tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348029277408768033.post9220008249249787109..comments2024-03-19T06:44:50.179-07:00Comments on Bradley A. Hansen's Blog: The Back of Ed Baptist's EnvelopeB. H.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13453135271118840895noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348029277408768033.post-15861394800391132422019-03-23T14:50:49.705-07:002019-03-23T14:50:49.705-07:00Austin,
Just saw your comment (3 years after you ...Austin,<br /><br />Just saw your comment (3 years after you made it). Anyway, it is Mark Skousen who wrote The Structure of Production, and Skousen did not invent Gross Output. You can look up Gross Output on the St. Louis Federal Reserve page (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOAI). <br /><br />What you cannot do, as Baptist does, is to include final sales as well as intermediate inputs and call it GDP. I think Hansen is very clear on this point. Even worse is that Baptist is making up numbers without any sources or evidence. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348029277408768033.post-76765217092018169192016-05-19T13:29:14.506-07:002016-05-19T13:29:14.506-07:00Mike Skousen's "Gross Output" measur...Mike Skousen's "Gross Output" measure (Structure of Production, 1990) includes all business-to-business exchanges, which seems what Baptist is doing here. Skousen's claim is that it's important to look at all exchanges, as this acts complementary to GDP and illuminates what's going on inside it. If GDP were $17T, B2B exchange would be an additional $21T, making overall expenditures $38T.<br /><br />Now Skousen doesn't think "GO" measures the same thing GDP does; he just thinks it's as important to track revenues and expenses, as well as profit.<br /><br />Baptist seems to have done something similar here. He's added up all the (estimated) intermediate expenditures related to slavery.<br /><br />But it's not clear that his estimates have any evidence supporting them, or that he's done the exact same thing to all other expenditures, or that he's changed the denominator when he tries to calculate the % of market activity dedicated to slavery production. So even if Skousen's methodology is accepted, it's not clear Baptist has done it well at all.Austin Middletonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348029277408768033.post-60668828330543179572015-04-27T15:29:29.114-07:002015-04-27T15:29:29.114-07:00Thank you for these posts. I read the book in a hi...Thank you for these posts. I read the book in a history grad seminar and your posts are helping me understand its many flaws.Timnoreply@blogger.com