i guess my lean towards (a) comes from a kind of qualitative empiricism, at best. year by year growth numbers aren’t reliable, but China’s share and increasing dominance in important sectors doesn’t require a well calibrated horserace to observe. 1/

that doesn’t mean China’s successes render its model superior in welfare terms! (there were lots of things the Soviet Union ill-advisedly produced a lot of, “dominated”). 2/

traditional growth measures are intended in a neoliberal context to obviate the question of “are we producing the right things?”, because markets optimize, then adding dollars spent on new production makes scalars, the value of “best uses” that we can rank. 3/

but i think rentierism in the US, persistent high mark-ups embedded in those numbers we sum, have weakened the historical correlation between GDP and welfare. 4/

so i think on both sides, our numbers aren’t what we want. they are overtly massaged on one side. they are undermined by structural change despite consistent, earnest, econometrics on the other. 5/

so ultimately we have little choice but to rely on course, qualitative observations, and impose our own weightings on them. 6/

does the military heft and/or generalized physical-world capacity that comes with shipbuilding overwhelm the cost in all the services thousands of workers in shipbuilding might otherwise supply? 7/

i have a view, but it could be wrong! still, i don’t think there is anything we can straightforwardly measure to decide the question, even if the measures weren’t massaged. /fin