You've unfortunately sparked a fairly pointless litany of quibbling about language, which I don't think was your intent.
The problem is that GDP is a lousy measure of median economic well-being, which is what matters most in social policy, yet it is the overwhelmingly popular summary statistics for (mean) "economic well-being". The problems with using arithmetic means rather than medians are so large and well-known that it's astonishing anyone still uses them, but the historical inertia of such measures is huge. There are decades of social science and economic research that needs to be re-considered in the light of median measures.
The article in question is part of this process, as it focuses on median measures, and anyone who is paying attention acknowledges that median measures are far more appropriate in many cases than mean measures.
"The GDP is growing" is no more relevant to a person who can't afford to buy winter boots than "Boot production has increased". And if the median person can't afford to buy boots, that indicates a major social problem. We need to move the discussion on from GDP and talk about the median person. It's still an imperfect measure, but a much, much better one.
A "double dip recession" translates in those terms to "things getting much worse for the median person."
> You've unfortunately sparked a fairly pointless litany of quibbling about language
Perhaps unfortunate, but very predictable. We have to agree on the definitions of the words we're using otherwise we're just monkeys at keyboards. And starting from a false premise is one of the worst ways to construct an argument.
As an aside, I'm always intrigued when people use words whose meanings they don't really comprehend. I think it's interesting how we try to infer meaning from contexts and how rarely we actually check that model against reference sources.
The problem is that GDP is a lousy measure of median economic well-being, which is what matters most in social policy, yet it is the overwhelmingly popular summary statistics for (mean) "economic well-being". The problems with using arithmetic means rather than medians are so large and well-known that it's astonishing anyone still uses them, but the historical inertia of such measures is huge. There are decades of social science and economic research that needs to be re-considered in the light of median measures.
The article in question is part of this process, as it focuses on median measures, and anyone who is paying attention acknowledges that median measures are far more appropriate in many cases than mean measures.
"The GDP is growing" is no more relevant to a person who can't afford to buy winter boots than "Boot production has increased". And if the median person can't afford to buy boots, that indicates a major social problem. We need to move the discussion on from GDP and talk about the median person. It's still an imperfect measure, but a much, much better one.
A "double dip recession" translates in those terms to "things getting much worse for the median person."