GDP

Gross Domestic Product adds up the value of all the goods and services a country produces in a given period. It's the number everyone reaches for to answer "is the economy growing or shrinking," and two straight quarters of it shrinking is the informal, commonly used definition of a recession. It's a blunt tool. It doesn't capture who benefits from that growth, or unpaid work, or the environmental cost of producing it. But as a single scoreboard number for the size and direction of an economy, nothing else gets quoted more often.