> GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. I’m not sure how true this is. There are international standards, updated over time, with variable adopt

> GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. I’m not sure how true this is. There are international standards, updated over time, with variable adoption by per-country agencies tasked with measuring GDP. These agencies typically rely on surveys of industry specific activity to measure different metrics and at times imputation and inference of unmeasured or missing values to form a picture of overall economic activity, from which a single GDP figure is derived. All of which is to say “measuring” GDP is nothing like measuring a concrete physical quantity such as temperature, and there is ample opportunity to fiddle with the standards or fudge the statistics, either innocently or nefariously. See for example how incorrect construction data cleansing lead to Japan overstating its GDP for several years.