The GDP Myth.

• Author: ROWE, JONATHAN
• Position: Gross domestic product; questionable whether economic growth is inherently good

Why "growth" isn't always a good thing

George Orwell really did see it coming. "As soon as certain topics are raised," he wrote, "the concrete melts into the abstract." Nowhere does it melt more quickly than in economics.

Public discussion of the economy is a hothouse of evasive abstraction. Opinionators and politicians rarely name what they are talking about. Instead they waft into generalities they learned in Economics 101.

The President's State of the Union Address was a case in point. The President boasted of the "longest peacetime expansion of our history." That's how pols always talk. It sounds like truly wonderful news. But what actually has been expanding? A lot of things can grow, and do. Waistlines grow. Medical bills grow. Traffic, debt, and stress all grow. We can't know whether an "expansion" is good or not unless we know what it includes. Yet the President didn't tell, and the media homes didn't ask, which was typical too.

A human economy is supposed to advance well-being. That is elementary. Yet politicians and pundits rarely talk about it in those terms. Instead they revert to the language of "expansion," "growth," and the like, which mean something very different.

Cut through the boosterism and hysterics, and growth means simply "spending more money." It makes no difference where the money goes, and why. As long as the people spend more of it, the economy is said to "grow."

The technical term for this is "Gross Domestic Product" or GDP, which gives the proceedings an atmosphere of authority and expertise. But it doesn't take a genius to smell the fish. Spending more money doesn't always mean life is getting better. Often it means things are getting worse.

This is exceedingly ham for most commentators to grasp. It simply does not fit with the story line we learned in the economics texts. A number of writers have argued, for example, that things are much better than Americans realize, and that only a jaundiced and elitist media obscures this fact.

Yes, there is a Cassandra industry of issue groups on both Left and Right that raise money on dire warnings. Yes, the media gets more attention with bad news than with good. But that doesn't mean Americans are wrong when they tell pollsters that they are concerned abut the direction of the nation, even though their own economic fortunes are pretty good. When one looks at what is actually growing in America today, that view makes a lot of sense.

Consider a few examples.

The Flab Factor

To put this delicately, Americans are becoming quite ample. Over half of us are overweight. The portion of middle-aged Americans who are clinically obese has doubled since the 1960s; it is now one out of three. The number that is grossly overweight--that is, can't fit into an airline seat--has ballooned 350 percent over the past thirty years.

That's a lot of girth, and a prodigious source of growth. Food is roughly a $700 billion industry in the United States, counting agriculture, supermarkets, restaurants and the rest. Unfortunately, a good deal of that industry ends up inside us Americans. The result is flab, and a diet and weight loss industry of some $32 billion nationwide and--yes--growing.

Richard Armey, the House majority leader and an economist, has opined that "the market is rational and the government is dumb." Here's a bit of rationality for him. The food industry spends some $21 billion a year on advertising to goad us to eat more.

Then we spend that and half again trying to rid ourselves of the inevitable effects.

When diets and treadmills don't work, which is often, there's always the vacuum pump or knife. Cosmetic surgery is another booming sector, and much of it aims to detach unwanted pounds. There were roughly 110,000 liposuctions in the nation last year, at a cost of some $2,000 or more apiece. At five pounds per, that's 275 tons of flab up the tube. Pack it in, vac it off; it's pretty rational, especially if you are in the packing or the vacking business--or if, as in Armey's case, you get campaign contributions from those quarters.

Girth is one growth sector with a bright future. With Channel One and billboards filling schools with junk food ads, and with computers joining TV as a sedentary claim on time, kids are becoming broad of beam like their folks. The Surgeon General says childhood obesity is "epidemic," which is bad for kids but good for growth. Clothing lines for the "husky" child are expanding, as are summer camps for overweight youngsters. Type II diabetes, the kind associated with weight, has quadrupled among kids since 1982, which is a boost for the pharmaco-medical establishment.

Meanwhile, eating disorders such as bulimia have become a growth sector unto themselves. Bulimia may be the trademark affliction of the growth era. It is a disease of literal obedience to the schizoid messages that barrage...