[yorwba]

This response appears to have completely missed the point of the article it's responding to, as evidenced by unironically titling a subsection "public misunderstanding of a technical term is irrelevant." The critique of GDP isn't that it is somehow calculated incorrectly, but that the calculation does not behave the way people unfamiliar with the details expect it to behave. In particular, they expect that the number going up is good.

Surprisingly then, the very last sentence of the conclusion gets to the crux of the matter: 'his position on manufacturing statistics appears to boil down to “all the numbers should be going up, and none of the numbers should go down.”' If you have a number where sometimes a good thing makes it go up and sometimes a bad thing makes it go up, then that number going up isn't helpful for determining whether things are good or bad.

It is then also perfectly coherent to criticize both value-added and gross output metrics, even though each avoids a problem identified in the other, because neither avoids all problems.