Transcription: “GDP is also a bullshit metric. If I buy $100 of flouride, add water, buy some bottles, repackage it as Crest Mouthwash, and sell it for $15/bottle, I’ve generated like $1500 of GDP. That’s not really adding value, that’s enriching shareholders at the cost of people who don’t realize they’re being robbed.”

Response: my guy, that’s literally the definition of adding value.

Now to be fair, this comment was downvoted when I found it, meaning more people disagreed than agreed, but still, this sentiment about “adding value” is something I see all over the internet in anti-capitalist spaces. People will literally explain adding value, then say something adds absolutely no value.

Even a marxist would agree that the labor required to add water, buy bottles, and package something adds value to the product. And a capitalist would say that if this poster successfully created mouthwash that people would buy for $15/bottle, then they’ve added value to that $100 of fluoride. And if this poster actually did this experiment, and made money off of it, they could quickly start a company and become rich.

But they can’t do this, because it’s actually quite difficult to create good, quality fluoridated mouthwash, and they have no skills besides complaining on the Internet.

Still, they have explicitly defined a process in which a low-cost good is turned into a highly desirable product, a process which both a labor-obsessed marxist and a capital-obsessed capitalist would say has “added value” to that good, and have said that it isn’t “real” value. They extend this to say that GDP is bullshit.

“GDP-is-bullshit”ism has seemed to take hold in some spaces. I can see why, people’s personal situations don’t always track the wider economy, so the economy as a whole (measured by GDP) can go up massively while some people or some sectors are struggling. It may not matter to you than millions of people have more time, money, and leisure because you personally lost your job as say a factory worker. In this case GDP can seem like a false measurement because people have a hard time looking outside themselves.

But in another way, it is true that some politicians laser-focus on GDP to the expense of all else. It is a basic truism that when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric. GDP is a *metric* of economic health, but once voters realized this they started grading their politicians on the GDP measurements they saw in the news. That in turn made GDP into a *target* for politicians to point at and say “look, I’m making things better!”

In that case, GDP can go up (because it’s being targeted) while people’s actual situation is going down. This is exactly what happened during the tail end of the Trudeau administration in Canada, Trudeau focused solely on rising GDP as his target, but GDP-per-capita went down. People’s living situations in Canada were not really improved at all despite Trudeau raising the national GDP.

Still, GDP is a good measure of what it measures: productivity. And what is productivity? It is the turning of low-value things into high value things.

The above poster blithely described it as “bullshit,” but think of this: everything we as a society need and want requires someone else to use their time, money and effort to make it for us. If there isn’t enough food for all of us, our lives are measurably worse off. Increasing the production of food requires the labor of a farmer, requires the cultivation of land, requires the creation of irrigation and of transport infrastructure and warehouses for the food and inspections to ensure the food is clean. The creation of all those things is captured in GDP.

GDP directly captures when something of value is created, whether it’s food, or irrigation to make the food, or warehouses to store the food, or even Crest Mouthwash made from raw fluoride. YOU may not think the thing created has value, maybe you don’t wash your mouth. But the beauty of capitalism is that OTHER people get to decide for THEMSELVES what they think is valuable, and if they want mouthwash, they’ll happily pay for it, and thus creating new mouthwash to sell to those people raises GDP.

This is a small post, it’s mostly meant to dunk on a single Internet commentator, and by extension dunk on an entire subculture of “GDP-is-bullshit”ists. But I want to make clear: GDP is NOT bullshit. It is a measure of goods and services created. Those goods and services have VALUE, maybe not to you, but to SOMEONE ELSE. If they didn’t have value to someone else, they wouldn’t raise GDP. And so complaining that some people’s goods and services add value, even though you don’t think they’re useful, is like complaining that other people are having fun with a game you don’t like.