Childcare is the obvious idiocy. What was done free and for love is now an “industry”, God help us,, while female labour in factories is counted as productive yet ladies out of the “workforce” producing little Australians, the future workforce, are counted as producing nothing of value to the economy as though it matters not if there are no future taxpayers. Adam Smith was a lot smarter,
Is it to understand the flows of cash in the economy? Is it to understand the potential tax take of government?
If it is the former, then perhaps including vice is valuable (though efforts to come up with any sort of reasonable estimate are laughable) as it clearly is an end use for cash in the economy and would need to be a critical part of an economic sankey diagram.
If it were the latter, then clearly unregulated vice would need to be excluded as the government could only get their hands on a cut when the finally regulate vice!
Or is GDP for something else?
Or maybe GDP is just a highly generalised metric, good for a vague notion of how things are going in the economy and really not of much REAL value? In which case, we need to look past it and find some better, more specific metrics, for any particular area of investigation that takes our fancy!
Childcare is the obvious idiocy. What was done free and for love is now an “industry”, God help us,, while female labour in factories is counted as productive yet ladies out of the “workforce” producing little Australians, the future workforce, are counted as producing nothing of value to the economy as though it matters not if there are no future taxpayers. Adam Smith was a lot smarter,
Why do we even measure GDP in the first place?
Is it to understand the flows of cash in the economy? Is it to understand the potential tax take of government?
If it is the former, then perhaps including vice is valuable (though efforts to come up with any sort of reasonable estimate are laughable) as it clearly is an end use for cash in the economy and would need to be a critical part of an economic sankey diagram.
If it were the latter, then clearly unregulated vice would need to be excluded as the government could only get their hands on a cut when the finally regulate vice!
Or is GDP for something else?
Or maybe GDP is just a highly generalised metric, good for a vague notion of how things are going in the economy and really not of much REAL value? In which case, we need to look past it and find some better, more specific metrics, for any particular area of investigation that takes our fancy!