GDP and Productivity are the functional equivalents of waving dead chickens while dancing the humba-humba around the campfire at midnight, delusional claims of "how the world works" that set up a world-shattering encounter when the real world doesn't obey the claims.

Economics measures what's easy to measure, not what matters, and eventually that will matter more than the temple's believers can possibly imagine.

When economists start measuring durability, the quality of services, unpaid shadow-work performed by consumers and households that should be done by the companies providing the services, the perverse profiteering of monopolies, state and private, and the true costs over time of fixing AI's "almost good enough" magic, then their cultish claims to being "science" might have a shred of credibility.

Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack

Economics Measures What's Easy to Measure…