There are inflation-adjusted GDP charts tho

Thats the biggest rug of everything. People assume then posted inflation rate is the actual inflation rate.

That does seem like a problem. :)

Exactly, great point

That's a good one. Usually, you'd have it be Krugman and another Keynesian (Yellen or Bernanke, etc)

"Home production" is the econ term for everything that might be considered "housework" or "do it yourself", not building houses. The problem with excluding it is that the same service done by a contractor or employee would count towards GDP.

The leisure problem, is that leisure time is a consumer good, but it's free and we have no good way of pricing its value to the consumer.

"Real GDP" has all of the same problems as GDP. It just has a very flawed inflation adjustment applied to it so that comparisons over time make more sense.

I'm not an expert on "Gross Output", but my understanding is that it captures more of the structure of production, by including intermediate stages. There are pro's and con's to doing this. The con that most people will raise is the supposed "double counting", since the earlier stage prices are supposedly included in the price of the final goods. The pro's are that you don't have to make arbitrary decisions about which goods and services are final goods and services vs which are intermediate. It is also more of a measure of overall economic activity. It does move with GDP most of the time, but it generally declines more sharply during recessions.

It might be bad culture, but people do prefer the pills to lifestyle changes and as such those expenditures do reflect voluntary exchange.

Now, you're right that me doing my 100 push ups a day for free is an omitted variable.

Great point! Although, I took it in a different direction. What you're talking about is probably an input for advertising companies, so maybe that shows up in whatever they charge for advertising. I'm not totally sure how or where it gets counted.

The proliferation of "free" information in general is very poorly captured. There's an analogue of the housework problem with people who produce content as a hobby and don't really seek compensation.

There are a few technical issues with capturing tech innovation:

In principle, technological innovation would be included in GDP, if everything were measured accurately.

I forgot about how crime is counted, but at least that's consistent with how they treat the government.

You could argue that all of those factors indirectly affect GDP (and in the right direction), but to the extent they are valued beyond their impact on commerce, you're right about them being major omissions.

I think mean something like "GDP reduces people to financial units", because humans are economic units, but economics is much broader than monetary transactions.

In principle, happiness is a better metric of well-being, but there are even more methodological issues with happiness research than conventional economic analysis.

I know it's supposed to be funny haha we all have a good laugh

But the Big Mac Index is just populism. A basket of n=1 products from a company that is famous to shrink quality to increase margins to their loyal customers of low-lifes... is a bad metric

That's more of a substitute for CPI, but I suppose you could multiply by Big Mac volume.

Have you met Austrians before? They'll complain about GDP anytime, anywhere.

What does he emphasize as the biggest problem(s) with GDP?