It always amuses me when politicians, businessmen, journalists or people on the street argue that the economy is doing well because the GDP is growing. Or that a country is doing badly because its GDP is falling. Plain and simple.

We remember phrases like; “We are coming out of the crisis because this is the economy that is growing the most. We can celebrate the recovery now.” What would be the famous "green shoots". Without taking into account that the economic reality of a country is much more complex than a simple number or a single indicator.

It may be that in the past GDP was used as a thermometer of an economy and it may be that it worked at that time. I say "maybe" because I really don't know. But currently we are in such complex economies, strongly interconnected with each other and operating through a convoluted mechanism and of great depth that it is impossible to determine their state through a single indicator. Let alone give a final judgment on how it is evolving.

Nor do I want to underestimate the utility and all the information that GDP provides us, this is clear. Faced with this situation, we find that in order to issue a conclusion about the state of an economy, it is necessary to study it in depth, use many indicators and, above all, interpret statistics: how unemployment is evolving, how it is being hired and the quality of the work created. How domestic demand is evolving and why.

Are companies being created or closed? Why? Is credit flowing or not? Is the financial system channeling savings correctly? We could ask ourselves how foreign trade is behaving, if there are more imports or exports... Or ask ourselves what are the strong and weak points of the country.

And we could stay like this for a while, listing important points that must be studied and analyzed in depth, because as I said, after all, it does not depend on a single piece of information or a few. This is really what needs to be done to be able to say whether an economy has emerged from a crisis or not, whether it is doing well or not. It is not necessary to judge without knowing all the information or only using the information that is most convenient, a fact that often occurs in economics. There are situations in which people only use the data and information that support their vision and ignore others that are equally important but contrary to their conclusion.

Or other cases, in which someone judges without having all the information with them, thinking that this is the whole truth.