Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Productivity probably not, it can be useful as very rought measure of how much economic activity is going on. Within understanding that "very rough" means if I sell you a pumpkin for $2M and you sell it to me back for the same, we generate $4M of "economic activity" without actually doing anything useful. But since most people actually do not carry about messing with econometrists, the measurement still somehow may reflect the roughly correct picture. Of course, other people - like national-level politicians - may engage on purpose in messing with the measurements, e.g. to make themselves look good for the elections, and then national-level measurements become much less useful. But since they probably won't do it everywhere all at once, there still some value remaining.
What I am trying to say is that your critique looks correct and appropriate, so one probably shouldn't put too much value into those but still there may be some value there - i.e. if there's 10x "GDP" stuff happening at time T1 compared to point of time T0, then without going too much into detail, we could claim there's significantly more economic activity at T1 than at T0, though we should be very carefully about taking "10" as an actual mathematic number and not a somewhat symbolic expression of "more things".
More options
Context Copy link