Gross Domestic Product: Why You Should Care

Atlas Analytics’ Weekly Subscriber Update

July 1944 (1806802; Credit: U.S. Office of War Information in the National Archives)

GDP, again?

Who cares about Gross Domestic Product — some arcane old statistic from a bygone era?

You do.

GDP is the single number that policymakers, investors, CEOs, teachers, farmers, diplomats, and families rely on to understand whether life is getting better or worse. When GDP rises, your standard of living generally rises with it: more income, more investment, more jobs, and more freedom to enjoy the parts of life that happen outside of work.

You’ve heard me talk about Atlas Analytics’ real-time GDP forecasting — how we anticipate economic turning points weeks or months before government agencies publish their numbers. But beneath all of that sits a fundamental question:

What actually is GDP? Where did it come from? And why does it still matter in 2025?

Let’s take the journey — from 17th-century war planning to the satellite-driven economy of today.

What Is GDP, What Does It Measure, and Why Does It Matter?

GDP is the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country over a given period. It remains the world’s most widely used benchmark for economic size, growth, and performance. Governments use it to calibrate fiscal policy; central banks use it to set interest rates; firms use it to guide investment; investors use it to decide where capital should flow.

And yet, GDP is a blunt instrument — powerful in what it can describe, but limited in what it can see. That tension is exactly why Atlas exists.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back — way back.

GDP: A (Brief, Surprisingly Dramatic) History

Source: Eurostat, OECD, and World Bank (2025); Bolt and van Zanden Maddison Project Database 2023; Maddison Database 2010.

The story of GDP is not the story of an economic formula. It’s the story of war, industrialization, crisis, and global reinvention.

The Proto-GDP Era: Counting Nations for War (1665–1870s)

• 1665 — British scientist William Petty produces the first national accounts for England and Wales to estimate the resources available for the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

• 1781 — At the request of Louis XVI, France produces a sweeping financial assessment — in part to justify more borrowing (which, in hindsight, didn’t work out).

• 1870s — The Industrial Revolution spreads across Europe, and governments begin building systematic economic accounts.

The early purpose was clear: to know whether a country could finance a war or survive one.

The Birth of Modern GDP (1930s–1940s)

• 1934 — Amid the Great Depression, economist Simon Kuznets delivers the first U.S. national income report to Congress, showing a devastating 50% collapse in output since 1929.

• 1944 — Weeks after D-Day, 44 nations meet at Bretton Woods, establishing GDP as the universal yardstick for rebuilding the postwar world.

GDP became the backbone of global economic planning because everyone needed one statistic they could trust.

The Golden Age and Growing Doubts (1945–1990s)

• 1945–1973 — Explosive industrial growth, suburbanization, globalization. GDP captures it all: the “Golden Age” of economic expansion.

• 1986 — After years of stagflation and social upheaval, economists begin criticizing GDP’s blind spots: welfare, inequality, environmental degradation.

• 1993 — China becomes the last major economy to formally adopt GDP reporting — solidifying GDP’s position as the global standard.

The Crises that Exposed GDP’s Limits (2000–2024)

• 2008 — The financial crisis erupts, and GDP misses nearly all early signs of systemic fragility.

• 2010 — Ghana revises its national accounts, increasing GDP by 60% overnight — revealing how fragile and inconsistent measurement can be.

• 2020 — COVID shutters the global economy down; satellite indicators outperform traditional models.

• 2022 — Russia invades Ukraine; satellite data again becomes essential for estimating damage, supply disruptions, and agricultural loss.

• 2024 — Atlas Analytics incorporates, building the next generation of real-time economic measurement for the digital and geospatial era.

The world learned something crucial: GDP is indispensable — but, on its own, insufficient.

Why Atlas Matters

GDP remains the world’s economic anchor — but its limitations have become impossible to ignore.

We are entering an era of:

• Faster business cycles

• Larger, more frequent shocks

• Governments taking longer to produce data

• Digital sectors outgrowing the frameworks designed to measure them

• Investors needing real-time macro signals rather than backward-looking estimates

Atlas addresses this by building the first independent, continuously refreshed, satellite-driven, algorithmic view of the economy — an infrastructure capable of measuring growth not in quarters, but in days.

If the past few turbulent years have taught us anything, it’s this:

We cannot rely solely on government statistics to understand a global economy that moves at digital speed.

That is why Atlas exists — and why GDP’s origin story is not just history.
It’s the beginning of the next chapter.

GDP changed the world once. Real-time measurement will change it again.

If you’re following Atlas, you’re already ahead of the curve.
Help others get there too.

• Subscribe for weekly “satellite macro” insights

• Explore our research at atlasanalytics.com/insights

• Reach out to access Atlas’ real-time GDP & trade indicators

The next generation of macroeconomics is being built right now — and you’re part of it.

This article was written with valuable research assistance from Morgan Reppert, Executive Operations Associate for Atlas Analytics.