Let's say I run a company. For the sake of argument, we'll call it a shoe store in New York City. I am making $100,000 net per year now. But, I look around me and see huge opportunity for growth. So I go to my bank and ask for a loan to expand my business.  I invest the money in expanding the store, and over the next five years I increase my earnings to $140,000.  Not bad!

Is this a well-run business?

GDP is not enough

Well, if your first instinct is to say, "you didn't give me enough information," I would have to agree. But, this is the way GDP statistics are used to measure the success of an economy.

Clearly then, GDP is an inadequate measure for understanding how healthy an economy is.  Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz brought this issue into the public domain last week when he spoke in Paris, calling the focus on GDP a ‘fetish' and favoring a broader measure of economic health.

Stiglitz was responding to reporters after a study on alternative measures of economic growth commissioned by French president Nicholas Sarkozy was released. At the time, Bloomberg reported Stiglitz saying:

GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it increasingly poor one…

So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP. There needs to be an array of numbers but we need to understand the role of each number. We may not be able to aggregate everything together.

Stiglitz is talking about the social costs of growth here.  Think about pollution, infant mortality rate, healthcare, life expectancy, or rates of obesity to name a few.  And his views are echoed in an article which prompted this tirade from me called "Emphasis on Growth Is Called Misguided" by Peter Goodman in today's New York Times.  Read it.

However, in this post, I want to focus in one narrow issue: debt.

The income statement vs.