A focus on GDP understates the strength of America’s recovery

in some circles to lament the “cult of gross domestic product”. The pursuit of growth, this criticism goes, blinds officials to less quantifiable but worthier objectives, be it a contented population or a clean environment. For many economists, the concern about is very different. They see huge value in the core mission of the measure: namely, to provide as timely and accurate a snapshot of the state of the economy as possible, a lodestar for governments setting policies and for companies making decisions. Their criticism instead is that occasionally struggles to achieve this, and that better alternatives might exist. This debate has again come to the fore in America because of an unprecedented gap between and its close relative, gross domestic income (). In theory the two ought to be aligned. tracks all expenditure in the economy, summing up the market value of consumption, investment, government spending and net exports in a specific period. tracks the earnings associated with that expenditure, summing up wages, profits and any other income. In reality the two never match up perfectly, since the long-suffering bean-counters in statistical agencies must draw on different sources, released at different times, to tot them up.