lives because most of the gains have gone to the top 1%.

Other ideas: paper pushing services like handling unnecessarily large volumes of litigation just to run a business, which requires work and causes GDP to go up but doesn't produce actual products.

I haven't read the article yet, but note increasing workforce participation or working hours doesn't increase productivity - that just increases the denominator for the productivity calculation, and unless it increases the numerator faster there is no productivity increase.

Are you sure about that? Are you measuring in absolute GDP per person or rate of growth per person?

If public debt is up 100% and GDP has barely changed - I don't think that's cause for celebration that GDP / hours worked = we are more productive.

I'm not saying this is the case. But people use GDP a lot to make points like this - and it's important to talk about how much public debt is increasing GDP.

The GDP is not a scientific measure. It is an ideological concept.

It doesn't mean it is useless, but it should not be taken at face value.