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While economists speak of GDP as a legitimate measure of the economy, a closer look tells us that it is biased toward consumer spending and fails to give a true measure of the value of capital.
There are a bunch of well-known conceptual issues with GDP:
  • Leisure is not counted;
  • Home production is not counted;
  • Deferred maintenance is not counted;
  • Government expenditures are assumed to be worth what they cost; *Non-monetary compensation is not counted.
I'm sure I missed a bunch of others, but I'm curious what stackers perceive as the biggest shortcoming of GDP as an economic metric.
Are there other metrics you prefer?
Development economists sometimes use the Human Development Index (HDI), which explicitly adds education and longevity to income in an effort to capture some other quality of life measures.
On top of the issues you mentioned, it is also measured in units whose value is manipulated.
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128 sats \ 1 reply \ @tomlaies 16 Feb
There are inflation-adjusted GDP charts tho
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Right, but there are many problems with inflation adjustments, too, and lots of room for intentional manipulation.
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126 sats \ 0 replies \ @jeff 16 Feb
Thats the biggest rug of everything. People assume then posted inflation rate is the actual inflation rate.
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That does seem like a problem. :)
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457 sats \ 1 reply \ @Krv 16 Feb
I suppose GDP encapsulates the broken window fallacy. I break your window. That creates work for a window repair person. GDP goes up. But now you have less money for other things, so it hasn't actually increased the economy.
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Exactly, great point
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Two economists walks together until they find a pile of shit, the 1st says to the 2nd, "I bet you 100$ you don't eat that pile of shit. "Deal" says the 2nd and ate the crap to get the 100$ bill.
They keep walking until they find another pile of shit, now the 2nd economist says "now I bet 100$ you don't eat that crap". "Deal" says the 1st one and ate the crap and gets the same 100$ bill back.
They keep walking until the 1st one says "you know, I feel like we ate shit for nothing, we end up having the same amount of money" but the 2nd one replies
"But we rose the GDP by 200$" LOL
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That's a good one. Usually, you'd have it be Krugman and another Keynesian (Yellen or Bernanke, etc)
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I take issue with any article that bemoans GDP without discussing real GDP. This is the typical disingenuousness of Austrian economists that turned me away from them so many years ago.
Also, a cursory comparison between gross output mentioned in that article and real GDP and the two basically move in lockstep, with GO just being a higher number. I just don't see how it adds any additional value.
WRT to your question - GDP is far from perfect but it has its utility.
Think of it as a general health marker, like blood pressure or something. Sure, I can have normal blood pressure but have something else causing issues. Or I can have high blood pressure because I am anxious but otherwise healthy. That is why there are experts to interpret such things.
Real GDP should be considered as means to understand the growth of an economy. It is not perfect, but in general does a decent job of capturing that information. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water because people use incorrectly.
Also, if one knows where it falls short, one can check other data to get a more holistic picture. It is not hard to check the percent of GDP that comes from government deficits, for example.
Government expenditures being included in GDP is my main problem with it, which is why I also follow how much government deficits contribute.
Here are my knee jerk reactions to the first two conceptual issues you have listed.
People spend money on leisure goods directly (TVs, subscriptions, books, etc.) and they spend money indirectly when they e.g. pay someone to mow their lawn. Also, an increase in leisure does not generally grow the economy.
How is producing a home adding value if no one buys it? If someone builds a home that sits on a hill and never gets used, I fail to see how that should be considered any more productive than digging holes.
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"Home production" is the econ term for everything that might be considered "housework" or "do it yourself", not building houses. The problem with excluding it is that the same service done by a contractor or employee would count towards GDP.
The leisure problem, is that leisure time is a consumer good, but it's free and we have no good way of pricing its value to the consumer.
"Real GDP" has all of the same problems as GDP. It just has a very flawed inflation adjustment applied to it so that comparisons over time make more sense.
I'm not an expert on "Gross Output", but my understanding is that it captures more of the structure of production, by including intermediate stages. There are pro's and con's to doing this. The con that most people will raise is the supposed "double counting", since the earlier stage prices are supposedly included in the price of the final goods. The pro's are that you don't have to make arbitrary decisions about which goods and services are final goods and services vs which are intermediate. It is also more of a measure of overall economic activity. It does move with GDP most of the time, but it generally declines more sharply during recessions.
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GDP via medical expenses and curing people is a joke! More money in a pill than to heal!
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It might be bad culture, but people do prefer the pills to lifestyle changes and as such those expenditures do reflect voluntary exchange.
Now, you're right that me doing my 100 push ups a day for free is an omitted variable.
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450 sats \ 1 reply \ @jeff 16 Feb
Another big distortion that isn't captured properly in GDP is the value of data.
People pay for their social media, using their data. People turn around and steal or scrape it. Then vendor resellers sell the same bits for whatever price a business will pay for it. The biggest joke in the world, is negotiating a procurement contract for data, where the seller's cost is near zero, and the buuer's budget is made up.
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Great point! Although, I took it in a different direction. What you're talking about is probably an input for advertising companies, so maybe that shows up in whatever they charge for advertising. I'm not totally sure how or where it gets counted.
The proliferation of "free" information in general is very poorly captured. There's an analogue of the housework problem with people who produce content as a hobby and don't really seek compensation.
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450 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 15 Feb
this is true, a lot of tech innovation belongs in the “doesn’t show up in GDP” category too.
smartphones have added enormous value to people’s lives but basically have had no impact on GDP in the last 15 years.
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There are a few technical issues with capturing tech innovation:
  • Innovation is deflationary and our inflation metrics stink;
  • New products have no prior year price, so we can't account for how they impacted budgets (inflation measurement issue);
  • The products improve rapidly year-to-year and the necessary quality adjustments are highly imperfect.
In principle, technological innovation would be included in GDP, if everything were measured accurately.
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Government spending and employment inflate GDP.
Life expectancy, literacy rates, infant mortality, fertility rate
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You could argue that all of those factors indirectly affect GDP (and in the right direction), but to the extent they are valued beyond their impact on commerce, you're right about them being major omissions.
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I should have been more clear: government spending can boost GDP deceptively.
The other 4 metrics are useful for scoring development and quality of life for a country regardless of GDP
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That's how I read your comment.
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GDP reduces people to economic units as only their productivity is legitimatised as valid contributions to the society. But we all know that individuals shouldn’t base their self-worth on how much financial power they wield.
Gross national happiness index, used in Bhutan, seems to cover a more comprehensive range of indicators that measure individuals’ worth. It attempts more layered discussion of value: https://www.gnhcentrebhutan.org/gnh-happiness-index/
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I think mean something like "GDP reduces people to financial units", because humans are economic units, but economics is much broader than monetary transactions.
In principle, happiness is a better metric of well-being, but there are even more methodological issues with happiness research than conventional economic analysis.
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Big Mac Index
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128 sats \ 1 reply \ @tomlaies 16 Feb
I know it's supposed to be funny haha we all have a good laugh
But the Big Mac Index is just populism. A basket of n=1 products from a company that is famous to shrink quality to increase margins to their loyal customers of low-lifes... is a bad metric
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All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
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That's more of a substitute for CPI, but I suppose you could multiply by Big Mac volume.
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It's also very easy to game.
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126 sats \ 4 replies \ @OgFOMK 15 Feb
Jeff Booth in the Price of Tomorrow definitely puts this out.
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What does he emphasize as the biggest problem(s) with GDP?
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489 sats \ 2 replies \ @OgFOMK 15 Feb
I think he emphasizes that technology is deflationary in that it makes it easier to do things and that money printing creates more inflation which to many creates the illusion of money making. Also if the denominator is unlimited the numerator of value is fake.
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There are definitely attempts to adjust GDP for inflation (real GDP). However, inflation metrics are every bit as flawed as GDP, so who knows if that's helping or just throwing more fuel on the fire.
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487 sats \ 0 replies \ @OgFOMK 15 Feb
We already know that the CPI is garbage. Perceived inflation is garbage. Front run numbers before the next QEasing is garbage.
Reading Human Action, basically all the formulas are garbage because of Human Action and rational activities of humans who will game the system at all levels because there is an outcome wanted. The market place knows what is sell and what is not and even those are just relationships that happen so fast that the central planners can not keep up -- Good intentions or not.
Then there are the levers of the financial engineers doing what they do, good or bad. Only Bitcoin sans Fiat Value is setting the record straight but reflecting the money printer by being the Denominator of infinite numerator.
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It’s funny how the criticism only arrives when it’s no longer going up.
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Have you met Austrians before? They'll complain about GDP anytime, anywhere.
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Value is subjective but yes, there are other index and parameters.
GDP is used mostly because in general, quality of life correlate with it and easiest to compare across nations.
At the end it's just one of the figures like inflation rate, unemployment rate etc
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GDP and other economic KPIs, relics in the dance of evolving economies.
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446 sats \ 1 reply \ @shado_op 15 Feb
deleted by author
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I forgot about how crime is counted, but at least that's consistent with how they treat the government.
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