IL40: Why the Economy Feels Broken... Even When It’s Growing ft. Diane Coyle
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 712 Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if our most trusted economic statistic is pointing us in the wrong direction? Diane Coyle joins Kevin Coldiron to explore why GDP - long treated as a proxy for progress - now obscures more than it reveals. As economies shift toward services, intangibles, and unpaid digital labor, much of today’s value creation falls outside the frame. Drawing on her new book, The Measure of Progress, Coyle makes the case for a new way of seeing - one that captures time, trust, and the real foundations of growth. The question isn’t how fast we’re moving. It’s whether we’re measuring the right road.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:19 - Introduction to Diane Coyle
03:55 - How did the current systems of national accounts came to be?
06:55 - Why the national statistics doesn't add up
11:22 - The underlying problems of GDP
18:42 - How software pose a problem for measuring GDP and economic activity
23:25 - The challenges of cloud computing
26:39 - What is disintermediation and why is it a problem for economic statistics?
33:35 - The importance of considering time as a variable in economic statistics
38:38 - How technological innovations can mess up our ability to measure GDP
40:45 - Coyle's framework for improving how we measure GDP
46:34 - We are thinking about measuring national capital in the wrong way
48:48 - How human capital is measured
53:13 - What kind of statistics does Coyle value when trying to gauge the economy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're in an interesting time because the system of national accounts gets revised |
| 0:12.0 | over 10 years or so. We've just had a revision earlier this year. But almost immediately, |
| 0:17.0 | the Secretary General of the UN announced a new commission to look at how to do |
| 0:22.5 | better economic statistics because there is I think a deep sense among many populations that the |
| 0:31.1 | GDP growth figures don't reflect their experience GDP growth has been going up a lot of people feel their lives have not been getting better. |
| 0:39.9 | So the popular demand, if you like, for a different approach to measurement is definitely there. |
| 0:46.9 | Imagine spending an hour with the world's greatest traders. Imagine learning from their experiences, |
| 0:52.8 | their successes and their failures. |
| 0:55.1 | Imagine no more. |
| 0:57.0 | Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world, |
| 1:03.1 | so you can take your manager, due diligence, or investment career to the next level. |
| 1:07.8 | Before we begin today's conversation, remember to keep two things in mind. All the |
| 1:12.1 | discussion we'll have about investment performance is about the past, and past performance |
| 1:16.4 | does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance. Also understand that there's |
| 1:21.6 | a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies, and you need to request |
| 1:26.2 | and understand the specific risks from |
| 1:28.4 | the investment manager about their product before you make investment decisions. |
| 1:32.6 | Here's your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kostrup Larson. |
| 1:41.9 | For me, the best part of my podcasting journey has been the opportunity to speak to a huge range of extraordinary people from all around the world. |
| 1:50.5 | In this series, I have invited one of them, namely Kevin Koldine to host a series of in-depth conversations |
| 1:56.2 | to help uncover and explain new ideas to make you a better investor. |
| 2:01.6 | In the series, Kevin will be speaking to authors of new books and research papers |
... |
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