Second, “GDP/watt” is absolutely an economic metric, and it captures something about energy efficiency but also the mix of an economy. Software and services scores highly; aluminum smelting does not.
Say the monetary base is $100 and the GDP is $1,000 initially, then the monetary base doubles to $200 and the GDP doubles to $2,000. It looks suspiciously like no real economic activity was generated and that suggests that velocity is the growth measure.
Sure mind over matter, but I'd prefer using a more objective definition for wealth, rather than an arbitrary one. It makes measuring and comparing things much more sensible, otherwise you are free to reason whatever you want and have no culpability, which is very unscientific.
The reason economics is hard, in part, is that there isn't some core firmament you can rest on; there is no fundamental, provable truth. And yet, with fancy statistics and clever experimental design, you can still make intelligent statements and understand the world better.
To me, economics is the field with the purest expression of "all models are wrong, some are useful." Which is actually sort of cool, if you let it be.
I can only think it began with the philosophy for making better decisions, solving problems, and improving society - particularly in the allocation of its resources.
As so, I think a huge part of the problem with economics, including most economists, is that people equate value for wealth. Value certainly is subjective, I mean, do you value having $80k, or a nice car? How about a pool, or a boat? Do you value your time less than the cost of a flight? All very subjective. But I think it's flawed to conflate value for wealth. Wealth is something real, the things you are evaluating in trade. Time is wealth. Money is wealth. Oil is wealth. Land is wealth. Why don't we simply measure these things, and how they're allocated? IMO, it seems more practical and more noble of pursuit to figuring out if someone actually needs food in society, rather than what people with plenty of resources ascribe their values to.
You’ll find that money is noise, this, us, together, is wealth
The body’s just cosines and vectors, love is the real health
Anyway, idk if that's useful. I'd say though, economists don't really need to care about what people value, except to the extent that they can e.g,. learn about what people value by observing their behavior, or use how they ascribe value to something to predict their behavior. That is to say, "real" economists _do_ study allocations of physical resources etc., don't think they just try to model some theoretical value function :)
Is it actually that hard?
The material worth of something is what someone will pay you for it, i.e. the value it would sell for at auction. Your material wealth is the sum of the worth of what you have.
That means if you own something and the market price of it changes, i.e. someone changes their mind, then your wealth changes. But is that even wrong?
The real trouble here isn't measuring wealth, it's measuring surplus. If you sell your widget for $5, that implies it was worth less than $5 to you and at least $5 to someone else, but the gain isn't $5, it's whatever the difference is between how much you valued it and how much they did. If that was $4.50 and $5.50 then it's $1. If it was $3 and $1500 then it's $1497, even though they only paid $5. Imagine, for example, a $5 generic drug to someone who has what it treats.
The problem is that this i.e. isn't right, because the vast majority of market transactions are not auctions. The value a pallet of rice would auction for is very different than the value a rice farmer would accept to load it onto a truck, which is very different than the value a supermarket would pay to get one a month deposited in its loading dock, which is very different than the sum of values individual consumers would pay for the bags on that pallet.
"My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings." [1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrumpNation#:~:text=During%20d...
In that case, you could argue that "true GDP" didn't change at all, merely our measurement of it had error. But pretty soon you ask 'well, what is the real signal?' And it's turtles all the way down.
Again, economics is weird, but perhaps interesting because it's weird. (I'll confess I didn't care about the field at all until it suddenly got very interesting in ~2008.)