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Open thread August 2, 2013

Dan Crawford | August 2, 2013 7:16 am

Tags: open thread Comments (3) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
3 Comments
  • Juan says:
    August 2, 2013 at 9:34 am

    How the US economy is being recalculated
    31 July 2013 Last updated at 08:50
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23501037ET

    ””This stuff is not bought and sold in markets. You don’t say: ‘Hey, I need a patent for a new drug, let me go out and buy one.’

    “There’s no marketplace, like there might be for a new building to evaluate prices.”

    So the statisticians at the BEA have tried since 2005 to figure out the best way to tabulate the economic output of all of the intellectual property production that we can intuitively tell is going on around us.

    They’ve essentially created approximations of pricing models, using input from businesses and leaders around the globe.

    “The most similar change we did to this was back in 1999, when we first capitalised [included in GDP] computer software,” says Brent Moulton, head of national accounts at the BEA and the man tasked with creating and implementing the GDP revision formula.
    Adding $370bn to the US economy seems like a lot. What’s the impact of these changes?

    “Overall it’s a very significant addition to GDP – around 2.5%,” says Mr Landefeld….”

    Surely one way to ‘overcome’ stagnation.

  • Juan says:
    August 2, 2013 at 9:57 am

    Would someone please read Shaikh and Tonak’s ”Measuring the Wealth of Nations’ which point to some of the problems with GDP accounting.

    The Preface to – Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts

    is locaated here – https://sites.google.com/a/newschool.edu/anwar-shaikh/publications

    and is worthwhile.

  • coberly says:
    August 2, 2013 at 11:07 am

    juan

    thanks, i’ll try to look at it. i was pretty exasperated by the national income accounting section of the introductory economics books i have looked at. not really because they leave out any “quality of life” measure… which would be difficult… but because even in their own terms it’s hard to tell what they are measuring.

    as to your posts here, i can see why a patent would be hard to price… unless of course it is sold to someone… but software? isn’t that sold in stores every day?

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