Re:Development: Time to Leave GDP Behind
by notacoward on Monday October 31, 2022 @10:36PM
(#33416263)
> GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake.
It's trivial to fake. Just pull some asset values out of your ass, which Wall Street does a million times a day. GDP became a lot less useful when the economy shifted from mostly tangible goods to mostly intangibles (e.g. software) and services, then utterly useless with the over-financialization of our economy. Median income times population tells a lot more about how an economy's doing, and enables more rational decision making, than GDP. The same could be said of a hundred other measures as well. GDP is just a vanity number.
It's trivial to fake. Just pull some asset values out of your ass, which Wall Street does a million times a day. GDP became a lot less useful when the economy shifted from mostly tangible goods to mostly intangibles (e.g. software) and services, then utterly useless with the over-financialization of our economy. Median income times population tells a lot more about how an economy's doing, and enables more rational decision making, than GDP. The same could be said of a hundred other measures as well. GDP is just a vanity number.