Rachel Zellie, Chapter 9, Question #6

As Wheelan described what the GDP is and what it measures I found it surprising that there are a few things the GDP doesn't take into account resulting in falsities. For example the GDP does not account for anything that one does not pay for meaning it does not take into account evironmentsl degradation. Wheelan used the example of a company plowing down a forest to make paper. Although an entire forest was just demolished the GDP reflects this demolition as a positive growth in GDP and doesn't show the negative effect of the loss of the trees. Wheelan also offers China as an example. China has recently had a rapidly growing GDP but this was all at the cost of significant evironmental degradation. When calculating the real GDP one must actually subtract the overall cost of the environmental damage thus resulting in a less positive GDP. Overall I thought the fact that a country could be seemingly well off based on their GDP but in all actuality are writhing under major pollution problems, such as China, as a very interesting topic. I found this most interesting and surprising because it shows that the systems we have set up now are flawed and could use fresh minds to further the accuracy in measuring the overall worth of a country.