But there are some almost similarly absurd situations. If you paint your garden fence and your neighbor plants some potatoes, that doesn't count into GDP. However, if you buy your neighbors potatoes, and she pays you to paint her fence, those exchanges become relevant (ignoring the fact that small stuff like this is hard to measure).
This is more relevant than one might think. Considering one of the largest economic developments in the last half century was the integration of women into the labour force, growth statistics would look quite different if were to assign a fair value to unpaid housework they used to do.
Guess which sector has been the biggest drag on MFP? Yep. Commodities. Because market prices were so high, it was profitable to throw a crap-load of inputs to extract fairly marginal outputs. Hence the drag on MFP. Now that the 'mining boom' is over, our national productivity will probably rise while our living standards fall due to the sharp reduction in national net income.
Productivity should not be seen as an end in itself, although it seems to dominate political discourse on the economy. I wonder if there are more sensible (and calculable) metrics that we could use...
But in the potato-case, all the potato-value and great-fence-you-have-there-value gets added to GDP, where realistically, output only grew by whatever the increase of efficiency was.
Grandparent childcare.
Eldercare.
volunteer activity
open source software
True
> but it sure as hell isn't the productivity that GDP says it is
No, because GDP is just a measure of economic activity, not useful economic activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product
I would agree that GDP is not really a measure of useful economic activity. But if that is so, the question begs, what practical use is the metric of GDP in the first place?