The Bureau of Economic Analysis has revised the National Income and Product Accounts all the way back to 1928. With the release of Q2 GDP, Gross Domestic Product magically added $559.8 billion to 2012 GDP in current dollars. Additionally the chained dollar base year was changed from 2005 to 2009, a very funky year where some deflation from 2008 was still present.
In Do Nominal GDP Numbers Mean Anything (Very Much)?, Chris White has some stern words for how useless a measure Gross Domestic Product has become, and excoriates some "progressive" economists who recently used GDP "in a nominally uncritical way." And he takes aim at some of the results of economists' unwillingness to accept the need for normative judgements:
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