Continuity vs. Throughput: Why GDP Cannot Measure National Health

This paper establishes a structural inadmissibility theorem demonstrating that no throughput-derived metric—GDP included—can represent national health under conditions of irreversibility. Health is defined not as economic activity but as the preservation of admissible future option space. The core result shows that throughput measures, by aggregating irreversible execution, erase dependency order and therefore cannot track or preserve the state topology essential to viability. The analysis introduces key laws such as the Flow–State Category Error, Scalar Erasure, and Execution–Viability Orthogonality, culminating in a formal impossibility result: no scalar, vector, or composite metric derived from past execution can represent system health. This failure is structural, not empirical or policy-based, and remains masked until irreversible thresholds are crossed—at which point degradation becomes unrecoverable. Rather than critique GDP’s accuracy, the paper classifies its misapplication as a representational error that persists due to aliasing in partially reversible systems. Only option-preserving state descriptions are admissible under irreversibility. The result closes, rather than contests, the use of GDP as a health proxy. This paper establishes a structural inadmissibility theorem demonstrating that no throughput-derived metric—GDP included—can represent national health under conditions of irreversibility. Health is defined not as economic activity but as the preservation of admissible future option space. The core result shows that throughput measures, by aggregating irreversible execution, erase dependency order and therefore cannot track or preserve the state topology essential to viability. The analysis introduces key laws such as the Flow–State Category Error, Scalar Erasure, and Execution–Viability Orthogonality, culminating in a formal impossibility result: no scalar, vector, or composite metric derived from past execution can represent system health. This failure is structural, not empirical or policy-based, and remains masked until irreversible thresholds are crossed—at which point degradation becomes unrecoverable. Rather than critique GDP’s accuracy, the paper classifies its misapplication as a representational error that persists due to aliasing in partially reversible systems. Only option-preserving state descriptions are admissible under irreversibility. The result closes, rather than contests, the use of GDP as a health proxy.