https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33974/w33974.pdf is the paper in question. Resolves to N/A if I don't read the paper within a month (by August 19).
Clarification: this paper will resolve to whether I think the claim that "Beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, firewood output increased from about 18% of GDP to just under 30% of GDP in the 1830s" in the paper's abstract is accurate. An earlier clarification referred to a summary in Derek Thompson's tweet about the paper as the canonical wording; this will be ignored because that summary was about 1776 not 1830.
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I didn't read the paper, just the X discourse. But the conclusion there was that the paper doesn't actually say that, but rather that the firewood chopped was equal in value to 30% of GDP, if sold at market prices. Which it wasn't beacause most of the wood was used with the household.
So there's no number where we can say that the wood was 30% out of a whole: the wood that counted as part of the GDP was much less than 30% of GDP, and the total of all wood cut was much less than 30% of all goods produced (much bigger than GDP).
@AhronMaline Yeah, what I will be evaluating is whether I believe that this claim about the paper's findings (specifically from https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1941894499141115992) in the X discourse was accurate.
@EdgarLin so that's a huge differencd! The phrasing in the abstract, "firewood output... to 30% of GDP" is misleading but defensible. If asked, the authors would clarify that by "output" they mean the value of wood produced, at market pricers. The tweet, on the other hand, more strongly implies that this is 28% out of the whole GDP, which is very wrong.
So which claim will you be evaluating?