It’s always a pleasure for me to have a new book about GDP or economic statistics more generally to read (no surprise!) – and this is no longer such a niche taste as it once was. So I very much enjoyed Lorenzo Fioramonti’s The World After GDP: Politics, Business and Society in the Post-Growth Era, a sequel to his Gross Domestic Problem.

The book rightly points to the fact that the many known flaws with GDP as a measure of economic welfare are becoming still more severe. The environmental issues are obvious. There have been longstanding critiques of the omission of much ‘household production’ (although not, as the book seems to suggest, all informal economic activity as it is household services such as cleaning and childcare that are left out; household products such as food is included in the definition of GDP). Still, as the book observes, GDP conceives of firms and governments as productive and households as non-productive and while this has some logic in terms of transactions, it has none in terms of economic welfare.

The digital transformation of the economy is making measurement ever harder: “One of the crucial flaws of GDP is its inability to capture the dynamic value embedded in all sorts of innovations, especially when they reduce costs, distribute access and increase what economists call ‘consumer surplus’.”

Fioramonti also highlights the political economy of GDP – its role as a sole criterion for assessing success or failure, and the growing ‘administrative uses’ such as debt and deficit rules expressed as a percentage of GDP, distorting policies. Unlike Ehsan Masood (in The Great Invention), who argues for a replacement for GDP, Fioramonti favours a suite of indicators. I don’t know which I think is better – there is a strong argument for needing more than one dimension of measurement but there are too many dashboards and sets of goals already. And perhaps people can only pay attention to one summary statistic? Either way, as Fioramonti says here, economic transformations go hand in hand with transformed measurement frameworks.

He makes some points I hadn’t considered and will think about more. For instance, the switch from GNP (the total output of all nationally-owned entities) to GDP (the total output produced within the national territory) provided “an accounting system in support of neoliberal economic globalization,” he writes. That ‘in support of’ suggests intentionality – I don’t know what the historical process was but doubt this was the case. However, it’s an interesting question whether the switch enabled or encouraged globalization (I’ll overlook the n-word).

While there’s much I agree with, there are also points on which I disagree, sometimes strongly. For instance, there is a truly bizarre section on competition, which Fioramonti sees as a wholly negative phenomenon, creating negative externalities. He alludes to competition as ‘random, disorganized interactions’, and yet at the same time describes it as a top down, and centralized process. I’m not sure how he thinks the technological change he refers to elsewhere happens without rivalry between businesses, and clearly sees markets as centralized – but then, how does competition come in to it? He argues also for localized, co-operative production which seems to me a largely romantic dream, which is feasible for some kinds of business (including, perhaps ironically, some ‘sharing’ platforms), but does not scale to an economy capable of providing goods and services to the population as a whole. This section cites Eleanor Ostrom, whose work is indeed marvellous, highlighting the range of possible collective economic institutions, other than markets and centralized states. However, she also underlines that the institutions she explores cannot function beyond a certain scale. The idea that all or many of the products and services in modern economies could be produced at homespun scale is a nonsense. But then, I also think the idea of a post-growth era overlooks the intangible character of modern growth and anyway requires some honesty about what the politics of no-growth would be like – think 10 years of stagnant real earnings, not cosy homesteading.
Still, a certain amount of disagreement adds savour to the book. I really enjoyed reading it, and so will anyone interested in the GDP and measurement debates – and there are plenty of you out there.[amazon_link asins=’1509511350,1780322720,1681771373,0691156794′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’61acb1ca-64c2-11e7-a339-5f9d782222c7′]