Darby Quast, Chapter 9, Question 6

One thing that stood out to me while reading chapter 9 was how much people care about the GDP.  It's in the news almost every day and is used as a tool to determine how well an economy is doing.  I find this odd because there are so many factors that are missing when the GDP is calculated.  For example, it does not include factors like economic activity that is not paid for such as working at home or environmental degradation.  Once Chinas environmental damages (around 64 billion dollars) was calculated into the GDP growth it went down from 10% to around 7%.  It  also does not take into account wealth distribution.  This means that if a country had some people who were extremely rich and some who were very poor, its GDP could still look good even though that might not necessarily be the case.  After learning all these different factors that are not accounted for while calculating GDP I find it interesting how inaccurate it can be when determining the health of the economy.