The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters
“A book which explores how the digital transformation of the economy affects how we measure and interpret the true scale of innovation, productivity, and growth. Statistics are an essential guide for better economic policies. They also involve questions of freedom, justice, life and death, as governments – and increasingly machines – use statistics to make decisions affecting people’s lives. This book argues that the conceptual framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is out of date, and makes it impossible to measure, understand, and respond to what is really happening in the economy. According to Diane Coyle, we have been interpreting the economy through the lens of a statistical framework developed in the mid-twentieth century, when a lack of goods and services rather than natural resources was the binding constraint on growth, when the intangible value of intellectual property and digital assets were largely unaccounted for, and when the most pressing economic policy challenge was managing demand rather than supply.
