Have we been thinking about economic growth all wrong?

Yesterday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the US economy contracted by 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2022, the first quarterly drop in GDP since the pandemic hit in 2020.

That’s an alarming-seeming but ultimately misleading number; most of it is accounted for by changes in international trade (imports, which reduce GDP numbers, rose as businesses knew war in Ukraine was coming) and the shrinking of inventories held by businesses as consumers bought them up. “Final sales to domestic purchasers,” which strips out those factors, was up 0.6 percent...