When it's released in the depression, this wonky statistic becomes an overnight sensation. A report on national income submitted to Congress becomes a bestselling book.. And pretty soon, you can't turn on the radio without hearing those numbers and what they're measuring.

In the decades that follow, national income becomes gross national product and eventually GDP — and it sweeps the world. "The first thing you do in 1950s and '60s if you're a new nation is you open a national airline, you create a national army, and you start measuring GDP," Karabell says.

You need to calculate GDP because if you want help from the World Bank or the United Nations, they're going want to know: What does their help do for your country's economy?

It's somewhere around this time, Karabell says, that people start to make too much of GDP. Rather than a limited measure of the economy, it becomes this Cold War gauge of who's doing better, who's winning. And, so, perhaps inevitably, all that success leads to a backlash.

In one of the most famous moments of that backlash, Robert Kennedy enumerated the shortcomings of what was then known as Gross National Product.

"Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play," he said. "It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials."

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