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The Invention Of ‘The Economy
If you’d asked somebody 100 years ago, “How’s the economy doing?” they wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.
At the time, people talked about things like banking panics, and national wealth, and trade. But, according to Zachary Karabell, this thing we call the economy — this thing that we constantly measure with specific numbers — wasn’t really invented until the 20th century.
So the government starts calculating out this single, official number called national income. It’s the forerunner of today’s Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, and it’s basically the value of all the goods and services produced in the country in a year.
When it’s released in the depression, this wonky statistic becomes an overnight sensation. A report on national income submitted to Congress becomes a bestselling book.. And pretty soon, you can’t turn on the radio without hearing those numbers and what they’re measuring.
In the decades that follow, national income becomes gross national product and eventually GDP — and it sweeps the world. “The first thing you do in 1950s and ’60s if you’re a new nation is you open a national airline, you create a national army, and you start measuring GDP,” Karabell says.
You need to calculate GDP because if you want help from the World Bank or the United Nations, they’re going want to know: What does their help do for your country’s economy? Click to read the full article on All Self Sustained
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Source: http://www.allselfsustained.com/the-invention-of-the-economy/
