Well, Happy Labor Day, at least for the American version of it. So, let me crow a bit. For a very long time, I have been making the argument that using Gross Domestic Product as a measure of the well-being of the nation is phony (I haven’t been the only one saying this, mind you). Check this out here, here and here, just for a few examples.

Yesterday, a little headway on this topic, via an article in the Times’ Week in Review by Louis Uchitelle:

How else to explain that just when many Americans are not feeling so good at all about their circumstances, the gross domestic product is going up? Just last week, markets surged after the government announced that the G.D.P. had risen at an annual rate of 3.3 percent from April to June. But with all the turmoil in the economy, the product almost certainly would be shrinking if it were not restricted to cash transactions.

   And, then, this is a key point:

And over the last 15 years there has been just such a shift. While the G.D.P. has continued to rise, wages have stagnated, pensions have shrunk or disappeared and income inequality has increased. Other shortcomings have become apparent. The boom in prison construction, for example, has added greatly to the G.D.P., but the damage from the crimes that made the prisons necessary is not subtracted. Neither is environmental damage nor depleted forests, although lumbering shows up in government statistics as value added. So does health care, which is measured by the money spent, not by improvements in people’s health. Obesity is on the rise in America, undermining health, but that is not subtracted.

   GDP has makes the deep crisis enveloping worker over the past 2-3 decades. When GDP goes up and the nation is told to rejoice, no one really wants to hear alternative points of view that might seem like you are raining on the GDP parade–like pointing out that the celebration obscures the growing gap between wages and productivity, that the minimum wage is a poverty wage, that growing numbers of people have no health care or pensions (but, heck, sicker people create more business for hospitals and, then, add to the rise in the GDP!!!).