ჯუნგლების ცხოვრება

If you want to make claims about what economists think, you probably should be reading what we write. This isn't a matter of it being economics, but a matter of data collection: you need a representative sample of what we say to make statements about what we say. If you aren't trying to make sense of a large number of papers and you're saying things like "economists think X," you aren't "thinking for yourself." You're just making shit up. And that's the problem with JD Vance's comments. He is making shit up. More generally, if you want to think about economic measurement, you should read work on the topic to understand how it works, why it was done this way, and to see how it is used in practice. If you have not spent even a couple of hours on this, how would you know if there are problems? You don't even know what you're looking at. But if you did your readings, maybe some things do feel odd to you and you might then ask if that idea also occurred to someone else. There are people who obsess over problems like those full time, so the answer is often "yes." Otherwise, that's a valid research topic -- someone could write a paper about it. If you have the skills, or a lot of time and the inclination, you could write that paper. Then you'll be the someone who thought about it next time someone else asks.

There's a common type of criticism of economics where people think up a reasonable objection - like Vance saying prices ignore important factors like quality and other things - and then assume economists have never thought of it before. It's more likely that *thousands* of economists have done detailed research on the exact subject you're accusing economics of ignoring. I promise you that you are not the first person to have dreamed up this particular objection. People much smarter than you have already thought of it, collected data, built models to explore it, and written about the whole thing exhaustively.