Re: GDP?
Economic growth is like interest, it adds up.
With GDP, though, perhaps the more interesting thing is to think about how it is measured and whether it is very reasonable to think that anybody (especially outside the developed world but also in the developed world too) could accurately estimate the total value of goods and services produced in an economy. Since, as you point out, even percentage point can have very important substantive meanings, the margin of error in estimating GDP doesn't have to be too high in order to make the statistic kind of crappy. For example, should anybody have any confidence in Chinese estimates of GDP growth right now?
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