Fourth, and last, the confusion between profits and rents appears in the ways we measure growth itself: GDP. Indeed, it is here that the production boundary comes back to haunt us: if anything that fetches a price is value, then the way national accounting is done wont be able to distinguish value creation from value extraction and thus policies aimed at the former might simply lead to the latter. This is not only true for the environment where picking up the mess of pollution will definitely increase GDP (due to the cleaning services paid for) while a cleaner environment won’t necessarily
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