If I moved into that apartment instead, would that help or hurt the country's economy as a whole?

Good question, not because it's hard to answer, but because of how pervasive the wrong answer is, and the implications for policy for economists getting it wrong.

• If your parents prefer you being in their apartment to the forgone income, they benefit; otherwise they don't.

• If you prefer being in their apartment to the alternative rental opportunities, you benefit; otherwise, you don't.

• If potential renters or the existing ones prefer your parents' unit to the other rental opportunities and they are denied it, they are worse off; otherwise, they aren't.

ANYTHING beyond that -- anything whatsoever -- is Goodhart-laden economist bullsh**. Things like GDP and employment and CPI were picked long ago as a good correlate of general economic health. Today, they are taken to define economic health, irrespective of how well people's wants are being satisfied, which is supposed to be what we mean by a "good economy".

Today, economists equate growing GDP -- irrespective of measuring artifacts that make it deviate from what we want it to measure -- with a good economy. If the economy isn't doing well enough, well, we need more "aggregate demand" -- you see, people aren't buying enough things, which must be bad.

Never once has it occurred to anyone in the mainstream (and very few outside of the mainstream) that it's okay for people to produce less, consume less, and have more leisure. No, instead, we have come to define success by the number of money-based market exchanges, rather than whether people are getting the combination of work, consumption, and leisure (all broadly defined) that they want.

This absurdity reveals itself when you see economists scratching their heads, thinking how we can get people to spend more than they want to, in order to help the economy. Unpack those terms: they want people to hurt themselves, in order to hurt less.

Now, it's true there are prisoner's dilemma-type situations where people have to cooperate and endure some pain to be better off in the aggregate. But the corresponding benefit that economists expect from this collective sacrifice is ... um ... more pointless work that doesn't satisfy real demand .. but hey, it keeps up "aggregate demand", so it must be what a sluggish economy needs.

Are you starting to see how skewed the standard paradigm is? If people found a more efficient, mutualist way to care for their children rather than make cash payments to day care, this would be regarded as a GDP contraction -- despite most people being made better off and efficiency improving. If people work longer hours than they'd like, to produce stuff no one wants, well, that shows up as more GDP, and it's therefore "good".

How the **** did we get into this mindset?

Sorry, [/another rant].