GDP has its place in our national public-sphere conversation because a new number is released roughly once a month—each quarter of the year has its own GDP number, and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis releases "advance", "second", and "third" estimates for each quarter, and then there are benchmarking revisions. To attain an equal place in public-sphere consciousness, the distributional national accounts component would have to appear also once a month. And it is not clear to me how to do that: Equitable Growth: Measuring U.S. economic growth: "The measurement of GDP has fostered a national fixation on 'growing the pie' that ignores how growth is distributed...
... That conventional wisdom has become antiquated.... Policymakers interested in combatting rising income inequality cannot evaluate the effectiveness of their policies without a consistent, high-quality measure of how economic growth is distributed. Existing statistics on inequality and the distribution of economic gains produced by the federal government do not account for all income, vastly underestimate the income of top earners, or are not given the level of attention received by other major economic statistical products. A distributional component could be added to the National Income and Product Accounts, at least in part...
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