“There’s a useful old carpenter’s adage — measure twice, cut once — that’s also pretty good advice for other projects, like crafting public policy. Knowing as precisely as possible how a society is ticking helps both to better understand problems and formulate solutions. Compared to woodworking, it’s harder to measure what is going on in a society — or even to know what to measure. And relying on the wrong measurements can mess up public policy, tilting decisions politically and ignoring a society’s shortcomings. The big emerging debate focuses on the single most influential economic statistic — the gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the market value of all the goods and services produced in a country over a year, including private household consumption, investment, government spending and exports (minus imports).” [editor’s note: as long as GDP includes the non-production of statist spending, it will never be an accurate measure of economic activity - SAT] (02/08/10)