Monday 26 December 2016

A question to end the year with.

A question I have absolutely no idea of the answer to. This comes from Greg Mankiw's blog.
A professor emails me:
My students have the pleasure to use your economics textbook. I have one question: where the symbol "Y" for GDP comes from? All the others, we could detect, such as NX , NCO, etc. My students are curious, and I could not give them a good answer.
My unsatisfying response:
To be honest, I don't know. It is an old convention to use Y to denote real GDP, and I am just following that. But I don't know where or why the convention began.
So anyone who knows the answer let the rest of us in on the secret.

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