The difficulty of discussion w/ @jasonhickel comes also from the fact that he just does not *know* things about which he writes. He is right that today's GDP does not include non-marketed activities. But this is less obvious for the past. He seems to imagine that in 1820 England
Zambia and Peru had statistical offices that calculated GDP according to today's rules and excluded then quite sizeable non-market activities. But this is of course not true. There are no statistical offices and GDP methodology until late 1940s and early 1950s or even 1960s.
Historical GDPs are calculated based on assessments of arable land, yields, some info on people's consumption patterns, and data on production on a few manufactured goods. Such an approach which, in agriculture, does not depend on marketization but on physical production can...
actually exclude *fewer* non-marketable transactions than today. Other shortcut methods of GDP estimation are even rougher: they are based only on urbanization rates and elasticity of food consumption: they have *nothing* to do with exclusion of non-marketable production.
Thus, Hickel should, I think, first learn how historical GDP estimates are made rather than anachronistically take today's approaches and imagine they were applied two centuries ago.
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