The piles of unfinished reading and writing projects littering my office have actually shrunk a little bit. Summer vacation rules.

1. "Wal-Mart's Weight Effect," published online on Wednesday and appearing in the June 8 issue of Forbes.

2. "The Great Depression and World War II," now online and forthcoming in the June issue of The Freeman.

3. "Conscription of Men, Women, and Resources, a Mises Daily on Monday.

4. Review of David M. Primo, Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions, forthcoming in Public Choice

5. My entry for Alex & Tyler's epigram contest: "A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties."--Ludwig von Mises

Economists are well aware of the problems with Gross Domestic Product as a measure of how wealthy a country is. It doesn't account for "non-economic" values (T. Sowell: are there any values that aren't "non-economic"?), it doesn't count household labor, and so on. Nonetheless, GDP is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.* Here, for example, are two posts on the Human Development Index in which Justin Wolfers and Bryan Caplan argue that HDI is so highly correlated with GDP per capita that it isn't clear that it's useful. Caplan's dismissal of the HDI is particularly cutting: "Scandinavia comes out on top according to the HDI because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is." In other words, if you're the best by definition, you'll always come out on top.

*--I'll send my now-obsolete copy of the eleventh edition of The Economic Way of Thinking to the first person who emails me with the correct reference to the "anvil that has worn out many hammers" phrase.