>Sure, that is what the US Department of Commerce did when it
>standardized our national income and product accounts (GNP) in the
>1940s; the economists involved defined "production" by including
>some activities and not others. Look at the production process
>closely and decide...that's what others have done including Simon
>Kuznets who was involved in the project for a while...that's what I
>was doing. But for the record Simon Kuznets quit the US DOC project
>as he felt GNP should measure economic well-being and should include
>the value of unpaid home production because it is an important
>factor of production.
But GDP mostly measures stuff produced and sold for money (though there are quite a few imputations in the NIPAs, but exchange value is the basis for the imputations). Household production is conducted under very different sets of rewards and constraints. That's not to say that the stuff excluded from the NIPAs is less important - quite the opposite, it's a way of saying that GDP misses a lot of important activity. But conceptually, households and markets are very different realms. Besides, the practical problems of assigning values ti household production (or, worse, environmental degradation) are mindboggling.
>CBS News anchors Dan Rather and John Roberts both need cosmetics
>applied to their faces to produce whatever it is they both produce.
Advertising is what they produce. At least by the logic of the NIPAs - the value of commercial radio & TV is the value of the ads they carry.
Doug