GDP is a poor measure for quality of life. Credit: Getty GDP is a poor measure for quality of life. Credit: Getty “It’s the economy, stupid” was Clinton campaign guru James Carville’s slogan for the 1992 election. But what if it’s not? Sure, in every election, the economy tops the list of voter concerns. But voters are focused on short-term factors like inflation, not on the factor that is generally deemed more important by politicians and economists: the estimated long-term rate of national GDP growth. And, in practice, voters have many non-economic concerns. The huge Democratic victories in the 2026 midterms seem to owe as much to opposition to the Iran war, rejection of Republican extremism, and disgust with President Trump, as to affordability. It follows that strategists in both parties can safely ignore the policy wonks and pundits who argue that, in order to win, they must have a coherent plan to boost GDP over years or decades to come. The idea that the federal government has the responsibility and the capacity to increase the rate of overall economic growth is relatively new. The United States grew from a collection of mostly agrarian ex-British colonies in the 1780s into the world’s dominant industrial and military power by the mid-20th century. But such growth was an accident, the incidental byproduct of policies promoted by various factions for their own short-term purposes. Industrialization to supplant imports was championed by American manufacturing interests that sought to corner the US home market for themselves. These interests successfully used tariffs to exclude manufactured imports from Britain and other industrial nations. Simultaneously, agrarian and mining interests sought the expansion of the borders, at the expense of indigenous Americans and countries like France, Spain, and Mexico. Employers and various economic interests that benefited from more workers or more consumers promoted mass immigration, which was limited mostly by law to white Europeans before the 1960s. American growth resulted from these various selfish projects, not a long-term master plan. The possibility of endless economic growth itself came into question during the Great Depression. Underlying the early New Deal was the assumption that the most recent industrial revolution, based on automobility and electricity, had reached a plateau. Thinking that continued high growth was unrealistic, many New Dealers sought to focus on distribution of the gains from the existing industrial economy to the less-developed South and West through infrastructure investment, higher profits for farmers through government programs, and higher wages for the working class by means of unions and the minimum wage. FDR made this view clear in a famous address at the Commonwealth Club during his first campaign for president in 1932: “Our industrial plant is built; the problem just now is whether under existing conditions it is not overbuilt…. A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help. The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over…. The day of enlightened administration has come.” Many New Dealers feared that the country would lapse into repression and technological stagnation following the end of the mobilization for World War II. Optimism about the prospects for permanent economic growth, guided by the government, grew after 1945. That confidence was accompanied by the mainstreaming during the war of statistical measurements: GNP (gross national product of national firms at home and abroad) and GDP (gross domestic product only). From the beginning, many economists have warned against the promotion of GNP or GDP growth rates as the focus of national economic policy. One of them was Simon Kuznets, who played a major role in the development of the system of national income ac
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