That imposes additional requirements not specified by Tyler Cowen, though. Specifically: that the market’s estimate of inflation be exactly the same as the government figures, that you already be rich enough to be messing around with stocks and bonds, and that your personality includes a willingness to gamble a lot of money.

I don’t dispute that if you know the government’s inflation claim is wrong _and a whole bunch of other things are also true_ that you could be a very rich man. However, the number of people for whom all those other factors _are_ true doesn’t seem to be very big.

As for the “productivity of government”, you can if you prefer substitute “the deadweight loss of government”; the problem of its being hard to measure remains the same. Governments do provide goods and services (albeit generally the wrong ones, and badly); if those goods and services get better or worse there is a real effect on peoples’ lives that isn’t going to be adequately measured in GDP figures.

“If there’s anything wrong with gdp statistics, it’s either environmental problems or that we don’t have good measures of the productivity of government itself.”

Anyone who could seriously talk about “the productivity of the government” obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Also, the inflation rate has nothing to do with how rich America is now, as he implies, but with how much of that current wealth the government is stealing by inflating the currency.