Watch New Zealand MP’s ‘Absolutely Brilliant’ 80-Second Takedown of GDP https://flip.it/7NhS9w
Ive long had a dim view of this metric. IMHO, it’s simply ‘single-entry accounting’ — ‘”That baseline measure of just those transactions does not give us any meaningful insight into the value of those transactions, whether we actually want them in the first place, whether they actually benefit people and the planet, nor the distribution of those transactions—that is, who benefits from those transactions.”‘
Thinking about it another way: disaster response and recovery activities (debris removal, search/rescue, victim recovery, reconstruction, .. ) are all positive expenditures in the GDP ledger.
And GDP does not calculate any ‘debits’ — eg – when crime increases in a community, the response is to spend more on police and personal security, etc. All these drive GDP up, but is your quality of life in your community better?
From Brassville to... (working title) 