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What objective metric would you recommend they use, instead?



Productivity improvement in a physical application - it now takes fewer people less time to build a house

It takes less resources to remedy a failed over bridge. You’d have to have a basket of measurement like how we measure CPI - current approach is lazy.


What if an innovation makes things better, instead of faster?

The house takes just as long to build, but it's sturdier, longer lasting, better insulated, etc?


Well those are all measurable quantities, and you can measure them in proportion to their economic importance - like house insulation is a big change if you live in cold climate, etc.

I am not saying it’s easy, but economics is full of complex measurements, financial derivatives, and god knows what. Maybe they should spend some effort measuring the real world.


Without opining on the validity of the overall patent count as a measure of creativity, here's a cool paper I saw describing how to determine 'creative patents' - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aakashkalyani/WebsiteUploa...




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