A fundamental assumption of mainstream economics is that market prices are approximately correct. This is more for pragmatic reasons than anything; you need some sort of prices to compare unlike things and it's often easy to get some consensus on what the market price is.
If you want to calculate GDP some other way then you will need to decide what millions of prices "should" be and persuade others with your argument. Coming up with an alternative scheme is probably the easy part. Agreeing on a new standard would be much harder.
Consider also that those millions of prices are also changing, often rapidly.
The problem is that, even within mainstream economics, we know market prices aren't correct. Pricing externalities is something pretty much all economists can get behind, and that's just the beginning. Does anyone really believe health care prices are correct? How about all the other subsidies? Asset prices for things like startups are even worse.
In areas where there are no market prices or the market is obviously artificial, price and value become nebulous. Without any objective standards of value, what things are worth becomes a matter of opinion and politics. I am pessimistic on there being consensus on a better way of understanding value any time soon.
More likely we will muddle through with patches to the system we have. Philosophically, even major changes like a carbon tax or universal basic income are basically just patches to get prices somewhere closer to what we think they should be.
If you want to calculate GDP some other way then you will need to decide what millions of prices "should" be and persuade others with your argument. Coming up with an alternative scheme is probably the easy part. Agreeing on a new standard would be much harder.
Consider also that those millions of prices are also changing, often rapidly.
The problem is that, even within mainstream economics, we know market prices aren't correct. Pricing externalities is something pretty much all economists can get behind, and that's just the beginning. Does anyone really believe health care prices are correct? How about all the other subsidies? Asset prices for things like startups are even worse.
In areas where there are no market prices or the market is obviously artificial, price and value become nebulous. Without any objective standards of value, what things are worth becomes a matter of opinion and politics. I am pessimistic on there being consensus on a better way of understanding value any time soon.
More likely we will muddle through with patches to the system we have. Philosophically, even major changes like a carbon tax or universal basic income are basically just patches to get prices somewhere closer to what we think they should be.