“The correct answer, I am afraid, is that we have virtually no economic use for national accounts, partly because we cannot be in control of our economy and partly because our economy has a dynamism which outpaces such accounts.” Those were the words of Sir John James Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971.
Cowperthwaite famously harbored a dislike for government statistics given an unrelenting aversion to government intervention in the economy. The production of economic statistics would perhaps cause politicians to “do something” in response to measures indicating economic trouble, so Cowperthwaite avoided them altogether. Considering how desperately poor Hong Kong once was, it's not unreasonable to suggest that Cowperthwaite was on to something. An economy is not a blob, or an organism that can be massaged or nursed, rather it's just people. People have needs and they produce in order to fulfill them by exchanging their production with others. Where people are broadly free economically, their production has a tendency to be substantial.
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