[yesfitz]

What bothers me about using GDP and Wages as a denominator or a measure of progress is that it ignores the impact of things becoming more expensive (except for inflation adjustments).

In fact, if we paid more for everything except imports, GDP would grow and it would look like we weren't importing as much. If we paid less for imports over the years, and then used them to generate a lot more money (e.g. a computer), it would look like imports were of shrinking importance.

With wages, the OECD definition of "Disposable Household Income"[2] is all income minus taxes, mandatory contributions, and interest on loans. So what isn't excluded? Rent. Childcare. Healthcare. Things that have dramatically increased in price (and also increased GDP).

We can measure everything in dollars, but that doesn't mean that the goods and services represented by those dollars are fungible.

1: Table 3 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/gdp4q24-3rd.... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...