The Commerce Department has made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product, designed to have the data better reflect the so-called knowledge economy. The U.S. government adjusted data all the way back to 1929, and other countries have or are about to make similar changes to their data. Read more about the U.S. economy during the second quarter.

At the same time, the government also went back and revised data for the past five years, to reflect more complete as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

What’s the upshot? The rate of growth hasn’t changed all that much, though there are big shifts in a few time periods. But the level of output is higher — $559.8 billion larger, with $526 billion of that amount due to definitional changes.

— Steve Goldstein

Ambarish Kulkarni monitors a condensation chamber in the Nanocoatings Subscale Lab at General Electric Co.'s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York. Bloomberg

Companies treat research-and-development as an investment, not just an expense — and now so do the U.S. national accounts. Allowing for the capitalization of R&D contributed an additional $396.7 billion to the U.S. economy in 2012.

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The capitalization of entertainment originals added $74.3 billion to U.S. GDP in 2012. The way the government figures, if a movie or a popular television series is created that is going to generate royalties in the future, then it should be reflected as an investment. That makes sense when you think about it — “Friends” is still on TV, while the nightly news from Jan. 23, 1993 is not, so the former is a productive asset.

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The government is now capitalizing more of the ownership transfer costs associated with buying a home: instead of just broker commissions, now other costs including title insurance, attorney fees and engineering services will be factored in.

Also, these costs are now being depreciated over the average ownership of a home, rather than the home’s lifetime. Combined, these add $42.3 billion to the U.S. economy for 2012.

Thousands of demonstrators took over the Wisconsin state assembly chamber after the Wisconsin Republican senators voted to curb collective bargaining rights for public union workers. Pensions of federal and state employees are likely to be contentious for years to come, particularly as private-sector workers now by and large have defined-contribution plans. Getty Images

Moving to accrual accounting for defined benefit pension programs adds another $12.6 billion. Put another way — the interest from the unfunded part of pensions is now being included in national accounts. Whatever doubts about, say, Detroit paying these obligations, they are legally owed to employees.

This move also is why the personal savings rate saw a big upward adjustment, to 5.6% from 4.1%, in 2012.

As far as the revisions go, the big move came in the most recent year, 2012, which now goes in the books as having 2.8% growth instead of the previously estimated 2.2% rise. The upward revision is mostly based on better data on consumption, farm inventories and government spending.

And here’s a look at how recent expansion and recessions now look, on an annualized basis. The Great Recession was a touch less bad, and the current recovery is a slight bit better.