A closer look
Simon Kuznets created the foundational concept of Gross Domestic Product in the 1930s but explicitly warned the US Congress that it should never be used as a standalone measure of a nation's overall welfare or social progress. Naturally, politicians immediately ignored the guy who actually invented the metric and aggressively turned GDP into the ultimate global scoreboard for capitalist ego-measuring contests. Now we have entire governments obsessively focused on making sure this single arbitrary line constantly goes up, even if it means destroying the environment and ignoring public health. Who cares if a society is deeply depressed and drowning in medical debt as long as the quarterly manufacturing output of cheap plastic garbage shows a solid two percent growth. We basically worship a financial metric that literally treats a catastrophic oil spill as a positive event because of cleanup costs
