Re: [Pen-l] Questioning GDP

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is what journalists call an "evergreen" -- a story that can
always be dredged up as filler. It's a true story, and the reason it
stays an evergreen is because macroeconomists typically ignore it.

There's a very simple way to understand the issue. Gross domestic
product is an effort to measure what Marx called "exchange value,"
i.e., the flow of money to buy commodities on the market. (Typically,
we correct for inflation, to get real domestic product.) On the the
hand, the Genuine Product Indicator and other alternative measures are
efforts to pin down the amount of what Marx called the "use-values"
our economy produces. (Strictly speaking, it can't be done, since
use-values are qualitative.) A different kind of measure is actual
gauges of "happiness" (subjective well-being) based on polling data.

By the way, the idea that the "gross domestic product was invented in
the United States during the  Depression to measure just how much and
how quickly the economy was shrinking and whether President Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal efforts at revival were working" seems wrong. If
anyone, it was Marx who invented something like GDP. That's his C+V+S.
One thing that people often miss in CAPITAL (volume I) is that Marx is
talking about accounting, for the capitalist system as a whole.

Elsewhere in the article, Kristen Lewis, co-director of the recently
published American Human Development Project says that: "One reason we
don't have mandated maternity leaves is because the work that women do
taking care of children is invisible to economists and policymakers."

That's naive politics. It doesn't answer the question of why unpaid
childcare work is "invisible." I'd say it's because our economists and
policymakers haven't gotten much political heat from unpaid childcare
workers.

Louis Proyect quoted:
> The New York Times, August 31, 2008
> Hey, Big Number, Make Room for the Rest of Us
> By LOUIS UCHITELLE
>
> For 75 years, the gross domestic product has been the premier means of
> measuring America's economic vitality. It is a celebrity among statistics, a
> giant calculator strutting about adding up every bit of paid activity in the
> 50 states. The annual sum, the famous $14 trillion economy, marks the United
> States as the world's most prosperous nation — measured in cash.
>
> In the absence of any statistic of comparable cachet, however, the G.D.P. is
> regularly asked to do more than it was designed to do. It measures wealth
> just fine, but as a stand-in gauge for the nation's overall well-being, this
> supernumber is less than perfect. Or, as Robert F. Kennedy put it 40 years
> ago, the G.D.P. "measures everything, in short, except that which makes life
> worthwhile."

<snip>

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l