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> The people who use GDP are aware of this. The thing is that no one has come up with anything better. For what it's worth, I too cannot think of anything bett

> The people who use GDP are aware of this. The thing is that no one has come up with anything better. For what it's worth, I too cannot think of anything better. And good points about all the other things not captured by GDP. But given that GDP is a terrible measure of productivity, shouldn't the result be: We don't know how to measure productivity on a nation scale so let's stop pretending that GDP meaningfully measures it? Thanks for the book recommendation. For anyone else who's interested in checking it out I found chapter 1 available here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10544.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10544.html

patrickk 10y ago
""Some of the volume data, such as power and rail freight and even (bank) credit, are interesting because there is less incentive to massage them at the local level. But they reveal only part of the truth, not the entire truth," he said. "This would be a useful measure for steel and cement production. I'm not sure how well it would measure retail sales."" This is what one Chinese official uses to get a better sense of the economy rather than relying on massaged numbers. It's still far from perfect obviously, but I find it interesting. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-wikileaks-idUSTRE6B527D20101206 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-wikileaks-id...