At Oxford university, many students regard lectures as optional. So teachers who fail to enlighten or entertain end up talking to empty rooms. A malicious fellow student measured lecturing performance by computing the ratio of attendance at the start of a course to attendance at the end. The highest score was earned by the hapless teacher of a first-year course on national income accounting.

Few universities now offer such a course. They have responded, or pandered, to student preferences, and the economics curriculum has moved on. Not necessarily in a good way; national income accounting remains central to economic statistics, and hence to economic policy, but is no longer well understood. Diane Coyle has bravely attempted in a recent book to make the subject once more accessible, and even interesting.

When economists talk about economic growth they are measuring the change in gross domestic product . Lay criticisms of GDP are often based on the indisputable observation that there is more to life than economics and material goods. GDP omits work done in the home, mostly by women. It values expenditure on war and nursing care on the same basis. It records the despoliation of the environment only by reference to the amount spent despoiling it, and then includes the amount spent to clean it up. It does not tell us how happy we are or how fulfilling are our lives.