The main problem with GDP is that in popular discourse and in the financial press, it tends to displace other indicators of how the economy is doing, much as the Dow and the S&P 500 tend to crowd out other indicators of the stock market. I, for one, would welcome the advent of a new economic statistic — call it “GDP revised.” Coyle notes, “We might move toward a different approach in time.” In my vision of such a revision, at least one version of revised GDP would no longer count spending on defense or domestic security, because each of those is geared toward avoiding destruction rather than providing enjoyable goods and services; as an intermediate good, the value of security will be picked up in any case by the production of the other goods and services it enables. I also would not count education, another intermediate good; we spend more and more on it, and our GDP measures are valuing how much we spend and not how much we learn. Let’s also consider that perhaps one-third or more of U.S. health-care spending is wasteful, and chop that off, too. With such a number in hand, the narrative of recent U.S. economic history probably would look less promising. It might help explain, for instance, why the income for the median or typical household has risen only slightly since 1973. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gdp-a-brief-but-affectionate-history-by-diane-coyle-and-the-leading-indicators-a-short-history-of-the-numbers-that-rule-our-world-by-zachary-karabell/2014/02/21/77da5a30-718b-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html