Please do not focus on partitions the message, specially if there are readings which also address your concern: the real GDP figures were there from the beginni

Please do not focus on partitions the message, specially if there are readings which also address your concern: the real GDP figures were there from the beginning. Now, do you mean that there are fewer researchers or that there are fewer researchers per unit of total population? Either way, you're wrong (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6?locations=US http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6?locati...). Your postscript is also just wrong. Notice that GDP might be estimated by three different accounting approaches, all of which are mutually consistent. One of them is the net product approach, which takes the value produced by all economic activities/sectors liquid of their expenditures and sums all those up to get the GDP. So two things: first, if something isn't sold in a year, it isn't accounted for in the GDP for that year; second, activities which have no net product have zero impact on GDP. Trade is defined as having zero net product for national accounts purposes, so any sort of capital gains of the sort you're describing has no impact on GDP. It merely shuffles money and assets between hands.