> GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. It's trivial to fake. Just pull some asset values out of your ass, which Wall Street does a million time

> GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. It's trivial to fake. Just pull some asset values out of your ass, which Wall Street does a million times a day. GDP became a lot less useful when the economy shifted from mostly tangible goods to mostly intangibles (e.g. software) and services, then utterly useless with the over-financialization of our economy. There are many measures that are more informative than GDP (or GDP per capita), that enable more rational decision making. GDP is just a vanity number.