U.S. GDP Is Just a State of Mind

1937: Simon Kuznets presents to Congress a research report called National Income and Capital Formation, 1919–35.

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By Peter Coy

December 4, 2014 at 12:50 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the December 8, 2014 issue of businessweek.

1937 Simon Kuznets presents to Congress a research report called National Income and Capital Formation, 1919–35.

The biggest thing in the world is the gross domestic product of the U.S. To equal it would take the combined earning power of a dance line of Taylor Swifts 100 miles long. It’s so big that writing out the number rounded-off to the next trillion puts you deep into a forest of zeroes: $18,000,000,000,000.