As one historian explains, “The first thing you do in 1950s and ’60s if you’re a new nation is you open a national airline, you create a national army, and you start measuring GDP.”23 But that last item became progressively trickier. When the United Nations published its first standard guideline for figuring GDP in 1953, it totaled just under fifty pages. The most recent edition, issued in 2008, comes in at 722. Though it’s a number bandied about freely in the media, there are few people who really understand how the GDP is determined. Even many professional economists have no clue.24
