UK Politics

GDP in the UK is hugelly manipulated anyways.

I remember back in 2012 when in the aftermath of the 2008 there was a "double dip recession" (a bit of GDP fall, twice) according to Official figures. Well, a few years later a group of Economists calculated GDP from the very same source figures and the result was very different from the Official GDP, with Britain having actually had a Depression (a GDP fall of over 4%).

And don't get me started at the whole scam of using the CPI measure of inflation that excludes housing rather than the CPI-H that includes it in the calculation of the Real GDP (which is the official one) even though house prices go into calculating the Nominal GDP via a mechanism called "inputted rent". Housing inflation goes into the nominal GDP and then the Inflation figures which are used to strip out the inflation from it to make the Official GDP (using something called the GDP Deflator, were the higher the Inflation the lower the resulting GDP) don't include house price inflation.

Thanks to this scam, because housing inflation does go into the raw GDP and the inflation from housing which is never stripped out when making the official GDP figures from it, Britain's realestate bubble ends up at the other end of this process with politicians harping about how great they are at managing the country because GDP went up, the worse the realestate bubble the more they have made Britain "grow".

I suspect that most people in Britain (especially the younger generations) don't at all feel all that "growth", quite the contrary.

Apart from the fact that, as the article acknowledges, the government is already measuring all these things (and has done for as long as I, at least, can remember), GDP didn't become a key economic measure by accident; it was chosen precisely because it's a good reflection of general wellbeing.

Of course, we also can, should and do measure lots of other things, including other economic metrics (like inflation) alongside numerous more general outcomes like education levels, life expectancy etc. Generally, with that latter group, higher GDP leads to better outcomes in those areas, which is why it's a good shorthand.

If you want further evidence of how trite this all is, David Cameron said the same thing in 2010.

I wonder if Polanski could be really radical and just scrap targets? You combat neo-liberalism by changing the conversation not by joining in.

GDP does not include home labour, mostly carried out by women. If you're a woman who takes even one day off from work for childcare, you are "harming" the countries GDP - you have reduced your wage and are not paying others to do that "job". Ohh wait, why don't you hire cleaners, hire gardeners, hire a handyman, hire a chef, and do your part for the economy - just work that third job and the business news will be happy!

How the fuck did we end up with a system where this supposed measure is the most important thing

Yes he is right, targeting well-being directly is way more sane than pretending ‘market forces’ will mysteriously result in well-being despite all appearances

Zack Polanski wants to make things better for ordinary working people. Is he right?

He is right.

Yeah, the BBC are talking 'bout the GDP
That means fuck all to me
I gotta eat

You know a brother's gotta eat

When he ask how I feel, I reply that I'm fed up
Some are drowning in money, I'm barely keeping my head up
Price of life on the rise, I'm feeling like it's a setup
'Cause nobody that I grew with seems to be getting a leg up

https://youtu.be/st6qnWeePDY

Sounds like a better measurement than GDP, although it can be harder to measure.