Re: Destructive growth?
For better or worse, we measure economic health and growth with GDP, but that only takes into account current expenditures - and makes no place for existing asset evaluation, its increase or decrease. That, in turn, makes any expenditure a gain, and lack of expenditure a loss, so that a natural disaster, or artificial one such as war, that destroys assets but elicits recovery effort, is a gain or growth in the economy even though expensive assets, including infrastructure, may have been wiped out in the process. That is, the economic base may be substantially reduced, but if that elicits a recovery effort involving expenditures, the reduction goes unaccounted in GDP, and only the ongoing recovery expenditures are recorded. One might argue that a substantially reduced base would be indirectly reflected in a lower GDP, by taking away the potential for expenditure by all, but if the recovery effort is sufficiently robust, it won't count for much. There are other national accounting statistics that would reflect the asset losses, but they don't get nearly the attention or the identification with "economic health", "growth", "stagnation", or "decline", as GDP.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
