What? You're making a serious stretch there. The profit from the cars contributes directly to GDP, but even if individual people get paid to help clean up the river, where is that money coming from? It's a DRAIN on resources to get the river back to normal, there's no profit. Therefore it's not growth.
I think the point is that the cleanup effort is "on the books" and calculated as part of the gross domestic product.
The issue that people are trying to make is that there are many activities that do contribute to the overall wealth of a country, which don't get counted in the GDP. And there are things that are counted by the GDP which don't contribute to wealth.
GDP is a poor measure of the overall wealth and health of a country.
Right, I agree with you. From the tone of the post, it seemed like the author was justifying the GDP calculation as it's made. Perhaps there was some sarcasm there I didn't detect. But yeah, if we want to count the cost of services produced for, say, digging a giant hole and then subsequently filling in said hole, we may want to rethink our logic. I'm becoming disillusioned with the idea of economics being a valid human science when it can't seem to deal properly with the concept of externalities.
