Suppose I believed that the only services that are really productive are those that facilitate the production of commodities in some way (so there is a difference between a banker and a barber, and a teacher is never productive but can potentially facilitate future production). Is there any existing national macroeconomic statistic(s) that could be made to approximate this (I know Reisman has GDR)?
Mark Skousen develops an alternative to GDP in The Structure of Production but as I’ve not read the book I don’t know much else about it.
I think the best treatment of the topic is in Chapter 15 of Reisman’s Capitalism, he uses the ideas of Skousen and to a lesser extent Rothbard to develop what he calles an Aristotlean method of economic accounting.
It also leads to the conclusion that we can measure interest rates by net consumption. However Reisman seems to present this as the cause of interest rates too and I’m not sure I agree with that.
I think real median income is telling.