Reconsiderando um milagre

A ler “Reconsidering a miracle” de Paul Krugman onde o economista confessa que está menos crente no milagre da superior produtividade da economia americana face à europeia que se apregoava até há pouco tempo. Será que tudo se resume a uma artimanha estatística na forma de apurar a produtividade do sector financeiro?
Um excerto:

“(…) First of all, how do we even measure output of financial services? If I read this BEA paper correctly, we more or less use “checks cashed” — or, more broadly, the number of transactions undertaken. This may be the best we can do, but it’s a pretty weak measure of actual work done by the financial system.
And given recent events, are we even sure that the expansion of the financial system was doing anything productive at all? In short, how much of the apparent US productivity miracle, a miracle not shared by Europe, was a statistical illusion created by our bloated finance industry? (…) “