Article Analysis: The Rise And Fall Of The G. D. P.

In recent years, GDP has been argued as an inefficient way to measure our country’s growth. The article in The New York Times, “The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P.” by Jon Gertner exemplifies to the reasons, which prove GDP alone isn’t enough to measure the U.S.’s growth throughout the year. While on the other hand, Nicholas Oulton provides readers with the evidence showing GDP’s effectiveness in measuring the nations wellbeing in his article “Hooray for GDP! GPD as a measure of wellbeing”. Gertner begins his article by explaining GDP results in the nation focusing solely on economic growth, and not anything that applies to our daily lives. Continuing on, he informs readers about the “State of the USA” organization, which will be a better method to discover information regarding health, the environment, and education. …show more content…
The first criticism he provides is the statement regarding GDP as an inefficient measure of welfare. He goes on to discuss GDP is a measure of output, not welfare; however, GDP does measure components of welfare. Additionally, he regards GDP as an indicator of human welfare. He proves these statements by giving the examples of how GDP is positively correlated with life expectancy and negatively correlated with inequality, along with infant mortality. Outlon then provides evidence through graphs showing richer countries have lower inequality and infant mortality rates, but higher life expectancies. Furthermore, he then disproves the statement “‘most people don’t benefit from GDP growth’”, by showing households throughout the US have grown significantly since 1959. Lastly, he shows happiness does not increase based of off increases income to disprove the theory “’GDP growth doesn’t make people happier’”. This shows there is no relevance to the statement, considering there is no real relationship between income and