If The Guardian can't even grasp GDP then why pay attention to its economics?

The Guardian does try to tell us what we should be doing about the economy. Then there are those acres of paper devoted to telling us how economics is going to kill us all. The problem with this is that if the people who write and edit the paper have no clue of the basics of economics then why should we pay attention to their blatherings?

For example, we have an assitant opinion editor there telling us about Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. Which, when stripped of its verbiage, is simply a statement that economic growth is constrained by reality. Well, yes….

But here we’ve got what The G thinks is the explanation of it all:

Growth, the process by which a country increases the amount of goods and services it produces, is supposed to raise people’s wages and provide governments with an income that can be invested into public services such as schools and hospitals.

And no, that’s not it at all. Growth here is GDP, obviously. And sure, there are problems with GDP, it doesn’t measure distribution, doesn’t include non-monetised transactions like household labour and so on. But at what GDP sets out to do it’s pretty good. And what it doesn’t set out to do is measure the amount of goods and services. In fact it’s entirely nothing to do with that at all.

GDP measures - as best it can - the value added in an economy. Further, by definition value added in production equals all incomes equals all consumption - because our incomes and our consumption are the value added. So, if GDP, value added, rises then by definition total incomes rise.

This is an important distinction. It’s also one all too many fail to make. For if the economy, growth, GDP, are the volume of stuff then sure, we’ll face physical limits pretty quickly. If growth is about value add then the limitation is in knowing how to add value - not something notably constrained by the physical world, rather by the state of knowledge.

This is back to that Herman Daly differentiation between quantitative growth and qualitative. He insists - as does Raworth - that physical limits mean we can only have that qualitative growth. We think the physical limits to quantitative growth - and we do know our minerals and metals around here - are a lot further away than most people do but we’ll agree they exist. The bit that’s being missed is that GDP, that standard measure of growth, includes that qualitative growth. In fact, the majority of growth recorded in GDP is that qualitative, not quantitative.

But the real point we want to hammer home here is that people are critiquing that standard economics without even grasping the basic definitions and terms of art in use. No wonder they’re all so mystified by it.