Ahem dear Doug, 'catastrophic' is not how to describe this school of political economy, and you know that. And yes, the point from Marx about surplus value is that bourgeois statisticians do not understand the dynamic of the system. Have you read David Harvey's Limits to Capital? Do you disagree with his treatment of the transformation problem? Sorry to sound like someone with ADD (no doubt it lurks in my veins), but yes, absolutely, the argument here is that we do not have the requisite accounting system to understand capitalism properly, and as David points out, that's one of the reasons there are so many systemic mixed signals, which pull capital flows into sites of high returns (like finance and real estate) where surplus value extraction isn't happening.