I thought I knew! But the more I introspected, the hazy my understanding got. Is GDP amount of stuff produced or consumed? Does it include imports or exports? What does it have to do with well being? Why does it keep increasing?
So, I fired up Claude and started understanding what GDP really is. This post contains my notes on the same.
But before we start, it’s worthwhile to reflect how many such concepts that we think we know, do we really know. Often there’s a gap between what we think we know, and what we actually know. It’s worthwhile to question your understanding of commonplace phenomena. Do we know what life is? What does productivity mean? How do greenhouse emissions warm the Earth, and so on. For so many such things, our mind convinces us that we know stuff when upon probing, it turns out to be a vague miasma. ...