Meet the new GDP prototype that tracks inequality

In the early 1930s, the US Senate enlisted a young economist named Simon Kuznets to figure out how badly the economy had been ravaged by the Great Depression, and whether policies were doing much to fix it. Back then, the government did not monitor the economy in a rigorous way. In fact, for a long time, the very concept of a single, nationwide entity known as "the economy" was alien to people, at least in the modern sense (for more on this, stay tuned for a Planet Money "Summer School" episode out on July 20).

After a lot of pretty boring work, sifting through papers and compiling statistics, Kuznets and his team delivered their report to Congress in 1934. It was titled, "," and it provided the federal government with the first comprehensive accounting system to measure the economy. The report introduced