Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, man.

Oh, my.

And so, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 76, GDP and

Unemployment. I'm your host, James Fodor. In this episode, we're going to look at the two

economic concepts of gross domestic product, or GDP, and unemployment, both of which are very

relevant for understanding the business cycle, which I wanted to a future episode on.

So this is sort of preparatory for that, but also important concepts in their own right.

So I will discuss how these two concepts are defined, how they are measured in practice,

their relevance for understanding economic policy,

and some of the limitations of these concepts as they're currently defined and used.

Recommended pre-listing for this is episode 65 inflation and interest rates, which will contain

a bit of background information about inflation, which will be useful to know.

Okay, so let's get started and begin by talking about gross domestic product or GDP.

A good way to start understanding what GDP is

is to look at what it stands for, gross domestic product. You've probably heard people talk

about GDP because it's very commonly discussed in the news, particularly financial news and

other things like that, but perhaps you don't know exactly what it actually refers to or how it's

calculated. So that's what we're going to talk about in this show. But let's consider the acronym Gross Domestic

Product. Let's think about that. So product comes from the word production, which obviously means,

you know, what is produced, the output of an economy. Domestic means that the production occurs in the country,

domestically, that is, as opposed to, overseas. And gross means that, essentially, everything is

included. There are not subtractions made, and what that means exactly, we'll unpack at a moment.

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