What are conventional metrics to measure the strength of an economy? How subjective is the term “a strong economy”, if at all?
In: Economics
It is quite subjective. In fact, the term “the economy”, as we currently define it, didn’t take on its current meaning until sometime around the Great Depression/World War II, when measuring our productive capacity and economic strength became very important, and when statistics on it became more measurable.
Even GDP—Gross Domestic Product, a measure of all goods and services produced within a country per year—isn’t always measured the same way. There’s no way of collecting data on *all* economic activity, so people who measure GDP have to collect all the data they can and decide what statistics are more important or less. Different countries do it in different ways. So it’s not an objective measure, but people still think of a high GDP as an indicator of economic growth and strength and success. It doesn’t necessarily mean the people who actually live in a country are happier or healthier or more prosperous.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman writes about this in a book of his I’m reading right now, *Utopia for Realists*. [Here’s](https://inomics.com/blog/is-it-time-to-bin-gdp-1382324) an article that cites it and [here’s](https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2019/7/26/8909436/rutger-bregman-utopia-for-realists-ubi-open-borders) an article on the book as a whole.
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