Coyle, D. (2014). GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Coyle traces GDP from its wartime origins to its place as the headline figure of economic policy, explains the judgments built into its construction, and argues that it remains a useful measure of market production even as services, digital goods and resource depletion strain it. The wiki cites the book as the strongest defense of GDP on its own terms. On that reading the fault lies in how the figure is used to steer policy, which is the steering claim the corpus makes.