Opinion

For many decades countries have measured their status in the world by something called, Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These numbers are put into a league table with the most powerful nations at the top, and the poorest nations at the bottom. On one day every month, the latest GDP growth or shrinkage is announced in the news, and we will hear a lot of that over the coming months as an indicator, or otherwise, of the nation falling deeper into recession. The last two quarters have been negative, -2.2% for Jan to March and a record -20.4%, so we are officially now in recession, but these numbers already suggest the meaninglessness of the measure.