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Although many seem to forget their intro macroeconomics by the time they become journalists,
That is a natural consequence of always and uncritically using GDP or GDP pro capita as the metric for wealth in all economic exposition except these (usually perfunctory) disclaimers.
One cannot exonerate an academic discipline from perpetuating an error solely by noting disclaimers in first-year textbooks when the same discipline ignores those disclaimers essentially from the point they are made and until you graduate. In fact, reading disclaimers about the non-universal applicability of GDP in the discussion section of a first-year national accounting textbook feels a lot like reading a Quack Miranda: "We have to include a disclaimer about not elevating GDP to the One True Proxy in order to cover our asses. This being done, let's get back to elevating GDP to The One True Proxy."
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
However, it cannot be denied that there is a strong association between economic well-being of even the poorest sectors of a society and GDP, regardless of how it is measured, particularly when GDP growth is slow or negative, so it would be dishonest to eliminate discussions of GDP from issues of well-being entirely.
I just don't see many economists doing the things you attribute to them. I do see a lot of other people doing it, and I see economists frequently and publicly correcting them when they do. (I just came from the right of center National Association of Business Economists annual meeting, and entire sessions, as usual, were devoted to precisely the topic of the misuse of GDP in policy debate and how to try to correct it.) It's just not the field's fault. It really is the journalists here.
I can see one there. The others seem marginally less relevant.
Section 23 presented recent papers on alternative methods to GDP for measuring economic activity and the drawbacks of GDP and the alternatives to it. This has always been a topic of interest in economics, because of the inherent difficulties in the whole project of defining and measuring an economy and what it means for different people.
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