Excellent points.
To add to this, we should also bear in mind that GDP growth is a bad metric for comparing countries with low population growth with countries with high population growth.
For one western country with high population growth, I calculated that 20-25% of GDP is devoted just to catering for the population growth. New roads, hospitals, houses, offices, power stations, phone lines, offices, factories etc etc. So for Japan with hardly any population growth, GDP overstates the goods available for consumption versus the US, with high population growth. In effect the US has to produce a lot just to stand still.
As Japan has transitioned to low population growth, its effective ‘consumption-available’ GDP growth has been far higher than it looks.
Due to my medical problems I have been reading medical literature for 25 years, and indeed it is a catastrophe of p-hacking and the like, incompetent statistical analysis, ven very often there is a basic misunderstanding of what p-values mean. You routinely see researchers claiming “no effect” when the p value is slightly over 0.05.
Usually, medical papers are misleading in some serious way. The best you can hope for is that they waste the vast majority of the value in the data.
People who read abstracts only and thing they are learning something are deluding themselves. You can to go through the methods section carefully and even then not all the shenanigans are disclosed, and look very closely at sponsorship of the parties to the study (researchers, journal editors, institutions etc) to pick up the extreme biases that result from sponsorship.