Skip to content

Missing your economics classes does not help

Always important to remember that GDP doesn’t measure value. It just measures output.

Idiocy. GDP measures the value added in output. If we’re not measuring value then how come we can say that the value of GDP is £2 trillion?

As to the healthcare thing. Actually, it’s because GDP deigned to see patients again. Which is an addition of value, isn’t it? And, of course, if getting health care doesn’t add value we can close down the NHS, can’t we?

20 thoughts on “Missing your economics classes does not help”

  1. “If we’re not measuring value then how come we can say that the value of GDP is £2 trillion?” That illogical, Tim.

    … how come we can say that the value of temperature here is 27C?

    “it’s because GDP deigned to see patients again”: typo – you meant NHS; “deigned” is spot on though.

  2. Quite why they allow him to contribute is beyond me but Murphy has an article on the AccountingWEB website. Banging on about how audits aren’t mentioning climate issues and suggesting that a new financial reporting standard is needed – you’ll never guess who has written one.

  3. @Anon I expect it’s an abbreviation for “Good-for-Nothing Physicians.” Either that, or Tim stil doesn’t understand how “mote and beam” applies to him and the Telegraph subs.

  4. It seems that Spud doesn’t even know that there are 3 approaches to calculating GDP. One of them, the production approach, specifically sums up the value of transactions in an economy

  5. Bloke in North Dorset

    Andrew C,

    I don’t know about accounting standards but telecoms standards I’ve dealt with have to be clearly written and detailed and they are written collaboratively.

    I can’t see Spud passing any of the tests.

  6. Andrew C

    Is that a separate boondoogle from ‘Sustainable Cost Accounting’?

    Is it normal for Accountingweb to take articles from people who had someone else take their accounting qualifications for them?

  7. Andrew C, I wish Spud and our betters could please explain:

    NASA global temperature 1920 = 13.83C.(https://www.currentresults.com/Environment-Facts/changes-in-earth-temperature.php).

    Temperature global today = 13.69C. (https://temperature.global/#twitter).

    I may not be the sharpest tool in the box, but this is ‘there is an existential global warming crisis and we need to send our civilisation back to the dark ages immediately to prevent it’ how exactly?v

    I await in vain for any of the retards currently vying to replace BoJo to start asking questions such as this………

  8. How come economists ignore standard error? Is it because if you properly propagated error margins through all the surveys and imputations that go into GDP, you’d get a confidence interval something like 2% +/- 5%?

    In other words, is GDP noise?

  9. Monthly GDP is noise, which is why most countries don’t bother to report it. The UK does, the US is only quarterly.

    Over time of course it’s hugely, vastly, important, as anyone who has been to – say – the Sudan and US would be able to point out.

  10. I sneeze in threes

    Nominal GDP might be growing, what’s the story when you strip out the impact of inflating the money supply?

  11. Rsm, it depends on your sampling approach, obviously. Monthly GDP is a waste of time. The numbers the agencies want for the producer version are not always easily derived from company accounts, especially if you get down to subsidiaries and associated companies. And, of course, the 3 methods come up with different figures. It’s a number that should always be treated with caution. Just like the global average temperature

  12. Is the definition of when noise becomes signal pretty political, fair enough?

    Were pre-capitalist Sudanese better off than current, post-state and capitalist Sudan?

    Why isn’t a dollar-denominated CBDC universal basic income the best solution to Sudan’s (and other basket cases’) problems?

  13. ‘Why isn’t a dollar-denominated CBDC universal basic income the best solution to Sudan’s (and other basket cases’) problems?’

    Something like this was tried in the brave old days of yore, rsm. Of course they had to enslave the Sudanese and flog them on to produce the needed income.

  14. Diogenes @ 10.35 “It’s a number that should always be treated with caution. Just like the global average temperature”..

    Concur 100%, there is no such thing as ‘global average temperature’, but when that is the metric they are pushing it makes sense to use it against them…..

  15. rsm.

    Luckily we’ve adopted that wonderful Chinese invention, paper money. So the Fed just printed it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *