[flexie]

Apart from

1) measuring activity that doesn't contribute much to society in any meaningful way (war), and from

2) failing to measure activity that actually contributes to society (like the grey economy),

3) GDP also fails to measure old activity that is still contributing. In a company's accounting that would be the assets, incl. the IPR and goodwill. In a country, it's the roads that our forefathers built, the education that our parents still have, the peace that was brokered with neighboring states 500 years etc. I wish there was a better tool for measuring that. Even if the GDP of China has surpassed that of the EU for a few years, it will be many years for China to catch up with the GDP (and other contributions) added to the European economy in the past hundreds of years.