Gross domestic product, or GDP is a massively flawed way to measure the quality of an economy.

And yet, it's one of the better and most widely utilized options that we have at the moment,

which doesn't say much for the alternatives that are currently available.

GDP is a term applied to the market value of all consumer goods and services produced in a particular place within a particular time period.

Notably, consumer goods and services means finished products and services.

So business-to-business versions of the same are typically left out of this measurement,

as are raw materials that have yet to be turned into any finished product.

We are looking at the stuff that ends up on these shelves,

and the services that are available for purchase by you and me,

rather than those only available to, for instance, Boeing or Tesco. The default time period used to measure GDP is typically a year, though not always, and the

region in question is often delineated by government boundaries, so a country, a state, a city,

because that makes it easier to judge how productive, by this standard at least, the economy within that specific governmental boundary has been.

Despite all its flaws, and there are many, including not measuring anywhere near the entirety of economic activity happening within a region,

and not measuring non-consumer product and service-related valuable

things within a society like happiness and healthfulness. Despite those downsides,

measuring GDP has allowed us to better understand and map out economic cycles, which are

visualized using historical data collecting and economic mapping by downward and upward movements that are capped by booms and which are visualized using historical data collecting and economic mapping by downward and upward

movements that are capped by booms and which are followed by contractions.

In other words, the economic cycle is cyclical, going up, then down, up, then down, forever

and ever. That's what the data we have indicates, at least. And because we don't have any data,

based on how we measure these sorts of things, that indicates that any of these types of systems,

operating as they do today, have ever moved forever upward or forever downward, without then being

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