Jerry Bowyer | On July 19, 2021

(Photo by Dave Dugdale) (CC BY) (Resized/Cropped)

Dr. Mark Skousen of Chapman University has accomplished a rare achievement in economics: he has created an alternative to GDP and persuaded the Bureau of Economic Analysis to track and report it along with GDP. The theoretical foundations of Gross Ouput (GO) were laid down in Skousen’s book, The Structure of Production and those themes were extended and expounded in his innovative textbook, Economic Logic. GO (which Skousen originally christened GDO, Gross Domestic Output) addresses the paradox of economics which rely on GDP, the paradox that most economic activity is hidden away, absorbed and embedded in GDP, the flattened final layer of the economic process. Our mutual friend Steve Forbes likes to say that GDP is an X-ray but GO is a CAT scan. That’s an apt analogy. Modern medical imaging is based on the recreation of 3D representations by capturing images in “slices” and then reconstructing the full organ on the computer. I recently had a session with my cardiologist, Dr. Arthur Agatston, inventor of the Agatston Score which measure calcification of arteries based on a CT scan. We went through the image 3 mm slice by 3 mm slice to see exactly what was going on. And he was able to show, and I was able to see, so much more than a single slice or a single statistic could. (Don’t worry, what we found was good news).

GO lets us go through the economy slice by slice and see where blockages or irregularities might be appearing. It shows us the whole economy, which it turns out is mostly found in business production, not in final consumption. Now one might argue, and some have, that GDP captures all the value, i.e. all the prior stages of production are represented in the final purchase. That the car I buy contains all the value created in all the stage before from the mind of iron ore, to the production of steel, components, assembly, transport. Yes, that’s true, but it misses the point. People work in mining, refining, manufacturing, assembly and transportation. Companies perform these functions and (hopefully) generate profits doing so. To flatten all of it into one final phase is to miss the actual story, because the nature of stories is that they unfold in time. Narrative is temporal. Economics is temporal. GDP is one frozen captured moment.

And one of the advantages of reading the story as story is that we have a better chance to anticipate the next chapter. GO leads GDP. Production comes before consumption. (My wonderful mentor, the late Dr. Kurt Rethwisch of Duquesne University used to say, “There is only one place where consumption comes before production – the dictionary!”) Gross Output with the government and the final stages of private consumption stripped out leaves us with the supply chain. There’s a lot of insight there. Business is more agile than the consumer, and varies production more than we vary consumption. Supply chain managers have a lot of skin in the game if they build too few, or too many, widgets. Yes, they can get it wrong, but in general, they tend to get the direction right, which means that business activity now correlates with GDP later.

Skousen and I recently sat across a Zoom connection to discuss GO and Say’s Law and other matters of economic theory and analysis. But we also talked about his own business venture, FreedomFest. FreedomFest is the largest gathering of freedom-oriented folks in the world. It happens every year in July and has been doing so for more than a dozen years. It’s aimed at an intellectually curious non-academics audience. It offers a rich variety of topics, not just economics and politics, but philosophy, health, leadership, and (with me speaking about my book about Jesus and economics) some theology as well.

You can sign up here.

To listen to our conversation you can go here, or here, or here.

If you prefer to watch, you may do so here: Mark Skousen on the Whole Economy and on FreedomFest – YouTube

Time cues are below:

0:00 – Intro

1:59 – Where does FreedomFest come from?

5:20 – The Anthem Film Festival

8:15 – Why FreedomFest goes to Las Vegas and South Dakota

11:23 – Bringing intellectual speakers to FreedomFest

15:15 – FreedomFest Debates

18:49 – Signing up for FreedomFest

19:31 – A festival for attendees, not donors.

20:23 – The Structure of Production

22:00 – The Economics of Profit and Loss

24:03 – Say’s law

29:00 – What Seattle’s success says about Say’s law.

33:35 – Consumer spending and gross output.

45:17 – Gross Output versus GDP

48:09 – Inaccuracies of consumer confidence

51:38 –  Predicting GO

This article originally appeared on Townhall Finance.

Jerry Bowyer

Jerry Bowyer is a Forbes contributor, contributing editor of AffluentInvestor.com, and Senior Fellow in Business Economics at The Center for Cultural Leadership.

Jerry has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics. He worked as an auditor and a tax consultant with Arthur Anderson, as Vice President of the Beechwood Company which is the family office associated with Federated Investors, and has consulted in various privatization efforts for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He founded the influential economic think tank, the Allegheny Institute, and has lectured extensively at universities, businesses and civic groups.

Jerry has been a member of three investment committees, among which is Benchmark Financial, Pittsburgh’s largest financial services firm. Jerry had been a regular commentator on Fox Business News and Fox News. He was formerly a CNBC Contributor, has guest-hosted “The Kudlow Report”, and has written for CNBC.com, National Review Online, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as many other publications. He is the author of The Bush Boom and more recently The Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide, published by HarperCollins. Jerry is the President of Bowyer Research.

Jerry consulted extensively with the Bush White House on matters pertaining to the recent economic crisis. He has been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, The International Herald Tribune and various local newspapers. He has been a contributing editor of National Review Online, The New York Sun and Townhall Magazine. Jerry has hosted daily radio and TV programs and was one of the founding members of WQED’s On-Q Friday Roundtable. He has guest-hosted the Bill Bennett radio program as well as radio programs in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Jerry is the former host of WorldView, a nationally syndicated Sunday-morning political talk show created on the model of Meet The Press. On WorldView, Jerry interviewed distinguished guests including the Vice President, Treasury Secretary, HUD Secretary, former Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice, former Presidential Advisor Carl Rove, former Attorney General Edwin Meese and publisher Steve Forbes.

Jerry has taught social ethics at Ottawa Theological Hall, public policy at Saint Vincent’s College, and guest lectured at Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Heinz School of Public Policy. In 1997 Jerry gave the commencement address at his alma mater, Robert Morris University. He was the youngest speaker in the history of the school, and the school received more requests for transcripts of Jerry’s speech than at any other time in its 120-year history.

Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan, and the youngest three of their seven children.