“You get what you measure.” That is why it is quite important to understand the moral and ethical limits of economic measurements.

David K. Goodin, “The God of the Market Place: John Stuart Mill and Maximos Confessor on Economic Virtue”. World in the World: Concordia University Graduate Journal of Theological Studies 3/1, 2010.

Simon Rogers, Bobby Kennedy on GDP: 'Measures Everything Except That Which Is Worthwhile'. The Guardian UK, May 24, 2012.  Reflects RFK’s Catholic faith.

Richard Spady, Economics as Ideology. First Things, Apr 2018.

Michael Hudson, Why Is the American Empire Crumbling? Robinson’s Podcast Clips, Nov 11, 2024. Financial, global capitalism triumphed over industrial, domestic capitalism. In 1913, J.P. Morgan gathered private bankers to form the Federal Reserve to neutralize the U.S. Treasury’s ability to manage the U.S. economy. After WW1, the U.S. financial sector insisted on getting paid back, which contributed to harsh reparations on Germany, which led to WWII. After WWII, the U.S. had so much gold that the U.S. dollar created the global financial order. In the 1980s, the U.S. led the way in debt-leveraging, junk bonds, and exploitation of housing needs. The rules for mortgage lending relaxed from 25% of a person’s income to Fannie Mae’s federal guarantee of 43%. The financialization of housing began to price U.S. citizens and labor out of the market. Then financial interests viewed U.S. labor as too expensive and outsourced jobs to China since 1990s. GDP is misleading: GDP includes all the interest rate loans, the penalty charges that banks charge, monopoly rents, the homeowners’ estimates of what they would have to pay for their house if they had to rent their house. Much of GDP is financial and fictive, not concrete products. Most of GDP growth goes to the 1%.

Simon Anholt, Which Country Does the Most Good? TED Talk, Jul 2, 2014.  See also the Good Country Index, a website which measures fairly significant moral measurements, such as: refugees hosted; peacekeeping troops; ecological footprint; etc.

Jason Hickel, Forget ‘Developing’ Poor Economics, It’s Time to ‘De-Develop’ Rich Countries. The Guardian UK, Sep 23, 2015.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Which President 'Created' More Jobs? Wall Street Journal, Nov 8, 2016.  Says incentives to work, productivity growth, and overall economic growth are more important than just jobs created, but Robert F. Kennedy's critique of GDP still applies also

N. Gregory Mankiw, Want to Rev Up the Economy? Don't Worry About the Trade Deficit. New York Times, Dec 2, 2016.

David Leonhardt, We're Measuring the Economy All Wrong. New York Times, Sep 14, 2016.

Kate Aronoff, Unhinged GDP Growth Could Actually Destroy the Economy, Economists Find. The Intercept, Dec 5, 2016.

Richard Werner, How the Banking System and Financial Sector Really Work. Alessandro Del Prete, Mar 9, 2017.  GDP analysts don’t know how to account for the financial sector; their value-added is zero, even negative. Werner argues for decentralized, small banks.

Kate Raworth, Be Agnostic About [GDP] Growth. Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Apr 3, 2018.  Financial markets and government came to expect GDP growth, regardless of whether it made us thrive.

Christine Emba, What Country Isn’t Obsessed with Ensuring Economic Growth? New Zealand, Apparently. Washington Post, Jun 14, 2019.

Christopher F. Jones, The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. New Republic, Oct 1, 2019.  “How economists came to ignore the natural world.”

David Pakman, Ethical Billionaire Destroys CNBC Clowns. The David Pakman Show, Oct 17, 2019.  An interview with Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, on stakeholder vs. exclusive shareholder capitalism, and new economic metrics

David Lazarus, With Most Drug Ingredients Coming from China, FDA Says Shortages Have Begun. Los Angeles Times, Feb 28, 2020.  “About 90% of the core components of leading antibiotics such as amoxicillin and penicillin come from China.” Chaguan, Covid-19 Is Teaching Hard Lessons About China-Only Supply Chains. Economist, Feb 29, 2020. “A large share of the world’s supply of antibiotics depends on a handful of Chinese factories.” The neoliberal focus on GDP is shortsighted because it overlooks resilience in public health (not to mention manufacturing and security industries)

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Economist: Why the Establishment Won't Admit Workers Are Getting Screwed. Rising | The Hill, Mar 6, 2020.  Oren Cass on the “cost of thriving” as a new economic index, where rising wages have not kept up with the cost of living. Cass discusses why he has been criticized especially by those on the right.

Elise Gould, The Unemployment Rate Is Not the Right Measure to Make Economic Policy Decisions Around the Coronavirus-Driven Recession. Economic Policy Institute, Mar 20, 2020. “Think of the restaurant worker who just got laid off. They might not report looking for work because that whole sector is shut down. What would be the point in actively looking for a job when it’s clear that there are none out there? Instead of using the unemployment rate as a trigger-off mechanism, policymakers should use the employment rate—the share of the adult population with a job. This is how the economy looked before the pandemic hit the United States. (Please note: All figures are simply for illustrative purposes and are not drawn to scale.) In February 2020, the employment rate was 61.1% and the unemployment rate was 3.5%.” 

Krystal Ball, Wall Street Ghouls Want You to Get Virus to Save Stock Market. Rising | The Hill, Mar 24, 2020.  "Mommy, what happened to Grandma?" "Well, Timmy, she died so that the S&P500 wouldn't fall below it's 90 day moving average."

Hobbie Stuart, COVID-19 and Economic Narratives. Unlearning Economics, Apr 20, 2020.  Examines how GDP is calculated and questions its meaning, especially in light of factors like resilience and human flourishing

Krystal Ball, Did Covid Launch A Work Revolution? Rising | The Hill, May 10, 2021.  Asks excellent questions about why people are not returning to the labor force during/after the COVID pandemic, which led to the surprisingly low result of the April 2021 jobs report.

Cody Johnston, The Racist History of Austerity Politics In America. Some More News, Jul 19, 2021.  Also called “Racism and Capitalism - A Love Story” starting with Reconstruction and the Southern resistance to taxes and black empowerment; the argument was “fiscal responsibility” based on the interests of “the taxpayer.”

Second Thought, The Myth of Upward Mobility (Second Thought, Dec 3, 2021) opportunity itself has been commodified, and thus stratified. There is no such thing as equal opportunity. Cites Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University)

Ryan Grim, Americans Think The Economy Is Doing Poorly Because We’ve Become Consumers First. Rising | The Hill, Dec 6, 2021.  Discusses public opinion polling on the health of the economy; an intriguing hypothesis, although Grim does not comment on rent and housing, along with food and gas. Wage increases and worker satisfaction are important, however. Also, Richard Wolff, Economic Update : Class Struggles in the US Today. Democracy at Work, Dec 6, 2021.  Discusses teacher burnout and labor, then asks whether two billionaires flying into space while our society is so polarized and unequal is helpful.

CNBC, Can The Inflation Crisis In The U.S. Be Stopped? CNBC, Dec 7, 2021.  Mentions how inflation is understated from the PCE because housing is assumed to be 22% of household income, but on average it is 40 - 50%.

James Li, The Inflation Lie the Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About.  51-49 with James Li, Apr 17, 2022.  How the CPI switched from a cost of goods index to a cost of living index.

Robert Reich, The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told.  Robert Reich, Feb 21, 2023.  A short video about how we measure things that don’t tell us the truth about what’s important or who is experiencing what.  Reich argues we need to measure income earned, median income, how many people are housed vs. unhoused and clothed vs. unclothed and fed vs. unfed, who owns what (where is wealth, how concentrated is it?), and other “kitchen table economics” that ordinary people experience.

More Perfect Union, The Evil CEO That Elon Musk Is Copying.  The Class Room | More Perfect Union, Apr 13, 2023.  GE CEO Jack Welsh in the early 1980s pioneered “shareholder capitalism.”  The CEO of General Electric is the reason companies off-shore jobs, do massive cost-cutting and layoffs, and pour all their profits into stock buybacks. He invented the American CEO.

Noah Smith, In Which David Sacks and Balaji Raise a False Alarm About the Jobs Numbers.  Noahpinion | Substack, Jun 4, 2023.  On companies reporting people on payroll (“payroll survey”), and people reporting whether they have a job or not (“household survey) and why they yield different numbers.  “Imagine a self-employed freelance writer. Does she have a job? Yes. Is she on anyone’s payroll? No. So if you call up companies and ask “How many people do you have on payroll?”, that survey will miss all the self-employed people like her. But if you call up households and ask “Do you have a job?”, you’ll catch people like her. It’s just a different concept of “employment”. Neither one is right or wrong; they just tell you two different things.”

Jonathan Stempel, Diane Bartz and Nate Raymond, Meta's Instagram Linked to Depression, Anxiety, Insomnia in Kids - US States' Lawsuit.  Reuters, Oct 25, 2023. 

Noah Smith, Progressives Need to Learn to Take the W. Noahpinion | Substack, Sep 1, 2024. Smith points out very important definitional changes in how we define and measure “poverty.” Poverty is not intractable. LBJ’s Great Society was quite effective at bringing down poverty. Food stamps, Medicare, and the EITC have been effective.

Mark J. Perry, Chart of the Day… or Century? American Enterprise Institute, Jul 23, 2024. Inflation from 2000 - 2022 broken out by category.

Michael Hudson, Why Is the American Empire Crumbling? Robinson’s Podcast Clips, Nov 11, 2024. Financial, global capitalism triumphed over industrial, domestic capitalism. In 1913, J.P. Morgan gathered private bankers to form the Federal Reserve to neutralize the U.S. Treasury’s ability to manage the U.S. economy. After WW1, the U.S. financial sector insisted on getting paid back, which contributed to harsh reparations on Germany, which led to WWII. After WWII, the U.S. had so much gold that the U.S. dollar created the global financial order. In the 1980s, the U.S. led the way in debt-leveraging, junk bonds, and exploitation of housing needs. The rules for mortgage lending relaxed from 25% of a person’s income to Fannie Mae’s federal guarantee of 43%. The financialization of housing began to price U.S. citizens and labor out of the market. Then financial interests viewed U.S. labor as too expensive and outsourced jobs to China since 1990s. GDP is misleading: GDP includes all the interest rate loans, the penalty charges that banks charge, monopoly rents, the homeowners’ estimates of what they would have to pay for their house if they had to rent their house. Much of GDP is financial and fictive, not concrete products. Most of GDP growth goes to the 1%.