I read a great article in Harpers last month ("Our Phony Economy" by Jonathan Rowe) where Rowe rails against the use of GDP as a yardstick of how the country is doing.
It's a good article, full of stuff like:
A socialite who buys a pair of $800 pumps from Manolo Blahnik appears to
contribute forty times more to the national well-being than does the mother who
buys a pair of $20 sneakers for her son at Payless.
and
...the best kids are the ones who eat the most junk food and exercise the least, because they will run up the biggest medical bills for obesity and diabetes.
The overall point being that things that are really "productive" in the most important ways often don't show up in the GDP, but harmful things do. (productive to what, and harmful to what? that's the real question being asked...)
The thing about this that interests me the most is that the words "Economy," "Country," and "GDP" have gotten collapsed: in many situations they are interchangable even though they don't mean the same thing at all.
I think it was the super-genius Gregory Bateson who figured out that language doesn't limit what we can say, it limits the questions we are able to ask. If a guy from Miami is asked what kind of snow fell on his vacation he doesn't need to speak innuit to answer and say that it was soggy with big flakes. But an Innuit may implicitly mean this whenever she asks what the weather was like; in fact she may not be able to ask otherwise.
In Rowe's article, he mentions that when we hear that the economy is doing well, we actually mean that there was an increase in GDP. I do it myself all the time - how are things going means markets, GDP, etc., not where we are headed as human beings. I need to dance around linguistically to ask that kind of question, and when I do ask that, I wonder if people generally know what I'm talking about.
