C+G+I+X ≠ well-being
If you understood that headline, you know we're talking about GDP this week.
Hey Optimists!
If you’ve already listened to today’s podcast episode, you’ll recognize this line:
“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”
Those are the oft-quoted words of economist Simon Kuznets, who in 1934 created the first tidy measure of what was called National Income.
Even as the statistical methods would evolve, this fundamental tension would remain. A summing up of a country’s whole economic activity is a powerful big-picture piece of information, but one that hardly tells us how individuals or households are faring.
Still, that doesn’t make GDP, you know, wrong. It just means a lot of things are outside it’s scope. “I find myself in the position of defending a statistic that I think like mostly is fine,” Kathryn said when we were recording this episode.
”It’s not like I’m sitting here with like a GDP tattoo of like C+G+I+X.”
(Note to self: Optimist merch idea: Temporary GDP tattoos?)
Our latest podcast episode, “GDP Was Never Going to Make You Happy,” is ready for you wherever you listen to podcasts. Here’s a little video excerpt:
On Substack
Last week I forgot to mention that we’ve posted a few more of your letters. If you have a response to an episode that you’d like to share with other optimists, send them our way at optimist.economy@gmail.com.
Or, if you’d like to commune with your fellow optimists, we have a chat for paid subscribers here.
Miscellany
A few of you have emailed/chatted/texted curious about Kathryn’s take on the story in The New York Times (and on The Daily) about the “Baby’s First Years” study, which had some sort of non-finding findings after giving cash to parents of newborns.
Well, you weren’t alone. The New Republic also called, and she’s among the ones who counter some Heritage Foundation talking points in this article: Cash Payments Were Never Meant to Be a Cure-All for Poor Americans.
She was also on NPR’s Here and Now this week to talk about the state of the economy, and what’s going on with American consumer data. If you’re playing the OE drinking game, there’s no mention of congressional testimony, but there is a “way, way back” in there.
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