"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". No kidding. For one thing, this famous line from Alexander Pope's 1711 poem, An Essay on Criticism, is itself a misquote. The actual line goes: "A little learning is a dangerous thing". But there we go again, falling down rabbit holes and hyper-fixating on minutiae when we aren't even through the opening paragraph.
The knowledge to which I'm about to refer comes from my A-level economics teacher, back in the prelapsarian world of the mid-2000s, sometime after China's admission into the World Trade Organisation but before the Global Financial Crisis. He explained why, as a measure of value, gross domestic product (GDP) had clear limitations. For instance, GDP suggests that theft is good.
