Many of the prominent, public uses of GDP would be better replaced with life expectancy, which has been around since 1660. And if you don’t like that one, we’ve had lots of much better economic data for the past 50 years, so take your pick. Yet we still look at GDP and little else to measure how successful the economy is.

GDP in and of itself may have some validity in measuring specific types of economic activity, but its use as a singular number to measure overall well-being is propaganda and always has been.