This always makes me uncomfortable though. How would we tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly money to do services for one another? I pay you to mow my lawn and you pay me to mow your lawn. Are we creating GDP?
Very true and you quickly get into a very command economy style argument about what should be produced. Ultimately we have the system we have and wasted or scammy products generally eventually die. Look at things like NFTs they were an extremely brief blip it turns out because people quickly saturated the ability of crypto early adopters to inflate values with their funny money. Some scams last longer like Thomas Kincade 'paintings' but trying to sort through the economic data to throw those out is just not possible.
> How would we tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly money to do services for one another?
It will show up as decrease in exports because other countries (or societies or tribes or whatever you want to call them) will want less of what your country is selling.
Which then shows up as decreasing purchasing power for things that you do want from other countries (i.e. you getting poorer).
Luckily for the US, that does not seem to be the case given the resilience of the purchasing power of the USD.
