GDP is such a deeply flawed metric of measuring human welfare.

It’s an aggregate measure and doesn’t tell the distribution of wealth amongst nation.

Also, it’s a metric that was sort of useful in the 1950s and during wartime when this country manufactured goods. Now it’s all unclear in this modern economy. It doesn’t take into proper account of services, quality of care, quality of life.

It doesn’t even take into account _losses_ that may occur. Such as a natural disaster. Sure, in a post disaster GDP goes up because region is rebuilding. But the losses due to disaster are not figured into GDP.

It’s a broken metric. Stop using this as an indicator of economic health and human welfare.

edit; never heard of DSGE but yet again looks like yet another flawed “model” that assumes a level of “equilibrium” and seems to have been birthed out of the pseudoscience known as neoclassical (and orthodox) economics.

I don’t disagree with this criticism, but it also illustrates a common pattern where modelers tend to attack each other’s work. This criticism is somewhat inevitable because all models are flawed in some way, and reasonable people can disagree on how to best apply them.

But a bigger problem is the lack of a variety of models to choose from and compare.

My suggestion? If we want to encourage more models to exist in the world, we should use a mixture of (1) criticizing models (like above); (2) pointing to existing alternative models; (3) building new models; (4) writing up specific comparisons of models; (5) showing how to make models; (6) writing up successful case studies. And lots more.

What you say has a lot of truth. And yet, these kinds of models are still useful, provided a broader range of models is also available and socialized.

This touches on a key point: just because we can predict something doesn’t mean we should optimize for it. Still, being aware of consequences is useful: perhaps we want to satisfice under various constraints.

Eia also publishes their models.