It'd be nice in a world where economics is a religion and economists the high priests if the priests would make a distinction between numbers that have a clear, obvious connection to actual human welfare and the abstractions which are hard to measure and where their significance isn't clear. Nathan and other leftwing economists usually make an attempt to do this, but not everyone does.

So unemployment means something (though it might be hard to measure, given that some workers have given up) and income statistics mean something, but I'm not so sure about GDP and productivity and so forth. GDP, I gather, doesn't include things like damage to the environment and some leftists I've read say that disasters can actually raise GDP (because people spend money to fix what was broken). And productivity--well, I can understand that a factory which makes 2 million widgets with the same resources that another uses to make 1 million identical widgets is twice as productive, but it just strikes me as a little implausible that one could add together all the different forms of work done in an economy and assign a productivity number to it that means anything important or interesting.

Are kindergarten teachers today more productive than they were a few decades ago? I don't know the answer--my perhaps faulty understanding is that they would be, because their real income is higher.

Just ranting--if I've made some mistakes I'd welcome correction. (Honest).

Here's a key sentence from the article:

"We also now know that the economy stumbled just before the 2000 election, with a quarter of negative growth in the third quarter of the year instead of the weakly positive growth previously reported . . "

So can we put to bed the notion that Al Gore lost the 2000 election despite a booming economy?

Nice try Nathan, but you missed some important points. It isn't just one number that is looking good, but several. Unemployment is down, corporate profits are up, consumer confidence is up, and other leading economic indicators are also showing positive growth.