The True Story of Japan

[minionofmidas]

For a start, in a little noticed change, United States statisticians in the 1980s embarked on an increasingly aggressive use of the so-called hedonic method of adjusting for inflation, an approach that in the view of many experts artificially boosts a nation’s apparent growth rate

Yes. GDP figures had issues before, but they have been wose than useless as an indicator of prosperity ever since.