QUOTES OF THE DAY: On the GDP Delusion …

“The whole annual produce of every county is distributed into two great parts; that which is destined to be employed for the purpose of reproduction, and that which is destined to be consumed. That part which is destined to serve for reproduction, naturally, appears again next year, with its profit. This reproduction, with the profit, is naturally the whole produce of the country for that year.”
        - James Mill

“It is possible to determine in money prices the sum of the income or the wealth of s number of people. But it is nonsensical to reckon national income or national wealth. As soon as we embark upon considerations foreign to the reasoning of a man operating within the pale of a market society, we are no longer helped by monetary calculation. The attempts to determine in money the wealth of a nation or of the whole of mankind are as childish as the mystic efforts to solve the riddles of the universe by worrying about the dimensions of the pyramids of Cheops.”
        ­- Ludwig Von Mises

“The gross domestic product (GDP) or gross domestic income (GDI) is a measure of a country's overall economic output...”
        - Wikipedia

“However, GDP is not meant to be a complete measure of all activity and spending in the economy. GDP measures only final output of goods and services. It deliberately leaves out all intermediate production or goods-in-process... Why? ... To include spending at every stage of production would be ‘double’ and ‘triple' counting....”
        - Mark Skousen

“Keynesian macroeconomics is literally playing with half a deck. It purports to be a study of the economic system as a whole, yet in ignoring productive expenditure it totally ignores most of the actual spending that takes place in the production of goods and services. It is an economics almost exclusively of consumer spending, not an economics of total spending in the production of goods and services.”
        - George Reisman