A tale of two Koreas

One of the most common conversations I have with non-economists was amusingly summed up by Conversable Economist Tim Taylor recently. He says "on a semi-regular basis, I find myself trying to be polite while someone explains their breathtaking "new" insight that while economists all worship at the altar of GDP, this wise social critic has noticed that measurements of market output are not identical to social well-being. This supposedly new insight has been obvious to economists since they started trying to measure the size of an economy back in the 1930s".