If you take this definition literally, then if scientists find an extremely expensive way to make lab grown dodo meat, suddenly the GDP for when dodos existed jumps up.
Measure by old prices, and one thing we can make cheaply now that we basically couldn’t make before and the numbers get huge. Measure by the old prices and one thing we could make but no longer can sends the numbers plummeting.
There are also questions of how much you want to call two items similar. When we count the number of spoons in ancient Rome, do we compare them to modern plastic spoons, modern stainless steel spoons, or what it would cost to pay people to make authentic recreations of Roman style spoons, or the cost of an actual historical Roman spoon in modern times.
How valuable is a slip of paper with Newtons equations written on it, 100 years before Newton was born. If you were sent back in time, you could fairly easily get some paper and pay someone to copy down these exact symbols. But if you didn’t know the answer, you couldn’t. You could pay someone a fair bit to look at the sky, and try to find simple equations to explain what they saw, but that’s still kind of using your future knowledge to say where to look. And it may take some time. And note that 2 such slips of paper are not much more valuable than 1.
When you look closely enough, your abstractions all break down.
If you take this definition literally, then if scientists find an extremely expensive way to make lab grown dodo meat, suddenly the GDP for when dodos existed jumps up.
Measure by old prices, and one thing we can make cheaply now that we basically couldn’t make before and the numbers get huge. Measure by the old prices and one thing we could make but no longer can sends the numbers plummeting.
There are also questions of how much you want to call two items similar. When we count the number of spoons in ancient Rome, do we compare them to modern plastic spoons, modern stainless steel spoons, or what it would cost to pay people to make authentic recreations of Roman style spoons, or the cost of an actual historical Roman spoon in modern times.
How valuable is a slip of paper with Newtons equations written on it, 100 years before Newton was born. If you were sent back in time, you could fairly easily get some paper and pay someone to copy down these exact symbols. But if you didn’t know the answer, you couldn’t. You could pay someone a fair bit to look at the sky, and try to find simple equations to explain what they saw, but that’s still kind of using your future knowledge to say where to look. And it may take some time. And note that 2 such slips of paper are not much more valuable than 1.
When you look closely enough, your abstractions all break down.