JD Vance’s Problem Is with Your Choices, Not GDP

Ryan Bourne

JD Vance’s book Communion devotes a chapter to arguing that policymakers have spent decades chasing GDP at the expense of his version of the greater good. I wrote earlier this week to show what Vance gets wrong about the country’s economic history—namely, that policymakers have never been the GDP-maximizers he makes them out to be. But even granting that premise, the chapter misfires in a deeper way.

Its greatest mistake isn’t to misunderstand GDP or even to misrepresent what policymakers aim for. It’s to conflate GDP statistics with a motive. Lots of things we do every day grow GDP, yet few of us wake up in the morning with GDP maximization in mind. GDP is a by-product of much human action and decisionmaking—decisions that are for the most part voluntary. Reading the chapter carefully, it becomes clear that Vance’s problem isn’t really with GDP per se but with people who make choices that contribute to higher GDP, but who don’t chime with his own view of what’s best.

Consider Vance’s example of someone working on Thanksgiving ahead of Black Friday. “A healthier society,” he writes, “would recognize how gross it is to send sixteen-year-olds to work from 4 p.m. on Thanksgiving to 4 a.m. on Friday.” But who exactly is sending people to work? That young worker is not sacrificing his or her holiday because some economist or politician demanded they work for higher GDP. Instead, he or she sought a job with a certain schedule, opted to enjoy higher holiday pay, or prioritized taking a different day off because that was deemed the best decision given the real-life circumstances that person faced. 

The same is true of a mother who takes up paid employment or a father taking overtime, despite the natural desire to spend more time with their young kids. Are those decisions evidence that they’ve been duped by the “cult of growth”? Hardly. Some work and sacrifice that precious time because they value financial independence, health insurance, professional fulfillment, adult company, the income to make ends meet, or giving their kids a better start in life in other ways.

That isn’t to imply that every choice is wise. People can be mistaken, badly informed, addicted, defrauded, or coerced. Transactions can impose unfair costs on third parties. But as a starting point, most adults know more about their own circumstances, preferences, and alternatives than JD Vance will. A voluntary choice is evidence, at least, that the person making the decision expects to be better off as a result. It’s the politicians who want to remove their options in pursuit of some amorphous “common good” that bear the burden to demonstrate a harm to others, not merely announce that they disapprove of the result.

But Vance can’t meet that burden. He implicitly compares the Thanksgiving teen against an idyllic nuclear family holiday, not the wages lost when a shift disappears. Or a hypothetical working mother against the comfortable single-income household, not Americans’ real finances. Or consumers buying cheap imports against imagined American-made versions without reckoning with the real insufficiency of what can be made domestically.

But prohibiting holiday work, preferencing the stay-at-home family style, and levying tariffs don’t conjure up better-paying shifts elsewhere, replace a working parent’s earnings, or give Americans extra time to manufacture things for themselves. The government closing a door doesn’t snap everyone to the other side of it, into a room with the kind of life Vance thinks they ought to want.

We could legitimately debate whether some current policy choices stack the deck toward certain life choices over others. A lot of childcare subsidies, for instance, distort choices toward dual-earner households with both parents in work when kids are young. But Vance is implying a more comprehensive critique of economic policy than just removing distortive government policies. When Americans freely choose an outcome Vance dislikes, he sees them as hapless victims of an economic regime. But when Vance’s own government restricts those choices to push his preferred social order, it’s cast as a return to human flourishing, as if the good life is an agreed-upon, objective outcome.

That really gets to the heart of why Vance is so down on the policies of the last 40–50 years. To the extent that the post-1980 economic settlement had any unifying instinct, it was not “maximize GDP at all costs.” It was, however, to give individuals somewhat more freedom to decide for themselves: what to buy, where to work, how to organize their families, and which risks and trade-offs to accept. That freedom was always partial and inconsistently applied, as the zoning rules, licensing regimes, and permitting laws that have proliferated in recent years illustrate. But it is the somewhat greater economic freedom part of the settlement that Vance seems really to object to.

Communion’s “A Dismal Science” is therefore best understood as the wailing of a deep paternalism disguised as a complaint about national income accounting. Vance could’ve argued outright what he really seems to think: that some individuals’ preferences deserve less respect than others’; that government should privilege the traditional family one-earner model, sacrifice affordability for certain domestic reshoring, and embrace traditional gender roles over women’s free choices. He could then defend the taxes, tariffs, regulations, and prohibitions needed to produce the outcomes he wants—and tell the people made worse off by them that he thinks it a worthy sacrifice.

Instead, he sets up the straw man of GDP maximization, as though Americans have spent the past half century working, trading, shopping, and arranging their families under Bureau of Economic Analysis conscription.