Haseeb Qureshi

It doesn't show up in GDP, doesn't show up in income, doesn't show up in payroll, doesn't show up anywhere.

So this is one of the problems with using GDP as the principal measure of the wealth of a society is that these kinds of services that are too cheap to meter

where you're getting something that would otherwise have cost you a lot of money and you're now getting it for free, this does not get measured by the way that we measure GDP.

Now, you could look at that and say, oh my God, that's terrible.

That means that there's going to be an economic collapse.

That's wrong.

It's the wrong way to understand what's happening.

The right way to understand what's happening is that everybody in society just got richer.

That's the right way to understand what's happening, right?

If you had a machine that could magically manifest bananas

in your house, right?

Just literally transmogrify them and pull them out of outer space, okay?

That would not show up in GDP.

Nobody bought anything.

Nobody sold anything.

It would not look like society got richer.

You'd say, GDP was flat this year.

No one got any richer and society is exactly the same as it was last year.

Well, no, it's not.

We all got magical banana machine.