Gross Domestic Product. You have to ask why gross, not net? Why only domestic? This is a perennial game of ‘what figures can I come up with quickly and easily that people will believe’, played by politicians and economists on a roughly quarterly basis. When you look into it, it’s a house of cards. It has some relevance as a measure of relative production (so yes, we can say we generated more – or less – quantifiable economic activity within our national borders during the chosen period) but its biggest drawback is that it doesn’t subtract the costs of that production. Sure, we are making and ‘doing’ more stuff, but at what cost to our environment or our real standard of living? It’s looking only at a raw, fat, dirty number. (We can however discount the international product as that is a much smaller part of the whole deal.)

This is not a secret. It’s taught in economics. It’s obvious – it’s actually spelled out in “GDP”. It’s not net. It’s domestic. It’s product. So why don’t we think about it and do something? Because it’s hard to calculate the real costs of production, especially the fuzzy ones like standard of living and loss of environment. Anyway, at least it’s getting mentioned in the press: Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist tapped to head a new French study, said Tuesday he sees gross domestic product (GDP), the most often cited yardstick, as an imperfect indicator. Stiglitz, named by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to head a panel to find a new method of economic calculation that will include quality-of-life factors, said the current yardsticks “only reward governments if they increase materialistic production.”