The Great Invention: The Story of GDP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World

The world’s principal measure of the health of economies is gross domestic product, or GDP: the sum of what all of us spend every day, from the contents of our weekly shopping to large capital spending by businesses. GDP also includes the myriad things that our governments pay for, from libraries and road-line painting to naval dockyards and nuclear weapons.The Great Invention reveals how in just a few decades GDP became the world’s most powerful formula: how six algebraic symbols forged in...