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Even a googol zeros add up to nothing
10/25/16
During a presidential debate in 1980 Ronald Reagan famously asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?". His next sentence is less well-known but it shows how quickly we move to conflate measurement of human well-being with financial and economic metrics: "Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?"
A previous post here (https://www.onionsauce.com/mole_end/metrics/it-s-not-work-if-you-don-t) pointed to the omission of unpaid work -- most egregiously household work often done by women -- from national accounts. The key problem is that there is no money transaction involved, and that's all the processes can account. Ironically, if the stores in Reagan's second sentence had started giving everything away for free, GDP would have gone down and people could have logically answered "no, it has become impossible to buy anything".
Which brings us to today's item. While it is relatively easy for economists to continue to gloss over the contributions of homemakers everywhere it is harder to explain how some of the most prominent -- and, according to stock markets, most valuable -- global companies add nothing. And, in this case, the gap between the information needed and the metric used has international political consequences.
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