Gross Domestic Product Quotes

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product. attr to Buthan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck

Gross Domestic Product—the substitution, in effect, of ideas for physical value.

[O]ur human economy is derivative from the Earth economy. To glory in a rising Gross Domestic Product with an irreversibly declining Earth Product is an economic absurdity.

The problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

It was the ruling King of Bhutan himself who, in the 1980s, set up a system that measured national advancement according to Gross National Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product.

The Congolese are consistently rated as the planet’s poorest people, significantly worse off than other destitute Africans. In the decade from 2000, the Congolese were the only nationality whose gross domestic product per capita, a rough measure of average incomes, was less than a dollar a day.

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

As women of one country achieve more equality, men seek out women with fewer options elsewhere - a pattern observable sexually in sex trafficking, sex tourism, and mail -order brides and economically in labor trafficking, international outsourcing to sweatshops, and relocation of production in dominant countries to sources of cheap female labor in countries whose gross domestic product is less than that of some of the multinational corporations that locate there. No more than clean air can women's equality be successfully achieved in one country. No woman will be free until all women are equal.

The Donbas was a heavily populated and productive manufacturing area, with Donetsk alone accounting for about 12 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product. The area nearby also accounted for something near 90 percent of Ukraine’s oil and gas production, and fracking technology promised to open new fields. Grabbing the Donbas was a twofer. Russia could cripple the teetering economy of Ukraine and scoop up a healthy supply of oil and gas. Novorossiya!

We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it “gross domestic product.

And why do we measure the progress of economies by gross domestic product? GDP is simply the total annual value of all goods and services transacted in a country. It rises not only when lives get better and economies progress but also when bad things happen to people or to the environment. Higher alcohol sales, more driving under the influence, more accidents, more emergency-room admissions, more injuries, more people in jail—GDP goes up. More illegal logging in the tropics, more deforestation and biodiversity loss, higher timber sales—again, GDP goes up. We know better, but we still worship high annual GDP growth rate, regardless of where it comes from.

From 2013 through 2019, according to an estimate by the International Monetary Fund, nearly two-thirds of all economic activity disappeared.1 That’s a 65 percent drop in gross domestic product.

In the twentieth century per capita GDP was perhaps the supreme yardstick for evaluating national success. From this perspective, Singapore, each of whose citizens produces on average $56,000 worth of goods and services a year, is a more successful country than Costa Rica, whose citizens produce only $14,000 a year. But nowadays thinkers, politicians and even economists are calling to supplement or even replace GDP with GDH – gross domestic happiness. After all, what do people want? They don’t want to produce. They want to be happy. Production is important because it provides the material basis for happiness. But it is only the means, not the end. In one survey after another Costa Ricans report far higher levels of life satisfaction than Singaporeans. Would you rather be a highly productive but dissatisfied Singaporean, or a less productive but satisfied Costa Rican?

The rest of us, on the ·other hand-we members of the protected classes-have grown increasingly· dependent on our welfare programs. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments of often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes. The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years. A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America's welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France's. But that's true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided.

The benefits of silence are off the books. They are not measured directly by any econometric instrument such as gross domestic product, yet the availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation.

So the Cassandras who warned that the thirty-five-hour week would send the French economy into instant meltdown have been proved wrong. The gross domestic product has grown, and unemployment, though still above the EU average, has fallen. Productivity also remains high. Indeed, some evidence suggests that many French workers are more productive now. With less time on the job, and more leisure to look forward to, they make greater efforts to finish their work before clocking off.

What characterizes an addiction?” asks the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. “Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the power to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.” Addiction cuts large swaths across our culture. Many of us are burdened with compulsive behaviours that harm us and others, behaviours whose toxicity we fail to acknowledge or feel powerless to stop. Many people are addicted to accumulating wealth; for others the compulsive pull is power. Men and women become addicted to consumerism, status, shopping or fetishized relationships, not to mention the obvious and widespread addictions such as gambling, sex, junk food and the cult of the “young” body image. The following report from the Guardian Weekly speaks for itself: Americans now [2006] spend an alarming $15 billion a year on cosmetic surgery in a beautification frenzy that would be frowned upon if there was anyone left in the U.S. who could actually frown with their Botox-frozen faces. The sum is double Malawi’s gross domestic product and more than twice what America has contributed to AIDS programs in the past decade. Demand has exploded to produce a new generation of obsessives, or “beauty junkies.

of the 1 percent saw a bit less than a doubling of real incomes. Those in the 90th through 99th percentiles simply stayed even, with incomes growing at the same rate as per capita GDP, or gross domestic product. And the bottom 90 percent lost relative ground, with their incomes since 1980 growing more slowly than per capita GDP. The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.

Just a quick example: if the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP) continues on its current path of an average decline of 0.5 percent annually as it has from 2010 to 2021, the British economy will fall behind many of its European neighbors, including Poland by 2030 and Romania and Hungary by 2040.

Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities.

Trying to understand major economic events by looking only at data on changes in economic aggregates, such as gross domestic product, wage rates, interest rates, and tax rates, runs the risk of missing the underlying motivations for change. Doing so is like trying to understand a religious awakening by looking at the cost of printing religious tracts.

If you count all benefits, America’s welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France’s. But that’s true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided.[22]

A quick quiz. What do the following events have in common? The war in Iraq. The Exxon Valdez oil spill. The rise in America’s prison population. The answer: They all contribute to our nation’s gross national product, or what’s now referred to as gross domestic product, or GDP, and therefore all are considered “good,” at least in the dismal eyes of economists.

Recently China’s economy reached US$23.12 trillion in gross domestic product (the total value of goods produced and services provided in one country in a year). As the Chinese economy continues to rebalance from investment and manufacturing to consumption and services, bankers and officials around the world will be monitoring China for a soft or hard landing from 30 years of explosive growth.

Second, America is drowning in debt. While China is the world’s largest creditor nation, America is the world’s largest debtor nation. At $17 trillion, the national debt is now bigger than the annual gross domestic product—in other words, it is bigger than the total sum of goods and services that America produces in a year. Nearly half of this debt has been accumulated during the Obama years, at the average rate of a trillion dollars a year. At this pace, Obama will more than double the deficit in two terms. Since a substantial portion of America’s debt is owed to foreign countries, such as China and the Arab nations, debt produces a transfer of wealth away from America and toward the rest of the world. Today, instead of America owning the world, the world increasingly owns America.

In 1980, the compensation of the average chief executive officer was forty-two times that of the average worker; by the year 2004, the ratio had soared to 280 times that of the average worker (down from an astonishing 531 times at the peak in 2000). Over the past quarter-century, CEO compensation measured in current dollars rose nearly sixteen times over , while the compensation of the average worker slightly more than doubled. Measured in real(1980) dollars, however, the compensation of the average worker rose just 0.3 percent per year, barely enough to maintain his or her standard of living. Yet CEO compensation rose at a rate of 8.5 percent annually, increasing by more than seven times in real terms during the period. The rationale was that these executives had "created wealth" for their shareholders. But were CEOs actually creating value commensurate with this huge increase in compenstion? Certainly the average CEO was not. In real terms, aggregate corporate profits grew at an annual rate of just 2.9 percent, compared to 3.1 percent for our nation's economy, as represented by the Gross Domestic Product. How that somewhat dispiriting lag can drive average CEO compensation to a cool 9.8 million in 2004 is one of the great anomalies of the age.

Fighting poverty has huge benefits that we have been blind to until now,” Shafir points out. In fact, he suggests, in addition to measuring our gross domestic product, maybe it’s time we also started considering our gross domestic mental bandwidth. Greater mental bandwidth equates to better child-rearing, better health, more productive employees – you name it. “Fighting scarcity could even reduce costs,” projects Shafir.

The gross domestic product (GDP) was created in the 1930s to measure the value of the sum total of economic goods and services generated over a single year. The problem with the index is that it counts negative as well as positive economic activity. If a country invests large sums of money in armaments, builds prisons, expands police security, and has to clean up polluted environments and the like, it’s included in the GDP. Simon Kuznets, an American who invented the GDP measurement tool, pointed out early on that “[t]he welfare of a nation can . . . scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”28 Later in life, Kuznets became even more emphatic about the drawbacks of relying on the GDP as a gauge of economic prosperity. He warned that “[d]istinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth . . . . Goals for ‘more’ growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”29

I started tracking billionaire wealth in my home country, India. Back in 2010 anger against the new wealth elite was growing, and my first parsing of the Forbes lists helped explain why. Although India is relatively poor, billionaire wealth had soared to the equivalent of more than 17 per cent of gross domestic product, one of the highest shares in the world, with most of the gains accruing to a narrow set of families in industries prone to crony capitalism.

Has the United States been blessed for its critical role in Israel’s re-birth? Financially, America has certainly prospered. In the intervening 65 years since 1948, America has grown by 1,500%. In 1948 the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States was just over $1 trillion dollars. In 2012 America’s GDP had grown to over $15.6 trillion per year. In the same period, the nation also enjoyed a time of great freedom, though what Americans have done with that freedom is another issue.

A 2011 UN report admitted—years before the Paris climate pact—that going green will cost $76 trillion over forty years. Dan Gainor of the Media Research Institute has explained, “So let’s do the math: That works out to a grand total of $76 trillion, over 40 years—or more than five times the entire Gross Domestic Product of the United States ($14.66 trillion a year). It’s all part of a ‘technological overhaul’ ‘on the scale of the first industrial revolution’ called for in the annual report. Except that the U.N. will apparently control this next industrial revolution.”55

We have a tendency to describe capitalism with familiar, well-worn words like ‘markets’ and ‘trade’. But this isn’t quite accurate. Markets and traders were around for thousands of years before capitalism, and they are innocent enough on their own. What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it’s organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we measure as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.

The gross domestic product of the United States in 2001 was about $10.6 trillion. The budget of the federal government was about $1.8 trillion. In fiscal 2001, the government enjoyed a $128 billion operating surplus. Yet counterterrorism teams at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. working on Al Qaeda and allied groups received an infinitesimal fraction of the country’s defense and intelligence budget of roughly $300 billion, the great majority of which went to the Pentagon, to support conventional and missile forces. Bush’s national security deputies did not hold a meeting dedicated to plans to thwart Al Qaeda until September 4, 2001, almost nine months after President Bush took the oath of office. The September 11 conspiracy succeeded in part because the democratically elected government of the United States, including the Congress, did not regard Al Qaeda as a priority.

Kuznets created a metric called Gross National Product, which provided the basis for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) metric we use today. But Kuznets was careful to emphasise that GDP is flawed. It tallies up the market value of total production, but it doesn’t care whether that production is helpful or harmful. GDP makes no distinction between $100 worth of tear gas and $100 worth of education. And, perhaps more importantly, it does not account for the ecological and social costs of production. If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up. If you extend the working day and push back the retirement age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes up. But GDP says nothing about the loss of the forest as habitat for wildlife, or as a sink for emissions. It says nothing about the toll that too much work and pollution takes on people’s bodies and minds. And not only does it leave out what is bad, it also leaves out much of what is good: it doesn’t count most non-monetised economic activities, even when they are essential to human life and well-being. If you grow your own food, clean your own house or care for your ageing parents, GDP says nothing.

Indeed, for those in the West inclined to be critical of China, here are few cautionary facts. With its absolutely massive population (1.33 billion or one-fifth of the world's population) it's obvious that China should have a massive impact on the world. Yet, it's one-child policy, for all the uncomfortable ethical questions it raises and the painful sacrifice made by millions of Chinese families, means that China's annual percentage growth rate is low relative to the global average (0.49 per cent versus 1.13 per cent). Even with a population more than four times that of the United States (1.3 billion versus 0.3 billion), China's ecological footprint is still less than that of the US (2456 million global hectares versus 2730 million global hectares). In 2009, China invested far more than any other country in the clean energy industry – $34.6 billion or 0.39 per cent of its gross domestic product compared to United States' $18.6 billion or 0.13 per cent of GDP. When it comes to reforestation, China punches way above its numerical and geographical weight, with massive initiatives like the NFPP and SLCP helping seed some 4 million hectares of forest every year, which is probably more tree planting than the rest of the world put together.

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

Manhattan Prep started out as one lone tutor in a Starbucks coffee shop. Less than ten years later, it was a leading national education and publishing business that employed over one hundred people and was acquired by a public company for millions of dollars. How did that happen? We delivered a service that customers liked more than what was otherwise available. They sought us out and rewarded us with their business. We hired more people, grew, and kept improving. This process—a new company filling a need and flourishing as a result—is an example of value creation. It’s the fuel of economic growth, and what our country has been seeking a formula for. It’s the process that leads to new businesses and jobs. Value creation has a polar opposite: rent-seeking. In the 1980s, economists began noticing that countries with ample natural resources experienced lower economic growth rates than others. From 1965 to 1998 in the OPEC (oil-producing) countries, gross domestic product per capita decreased on average by 1.3 percent, while in the rest of the developed world, per capita growth increased by 2.2 percent (for an overall difference of 3.5 percent). This was a surprise—if you had lots of oil in the ground, wouldn’t that give you more wealth to invest and thus spur more rapid growth? Economists cited a number of factors to explain this “resource curse,” including internal and external conflict, corruption, lower monitoring of government, lack of diversification, and being subject to higher price volatility. One other possible explanation on offer was that a country’s smart people will wind up going to work in whatever industry is throwing off money (like the oil industry in Saudi Arabia). Thus fewer talented people are innovating in other industries, dragging down the growth rate over time. This makes sense—it’s a lot easier for a gifted Saudi to plug into the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and extract economic value than to come up with a new business or industry. Does this sort of thing happen in the United States? Yes, you can make money through rent-seeking as opposed to value or wealth creation.

It is very important to note, however, that the only segment of the population from whom changing our social and economic conditions in the ways that prevent violence would exact a higher cost would be the extremely wealthy upper, or ruling, class — the wealthiest one per cent of the population (which in the United States today controls some 39 per cent of the total wealth of the nation, and 48 per cent of the financial wealth, as shown by Wolff in Top Heavy (1996). The other 99 per cent of the population — namely, the middle class and the lower class — would benefit, not only form decreased rates of violence (which primarily victimize the very poor), but also from a more equitable distribution of the collective wealth and income of our unprecedentedly wealthy societies. Even on a worldwide scale, it would require a remarkably small sacrifice from the wealthiest individuals and nations to raise everyone on earth, including the populations of the poorest nations, above the subsistence level, as the United Nations Human Development Report 1998, has shown. I emphasize the wealthiest individuals as well as nations because, as the U.N. report documents, a tiny number of the wealthiest individuals actually possess wealth on a scale that is larger than the annual income of most of the nations of the earth. For example, the three richest individuals on earth have assets that exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product of the fortyeight poorest countries! The assets of the 84 richest individuals exceed the Gross Domestic Product of the most populous nation on earth, China, with 1.2 billion inhabitants. The 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, which is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the world's population, or 2.5 billion people. By comparison, it is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. This is less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world. It has been shown throughout the world, both internationally and intranationally, that reducing economic inequities not only improves physical health and reduces the rate of death from natural causes far more effectively than doctors, medicines, and hospitals; it also decreases the rate of death from both criminal and political violence far more effectively than any system of police forces, prisons, or military interventions ever invented.

The first thing to note about Korean industrial structure is the sheer concentration of Korean industry. Like other Asian economies, there are two levels of organization: individual firms and larger network organizations that unite disparate corporate entities. The Korean network organization is known as the chaebol, represented by the same two Chinese characters as the Japanese zaibatsu and patterned deliberately on the Japanese model. The size of individual Korean companies is not large by international standards. As of the mid-1980s, the Hyundai Motor Company, Korea’s largest automobile manufacturer, was only a thirtieth the size of General Motors, and the Samsung Electric Company was only a tenth the size of Japan’s Hitachi.1 However, these statistics understate their true economic clout because these businesses are linked to one another in very large network organizations. Virtually the whole of the large-business sector in Korea is part of a chaebol network: in 1988, forty-three chaebol (defined as conglomerates with assets in excess of 400 billion won, or US$500 million) brought together some 672 companies.2 If we measure industrial concentration by chaebol rather than individual firm, the figures are staggering: in 1984, the three largest chaebol alone (Samsung, Hyundai, and Lucky-Goldstar) produced 36 percent of Korea’s gross domestic product.3 Korean industry is more concentrated than that of Japan, particularly in the manufacturing sector; the three-firm concentration ratio for Korea in 1980 was 62.0 percent of all manufactured goods, compared to 56.3 percent for Japan.4 The degree of concentration of Korean industry grew throughout the postwar period, moreover, as the rate of chaebol growth substantially exceeded the rate of growth for the economy as a whole. For example, the twenty largest chaebol produced 21.8 percent of Korean gross domestic product in 1973, 28.9 percent in 1975, and 33.2 percent in 1978.5 The Japanese influence on Korean business organization has been enormous. Korea was an almost wholly agricultural society at the beginning of Japan’s colonial occupation in 1910, and the latter was responsible for creating much of the country’s early industrial infrastructure.6 Nearly 700,000 Japanese lived in Korea in 1940, and a similarly large number of Koreans lived in Japan as forced laborers. Some of the early Korean businesses got their start as colonial enterprises in the period of Japanese occupation.7 A good part of the two countries’ émigré populations were repatriated after the war, leading to a considerable exchange of knowledge and experience of business practices. The highly state-centered development strategies of President Park Chung Hee and others like him were formed as a result of his observation of Japanese industrial policy in Korea in the prewar period.

When the authors combine national expenditures in these social domains with the traditional health accounts, a dozen countries spend in aggregate a higher proportion of their gross domestic product than this nation does

Put simply, the growth model assumed that the overall wellbeing of a society was approximately proportional to the size of its economy, because more money or higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) meant that more individual and social desires could be satisfied via market transactions. No matter how rich a society became, growing the economy was thought to be the only effective way to eliminate poverty, reduce inequality and unemployment, properly fund schools, hospitals, the arts, scientific research, environmental protection programs, and so on. In other words, the underlying social problem (even within the richest nations) was believed to be a lack of money.

Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities

Let’s look at the amounts involved.5 When George W. Bush left office, the federal debt was $9 trillion. That’s a huge amount, and Bush added nearly $4 trillion to the total, a disgraceful legacy caused primarily by profligate domestic spending and foreign wars. Bush’s second term deficits averaged around $500 billion. But still, the $9 trillion represented America’s entire debt accumulated from the founding through 2008. Now, under Obama, the federal debt is $18.5 trillion. It’s larger than America’s gross domestic product which is around $17 trillion. The debt will be over $19 trillion when Obama leaves office. While progressives professed to be scandalized by Bush’s $500 billion deficits, they have remained silent while Obama racks up trillion-dollar deficits.

The United States spends nearly one-fifth its gross domestic product on healthcare, more than 3trillion a year, about the equivalent to the entire economy of France. For that, the U.S. health system generally delivers worse health outcomes than any other developed country, all of which spend on average about half what we do per person.

His personal wealth was larger than the gross domestic product of Hungary; larger than even the market capitalization of General Motors.

The definition of gross national product is nonsense, because they don’t put such factors as environmental damage and limited resources into the calculation. In the mean time there is another parameter, the gross domestic product, but this is not much better.

The most recent incarnation of the rules, as of 2022, that debt should be falling as a share of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in five years’ time is particularly ludicrous.44 It means government policy is being set in order that a distant forecast, that will definitely be wrong, falls just the right side of an arbitrary line.

Byron Wien, for decades one of the most influential voices on Wall Street, taught Israel how to understand macroeconomic questions like the difference between gross national product and gross domestic product. The government had switched the leading economic indicator from GNP to GDP, Wien explained to Israel, as a way to make it seem that the economy was growing faster—official sleight of hand understood by very few.

When George W. Bush left office, the federal debt was $9 trillion. That’s a huge amount, and Bush added nearly $4 trillion to the total, a disgraceful legacy caused primarily by profligate domestic spending and foreign wars. Bush’s second term deficits averaged around $500 billion. But still, the $9 trillion represented America’s entire debt accumulated from the founding through 2008. Now, under Obama, the federal debt is $18.5 trillion. It’s larger than America’s gross domestic product which is around $17 trillion. The debt will be over $19 trillion when Obama leaves office. While progressives professed to be scandalized by Bush’s $500 billion deficits, they have remained silent while Obama racks up trillion-dollar deficits. During the Reagan years the left fretted about “two hundred billion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.” What were annual deficits under Reagan became monthly deficits under Obama. In less than eight years, Obama has doubled the national debt.

America has an astounding 27.3% of the world’s total gross domestic product, with 4.5% of the world’s population. This means Americans are 6 to 7 times (600-700%) wealthier than most earthlings. The GDP of the United States is roughly equivalent to the total GDP of every single nation in the European Union, added together. Again, is there any other country in the world that one immediately thinks of, except America, even in the current recession, which so aptly matches the phrase ‘wealthy nation’?

During his final year in office, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government posted a more than $1 billion surplus. In 2013, the federal deficit topped $680 billion, down from $1.1 trillion in 2012. As of this writing, the U.S. national debt has surpassed $18 trillion. For perspective, in 1960, the national debt was about 52 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. By 1970, that figure had fallen to 34 percent. On October 17, 2013, it passed the 100 percent mark. In other words, the national debt now exceeds the value of America’s entire economic output.

Our current world I submit that we currently live in a climax stage.21 We have a political model that is based on leading in the popular polls--a model where barely differentiated political leaders pretend to be different by steering voters away from important issues and onto subjects that, albeit emotional, are of little consequence to most people--a model where the election is won by the person with the best marketing, and where consistency and integrity are irrelevant. We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn. We live in a world where the money necessary for our way of life comes out of a slit in the wall as long as we keep showing up for work, yet only experts understand the fiat-based money/credit system. We live in a world where food can be heated in a microwave oven at the touch of a button, yet only experts understand how this works. This goes for most of the other technology we use. All we know is that if we press this or that button, things magically happen. We are aware of large-scale problems, but most of us believe that we can't do anything about them. Instead, we believe in a mythical They who will find a solution, just like They have provided all this wonderful technology we surround ourselves with. We may be more technologically advanced as a group, and correctly but myopically hold up technology as our one indicator of "progress,"22 but in terms of individual understanding we have not come far, and once again live according to old concepts. In fact, we might have turned a full cycle from the last climax stage: The Dark Ages.

The Heritage Foundation concludes that by 2038, the carbon-dioxide rules alone, which phase out the use of coal, an abundant natural resource in the United States, will cost the nation nearly six hundred thousand jobs and an aggregate gross domestic product decrease of $2.23 trillion.

But there were others with reason to be thankful for the disappearance of that peculiar airplane—intelligence professionals enjoying the unprecedented influence conferred on them by the cold war’s cult of secrecy; military brass sitting atop armed forces that still consumed a tenth of the nation’s gross domestic product seven years after the end of the Korean War; and above all the missile manufacturers—Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, the Martin Company—girding themselves for an open-ended arms race to outproduce the Soviets in the technologies of an exotic new national defense that only Eisenhower seemed ready to resist. It is no surprise that many believed Article 360’s loss was no accident on America’s part; nor that some still do. *

Let’s look at the amounts involved.5 When George W. Bush left office, the federal debt was $9 trillion. That’s a huge amount, and Bush added nearly $4 trillion to the total, a disgraceful legacy caused primarily by profligate domestic spending and foreign wars. Bush’s second term deficits averaged around $500 billion. But still, the $9 trillion represented America’s entire debt accumulated from the founding through 2008. Now, under Obama, the federal debt is $18.5 trillion. It’s larger than America’s gross domestic product which is around $17 trillion. The debt will be over $19 trillion when Obama leaves office. While progressives professed to be scandalized by Bush’s $500 billion deficits, they have remained silent while Obama racks up trillion-dollar deficits. During the Reagan years the left fretted about “two hundred billion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.” What were annual deficits under Reagan became monthly deficits under Obama. In less than eight years, Obama has doubled the national debt.

The Saudi government probably spends more per capita than any other country in the world on arms. (It acknowledges only that it spends 13 percent of its gross domestic product, but half of its revenue is earmarked for the military.)

People who have seen the latest Greek plan said Athens was proposing new savings in the pension system — the biggest sticking point — which will amount to about 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product this year and just over 1 per cent next year. But this is short of the 1 per cent savings this year and next that Greece’s creditors had demanded. It also relies on higher employer contributions which, alongside proposed tax changes targeting corporate profits, could crimp economic growth, some creditor officials fear. The two sides also remain at loggerheads over rates of valued added tax on electricity and processed food. According to officials who attended the eurogroup meeting, Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund chief, was particularly tough.

We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn.

Currently a billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation. As a result, half of the world’s hospitalizations are due to people drinking water contaminated with infectious agents, toxic chemicals and radiological hazards. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), just one of those infectious agents—the bacteria that cause diarrhea—accounts for 4.1 percent of the global disease burden, killing 1.8 million children a year. Right now more folks have access to a cell phone than a toilet. In fact, the ancient Romans had better water quality than half the people alive today. So what happens if we solve this one problem? According to calculations done by Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute, an estimated 135 million people will die before 2020 because they lack safe drinking water and proper sanitation. First and foremost, access to clean water means saving these lives. But it also means sub-Saharan Africa no longer loses the 5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) that’s currently wasted on the health spending, productivity losses and labor diversions all associated with dirty water. Furthermore, because dehydration also lowers one’s ability to absorb nutrients, providing clean water helps those suffering from hunger and malnutrition. As a bonus, an entire litany of diseases and disease vectors gets wiped off the planet, as do a number of environmental concerns (fewer trees will be chopped down to boil water; fewer fossil fuels will be burned to purify water).

The combination of the land-reform programme and the creation of the public sector resulted in around 75 per cent of Egypt's gross domestic product (GDP) being transferred from the hands of the country's rich either to the state or to millions of small owners. The closest parallel to such a large-scale social programme had been in the early days of Mohamed Ali Pasha's rule in the early nineteenth century.

The Fed is still on the same track.” Whatever you call it, the benign economic environment has supported a bull market since 2009, and though there were a few rocky days last week, the main market ingredients seemed to remain in place. For example, on Wednesday a government report on gross domestic product in the second quarter showed that the economy was growing smartly, even rapidly, at a 4 percent annualized rate; yet the Federal Reserve declared that inflation was low enough to allow the slowly moderating pace of its expansive monetary policy to remain on track. In a statement on Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee said the central bank would continue to ratchet down its bond purchases as planned, yet it also said its policies would “maintain downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.” The Fed already holds more than $4 trillion in bonds, up from less than $1 billion when the financial crisis started, and it’s still buying more.

Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush. When Bush took office in 2001, the federal budget ran a surplus, the national debt stood at a generational low of 56 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and unemployment clocked in at 4 percent—which most economists consider the practical equivalent of full employment. The government’s tax revenue amounted to $2.1 trillion annually, of which $1 trillion came from personal income taxes and another $200 billion from corporate taxes. Military spending totaled $350 billion, or 3 percent of GDP—a low not seen since the late 1940s—and not one American had been killed in combat in almost a decade. Each dollar bought 1.06 euros, or 117 yen. Gasoline cost $1.50 per gallon. Twelve years after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States stood at the pinnacle of authority: the world’s only superpower, endowed with democratic legitimacy, the credible champion of the rule of law, the exemplar of freedom and prosperity.1 Eight years later the United States found itself in two distant “wars of choice”; military spending constituted 20 percent of all federal outlays and more than 5 percent of the gross domestic product. The final Bush budget was $1.4 trillion in the red and the national debt was out of control. The nation’s GDP had increased from $10.3 trillion to $$14.2 trillion during those eight years, but a series of tax cuts that Bush introduced had reduced the government’s revenue from personal income taxes by 9 percent and corporate taxes by 33 percent. Unemployment stood at 9.3 percent and was rising; two million Americans had lost their homes when a housing bubble burst, and new construction was at a standstill. The stock market had taken a nosedive, the dollar had lost much of its former value, and gasoline sold for $3.27 a gallon.2 The United States remained the world’s only superpower, but its reputation abroad was badly tarnished.

The senior British economic thinker on climate, Sir Nicholas Stern, has estimated that if we don't reverse climate change, the costs of dealing with the resulting catastrophe would be as much as twenty percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product. He's saying that if we do nothing about climate change, then we will have to spend a full fifth of our planet's economic energy on dealing with the floods, hurricanes, droughts, food shortages, and epidemics that will result.

By 2007, a healthcare system that sucked up as much money as the gross domestic product of France—but

I do think we’re at a turning point. The question is how strong and permanent this recovery will be,” he noted. But while these external factors are helping Italy emerge from economic decline, others — mainly events in Greece and Ukraine — could spoil any momentum and plunge the eurozone’s third-largest economy back into the doldrums. “We are definitely concerned, I see all the elements for a moderate recovery [but] there are risks coming from a number of open issues in the world,” Mr Rossi said. Mr Rossi credited the European Central Bank’s recent decision to buy government debt — known as quantitative easing — with driving the likely Italian recovery, through a weaker euro, lower borrowing costs, higher confidence and portfolio shifts. He estimated it would add about 1 percentage point to Italian gross domestic product over the next two years, but this would be in line with the rest of the eurozone — offering “no special advantage to Italy”.

Greece can balance its books without killing democracy Alexis Tsipras | 614 words OPINION Greece changes on January 25, the day of the election. My party, Syriza, guarantees a new social contract for political stability and economic security. We offer policies that will end austerity, enhance democracy and social cohesion and put the middle class back on its feet. This is the only way to strengthen the eurozone and make the European project attractive to citizens across the continent. We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy. Unless the forces of progress and democracy change Europe, it will be Marine Le Pen and her far-right allies that change it for us. We have a duty to negotiate openly, honestly and as equals with our European partners. There is no sense in each side brandishing its weapons. Let me clear up a misperception: balancing the government’s budget does not automatically require austerity. A Syriza government will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets. However, it is a fundamental matter of democracy that a newly elected government decides on its own how to achieve those goals. Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a “unilateral” act, but a democratic obligation. Is there any logical reason to continue with a prescription that helps the disease metastasise? Austerity has failed in Greece. It crippled the economy and left a large part of the workforce unemployed. This is a humanitarian crisis. The government has promised the country’s lenders that it will cut salaries and pensions further, and increase taxes in 2015. But those commitments only bind Antonis Samaras’s government which will, for that reason, be voted out of office on January 25. We want to bring Greece to the level of a proper, democratic European country. Our manifesto, known as the Thessaloniki programme, contains a set of fiscally balanced short-term measures to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, restart the economy and get people back to work. Unlike previous governments, we will address factors within Greece that have perpetuated the crisis. We will stand up to the tax-evading economic oligarchy. We will ensure social justice and sustainable growth, in the context of a social market economy. Public debt has risen to a staggering 177 per cent of gross domestic product. This is unsustainable; meeting the payments is very hard. On existing loans, we demand repayment terms that do not cause recession and do not push the people to more despair and poverty. We are not asking for new loans; we cannot keep adding debt to the mountain. The 1953 London Conference helped Germany achieve its postwar economic miracle by relieving the country of the burden of its own past errors. (Greece was among the international creditors who participated.) Since austerity has caused overindebtedness throughout Europe, we now call for a European debt conference, which will likewise give a strong boost to growth in Europe. This is not an exercise in creating moral hazard. It is a moral duty. We expect the European Central Bank itself to launch a full-blooded programme of quantitative easing. This is long overdue. It should be on a scale great enough to heal the eurozone and to give meaning to the phrase “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. Syriza will need time to change Greece. Only we can guarantee a break with the clientelist and kleptocratic practices of the political and economic elites. We have not been in government; we are a new force that owes no allegiance to the past. We will make the reforms that Greece actually needs. The writer is leader of Syriza, the Greek oppositionparty

In the US, the total cost of treatment has been put at two hundred and forty-five billion dollars every year. Equivalent to the entire gross domestic product of Israel. Many people fear that the medical management of diabetes could bankrupt every single healthcare system in the future.

There’s a country that does something a little like this. Its young people, including its very best educational prospects from all different backgrounds, spend two or three years training and solving problems in a nonhierarchical environment and get together every year. Many then collaborate to start companies. This country leads the world in venture capital investments per capita (over $170, versus $75 in the United States in 2010).1 It has more companies on the NASDAQ than any non-US country except for China, despite having a population of less than eight million.2 Its quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate was above 5 percent in 2011 and it’s in the top thirty globally in per capita GDP, above Spain and Saudi Arabia, among others.3 This country is Israel, where eighteen-year-olds complete two- or three-year tours in the military, getting to know each other in highly selective military units. They operate at a high level of autonomy and responsibility and then travel the world for months before heading to college and/or grad school. In Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s book Start-up Nation, this network and training ground is credited as helping give rise to a culture of risk taking and entrepreneurship. By the time Israelis graduate from college, they’re in their midtwenties and mature; in many cases, they’ve already been in operating environments and borne life-and-death responsibilities. This cocktail of experience gives rise to a mixture of both courage and impatience. As one entrepreneur put it, “When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. . . . Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.”4 Another observer commented, “Israelis . . .  don’t care about the social price of failure and they develop their projects regardless of the economic . . . situation.”5

The UN World Happiness Report put this down to a large gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, high life expectancy, a lack of corruption, a heightened sense of social support, freedom to make life choices and a culture of generosity. Scandinavian neighbours Norway and Sweden nuzzled alongside at the top of the happy-nation list, but it was Denmark that stood out. The country also topped the UK Office of National Statistics’ list of the world’s happiest nations and the European Commission’s well-being and happiness index – a position it had held onto for 40 years in a row.

Loraxes who like data may note that our rate of economic growth is matched almost exactly by our use of fossil fuels, which tracks almost exactly with the carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere. Given the direct relationship between gross domestic product and harmful emissions, these Loraxes might even contend that the only way to stop plundering the planet is to limit economic growth.

The velocity of a currency is calculated by dividing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for a certain period by the total money supply. For example, if the GDP is $20 trillion, but there are only $5 trillion worth of dollars available, then that money needs to turn over four times, or have a velocity of four, in order to meet demand on any given year. Currently, the velocity of the USD is a little north of 5.

To conceive of an education as a commodity (as if it were a polo pony or an Armani suit) is to construe the idea of democracy as the freedom of a market instead of a freedom of the mind. I can understand why the mistake is both easy and convenient to make, but unless we stop telling ourselves that America is best understood as the sum of its gross domestic product, we stand little chance of re-imagining our history or reengineering our schools.

by 2025, 440 cities with a collective population of 600 million (7% of all people) will account for half of worldwide gross domestic product.

A standardized way to appreciate the impact is by looking at gross domestic product (GDP)—a general measure of a country’s profit output, or economic health. Viewed this way, things look even more bleak, described in figure 16B. Insufficient sleep robs most nations of more than 2 percent of their GDP—amounting to the entire cost of each country’s military. It’s almost as much as each country invests in education. Just think, if we eliminated the national sleep debt, we could almost double the GDP percentage that is devoted to the education of our children. One more way that abundant sleep makes financial sense, and should itself be incentivized at the national level.

The difference, though, was that this time, the bankers were doing it on an inconceivable scale: the total amount of debt they had run up was larger than the combined Gross Domestic Products of every country in the world—and it threw the world into a tailspin and almost destroyed the system itself.

Utilitarianism is a deliberately unsentimental, unspiritual, pragmatic movement that values everything purely on the basis of its usefulness to humanity. It is the reason why we measure a country’s level of development in terms of Gross Domestic Product rather than quality of life, the degree to which industrial production is damaging the natural environment or whether what is being produced is beneficial to the rest of the world. Utilitarianism sees no virtue in adornment, in beauty for beauty’s sake, or in setting aside space for anything non-productive.

The Ukrainian scene remained as pluralistic at the turn of the twenty-first century as it had been after the declaration of independence. If anything, it became even more diverse. Eventually, all political forces had to accept the reality that Russian political solutions generally did not work in Ukraine. President Kuchma explained why in a book published in 2003, close to the end of his second term in office. The title was telling indeed: Ukraine Is Not Russia. THE MAJOR CHALLENGE to the democratic nature of the Ukrainian political process was the catastrophic economic decline that followed the declaration of independence and was often blamed on it, making not only the Leonid Brezhnev era but also the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms look like a paradise lost. In six years, between 1991 and 1997, Ukrainian industrial production fell by 48 percent, while the gross domestic product (GDP) lost a staggering 60 percent. The biggest loss (23 percent of the previous year’s GDP) occurred in 1994, the year of presidential elections and the signing of the first cooperation agreement with the European Union. These were figures comparable to but more significant than American economic losses during the Great Depression, when industrial production fell by 45 percent and GDP by 30 percent.

I did a study, called Men, that I’m hoping to make into a film. It’s about testosterone and how it acts in homogenized groups of male leadership. It’s about looking at what happens when you just have men at the fore of the political, financial, religious and cultural systems of the world. Historically, these systems were-and let’s be honest, still are-run by men: mostly white men. The continuation of this could be the end of us, because it’s one of the reasons we’ve had such intractability around climate change. In a closed system of male-dominated leadership, men’s testosterone and cortisol levels rise, which produces a really negative cascade of effects. It produces an acute focus on short-term threats and a very long-lens focus on long-term threats: so terrorism feels very, very immediate, but climate change-which is much more likely to be the bigger catastrophe-is put off. Men also fire dopamine and serotonin when they engage in conflict, so in these situations they exhibit much more risk-taking behavior. Women have somewhat of a different leadership style, so when you inject a tipping point of 30 per cent women into a ruling system of men, the entire group changes biochemically-communication, collaboration and consensus-building becomes more possible. My big theory is that, if more women were involved in the leadership of the world, in every country, we might see less war and more action on some of the direst threats. There are studies that bear this theory out; the countries that have the most progressive policies toward women generally have more women in office and in business. These countries also have the highest gross domestic products, they have the highest happiness indices and they have the lowest incidences of war. The countries that have the most repressive policies towards women are in endless cycles of war and tend to be doing very, very poorly.

Latinos not only count for 2 of every 10 Americans, the population is growing on an average of 1 million year‐over‐year. Latinos contribute 25 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and represent 82 percent of new entrants to the workforce, making them drivers of U.S. economic growth and productivity.

Perhaps the most extreme case is Mumbai, with 17 million people more densely packed than anywhere else in the world. The city is half slum, yet it generates one sixth of India’s gross domestic product.

The United States annually produces $5.3 trillion more in goods and services than China. Our gross domestic product is larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy, which are the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth richest countries in the world. California alone has a bigger economy than Canada does; New York State’s economy surpasses South Korea’s.[3] America’s poverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an indicator of economic health is, in fact, not a good indicator of a healthy standard of living at all.

fundamental analysts focus their attention on company finances and economic data about industries for which the stocks trade (also known as industries). They are concerned with factors like corporate earnings reports, profit margins, unemployment rates, and gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates. They examine these economic factors to determine how they will affect the demand and supply of a particular stock.

The handover from efficiency to adaptivity comes with sweeping changes in the economy and society including the shift from productivity to regenerativity, growth to flourishing, ownership to access, seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks, linear processes to cybernetic processes, vertically integrated economies of scale to laterally integrated economies of scale, centralized value chains to distributed value chains, corporate conglomerates to agile, high-tech small- and medium-sized cooperatives blockchained in fluid commons, intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge, zero-sum games to network effects, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship, gross domestic product (GDP) to quality-of-life indicators (QLI), negative externalities to circularity, and geopolitics to biosphere politics.

An entrepreneur is more useful and valuable to the economy than an economist.

As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), the national debt was at its highest—120 percent—in the period immediately following the Second World War. Yet, this was the same period during which the middle class was built, real median family income soared, and the next generation enjoyed a higher standard of living without the added burden of higher tax rates.

In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent.

Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent. The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class.

the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent.

Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent. The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class. The

Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date.

In 1947 the total value added by the financial sector to US gross domestic product was 2.3 per cent; by 2007 its contribution had risen to 8.1 per cent of GDP. In other words, approximately $1 of every $13 paid to employees in the United States now went to people working in finance.5 Finance had become even more important in Britain, where it accounted for 9.4 per cent of GDP in 2006.

Traditional finance uses a centralized authority that maintains distinct currency values across nations. Banks and other financial institutions enable monetary transactions using uniform values that may change, depending on the present GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the different nations whose currencies are used in particular exchanges.

We are exploited for cheap labor in vast economic contributions to the gross domestic product of the United States ($428 billion annually) as well as for our additional billion dollar contributions to federal, state, and local taxes. In the same breath, we are blamed for the economic and national security woes of the country by wily politicians eager for the power of elective office.

It is from the point of view of how does a culture meet the needs of human beings and how does it promote healthy or unhealthy development that we have to judge any society. Now we have the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), this is how we measure success and wealth. In a materialistic society we measure success by the possession or the control or the production of matter, of materials. That's what it means to be materialistic, it is materials that matter. Well, is that really the true measure of a human society? It is one measure, but is it a true measure of a successful society? Can a society be called "successful" because it produces more matter or controls or owns more matter than some other society? I would suggest that an equally important measure of a society and a culture and a system is to what degree does it meet human needs and how well does it promote healthy human development and to what degree or in what ways does it undermine it. So what is the nature of human nature? Well.. again, in this system, it is believed and often thought that human nature is essentially selfish, individualistic, aggressive and competitive. That's human nature. And so when somebody behaves that way, you say "oh well.. what can you do.. it is human nature.." But I believe that to speak of that is to make a rather elementary mistake. Which is to take this society as the standard over how human beings are supposed to be. It's true that we are taught to behave that way, as a matter of fact, not only we are taught to behave that way, the most successful people in this society do behave that way. That's how they become successful. But what if that is not human nature? What if that is a distortion of human nature? What if, in fact, our nature demands something else entirely? To look at human nature, we need to look at how human beings developed through aeons and then we have to look at what are the needs of the human child and what needs does the human being actually have. And rather than trying to determine the nature of human nature from our human behavior in certain situations, let's look at it from the point of view of their needs. And then, what I think we will find, it is not so much that there is human nature that predicts certain behaviors, because there are so many different human behaviors.. I mean you can have a Hitler or you can have a Jesus or a Martin Luther King. These are all human beings. So what then is human nature? What if we understood that there isn't so much a human nature that predicts human behavior, but what there actually is, is a human nature that means that we have certain needs. And if those needs are met, we are going to behave in predictable ways. And if those needs are not met, we are also going to behave in predictable ways. So it is not our behavior that defines our nature, but our needs that define our nature. And the behavior reflects the degree to which those needs are met or they are not met. What if we look from that point of view? Well.. what do we find from that point of view? And how would it looking at human nature from that angle lead us to understand what we call physical or mental pathology? And I say "what we call" because diagnoses and pathology and so on are just a certain way of looking at something. It doesn't necessarily reflect reality. Or it might describe a certain reality but it doesn't necessarily explain reality. And we have to make a distinction between descriptions and explanations.

Das Bruttosozialprodukt misst alles mit der Ausnahme der Dinge, die das Leben lebenswert machen. - Robert F. Kennedy (1925-68)

Der Bankmanager, der ohne Rücksicht auf Verluste Hypotheken und Derivate unters Volk bringt, um sich einen Millionenbonus zu sichern, trägt mehr zum BIP bei als eine Schule voller Lehrer oder eine Fabrik voller Automechaniker. Wir leben in einer Welt, in der die Grundregel anscheinend lautet, dass wir umso weniger zum BIP beitragen, je wichtiger unsere Tätigkeit für die Gesellschaft ist, etwa wenn wir reinigen, pflegen, unterrichten.

Simon Kuznets warnte bereits vor achtzig Jahren: "Aus einer Messung des Nationaleinkommens kann kaum auf das Wohlergehen eines Landes geschlossen werden. (...) Wir müssen den Unterschied zwischen Quantität und Qualität des Wachstums, zwischen Kosten und Erträgen und zwischen kurz- und langfristigen Entwicklungen im Auge behalten. (...) Die Wachstumsziele, die wir uns stecken, sollten die Frage beantworten, von welchem Wachstum wir mehr wollen und wozu.