The Structure of Production

In 2014, the U. S. government adopted a new quarterly statistic called gross output (GO), the most significance advance in national income accounting since gross domestic product (GDP) was developed in the 1940s. The announcement came as a triumph for Mark Skousen, who advocated GO nearly 25 years ago as an essential macroeconomic tool and a better way to measure the economy and the business cycle. Now it has become an official statistic issued quarterly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U. S. Department of Commerce.





In this new revised edition of Structure of Production, Skousen shows why GO is a more accurate and comprehensive measure of the economy because it includes business-to-business transactions that move the supply chain along to final use. (GDP measures the value of finished goods and services only, and omits B-to-B activity.) GO is an attempt to measure spending at all stages of production. Using GO, Skousen demonstrates that the supply-side of the business spending is far more important than consumer spending, is more consistent with economic growth theory, and a better measure of the business cycle.

Mark Skousen is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in California. Since 1980, Skousen has been editor in chief of Forecasts & Strategies, a popular award-winning investment newsletter. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. His economics works include The Structure of Production (NYU Press), The Making of Modern Economics (ME Sharpe), Economic Logic (Capital Press), and EconoPower (Wiley &Sons). His investment books include Investing in One Lesson (Capital Press), and The Maxims of Wall Street (Eagle Publishing). His latest book is A Viennese Waltz Down Wall Street: Austrian Economics for Investors (LFB Publishers).

John O. Whitney,Emeritus Professor in Management Practice at Columbia University:
Skousens Structure of Production should be a required text at our leading universities. The book masterfully juxtaposes the ideas of the 'Austrians' against mainstream economics yet it is balanced, fair, well written and clearly illustrated. It is an important book for students of economics and a treasure for academics.