Insightful! "So if you look at the gross national GDP accounts of the United States and Europe, they count economic rent as if it’s an addition to product, to

Insightful! "So if you look at the gross national GDP accounts of the United States and Europe, they count economic rent as if it’s an addition to product, to GDP. Interest charges, late charges are an addition to GDP. The rise in the rents paid by people as the rents go up for their housing is all GDP. They’ve erased the entire thrust of classical economics distinguishing between earned and unearned income. And, of course, that is exactly what China, Russia, and the rest of the world want to distinguish. They want to have an economy where people are productive, not where fortunes are made by being parasitic rent seekers making money in their sleep, as John Stuart Mill defined landlord rent and landlord capital gains. And as it turns out, the one thing that GDP does not report is capital gains. In other words, the increase in the price of wealth, the increase in the price of assets. Most wealth in the United States and Europe is not made, and certainly in Russia, was not made by producing more goods and services. It was by increasing the value of the property you had, the real estate property, the stocks and the bonds, the rent privileges that let you take the money you make from oil or nickel or diamonds or other products. What is needed is a set of economic statistics that actually will tell Russia, China, and other countries how much that we’re producing is actual product and how much is overhead. The Western GDP and post-classical theory denies that there’s any such thing as economic overhead. Monopoly pricing is not an overhead. Higher rents is not an overhead. That’s the one thing that in ad hoc practice Russia and China are trying to minimize."