What if our most trusted economic statistic is pointing us in the wrong direction? Diane Coyle joins Kevin Coldiron to explore why GDP - long treated as a proxy for progress - now obscures more than it reveals. As economies shift toward services, intangibles, and unpaid digital labor, much of today’s value creation falls outside the frame. Drawing on her new book, The Measure of Progress, Coyle makes the case for a new way of seeing - one that captures time, trust, and the real foundations of growth. The question isn’t how fast we’re moving. It’s whether we’re measuring the right road.

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Episode TimeStamps:

02:19 - Introduction to Diane Coyle

03:55 - How did the current systems of national accounts came to be?

06:55 - Why the national statistics doesn't add up

11:22 - The underlying problems of GDP

18:42 - How software pose a problem for measuring GDP and economic activity

23:25 - The challenges of cloud computing

26:39 - What is disintermediation and why is it a problem for economic statistics?

33:35 - The importance of considering time as a variable in economic statistics

38:38 - How technological innovations can mess up our ability to measure GDP

40:45 - Coyle's framework for improving how we measure GDP

46:34 - We are thinking about measuring national capital in the wrong way

48:48 - How human capital is measured

53:13 - What kind of statistics does Coyle value when trying to gauge the economy

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Disclaimer

IL40: Why the Economy Feels Broken... Even When It’s Growing ft. Diane Coyle