[gumby]

> GDP was never really an accurate calculation and interest rates greatly affect whatever the natural baseline is at any time.

GDP (GNP back then) was just a simple, interim suggestion of Simon Kuznets' while walking with FDR and talking about the depression back in the early 1930s. It wasn't meant to be an authoritative or be-all-and-end-all for the state of the economy.

Like the Charles Dow's indexes, GNP was something that could relatively easily be calculated (Dow could do it with a pencil and paper; GNP needed the simple statistical bureaucracy of the time to collect the raw data). Also like the Dow, once reported you didn't want to stop because it was the longest time series data available. Also like the Dow it was readjusted via judgement from time to time.