Like nurses anxiously watching the pulse rate and temperature of patients in an emergency ward, for a long time we were schooled to observe movements in Gross Domestic Product as the indication of whether a country is healthy or ailing. All of us were brainwashed into acclaiming an increase in GDP as the chief criterion of success and deploring reduction in GDP as denoting national failure. I don’t know who did the brainwashing but I suspect professional economists around the world, that most powerful of undercover trade unions, were behind it. They certainly did a very thorough job. We were mesmerized into keeping our eyes glued on GDP. This was always nonsense and should be seen to be nonsense.
In purely statistical terms GDP is a grossly unsatisfactory measurement. Published GDP figures include neither the products of self-help and self-reliance nor women’s indefatigable, daily work in the home nor the activity in parallel economies. These are glaring omissions if one wishes to measure what is really going on in any country.
What does GDP signify if you have not counted the private production and underground transactions of people anywhere but particularly people in poor countries who in great part have to fend for themselves? In India, for instance, some estimates put such unrecorded activity at anywhere up to 50% of the total economy. In Burma they are
