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Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

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Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#111

Post by nl »

voisin wrote: post #101
lkrubner wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While RFK sometimes got help from Edwin Guthman and Peter Edelman, he also spoke extemporaneously sometimes, most famously when he had to announce the death of Martin Luther King to a crowd that hadn't yet heard the news: https://kennedykingindy.org/full-rfk-speech

Where are the politicians today who can quote Aeschylus at will? What happened to our national discourse that we’ve filled it with dimwits?

Obama could speak eloquently and sincerely like that off-the-cuff: https://www.businessinsider.in/people-are-saying-obamas-off-...

Mitt Romney wasn't bad.

If you mean specifically quoting Greek poets and philosophers I would imagine Obama could (and has in speeches) but hard to tell which he wrote himself of course.

Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#112

Post by pessimizer »

voisin wrote: post #101
lkrubner wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While RFK sometimes got help from Edwin Guthman and Peter Edelman, he also spoke extemporaneously sometimes, most famously when he had to announce the death of Martin Luther King to a crowd that hadn't yet heard the news: https://kennedykingindy.org/full-rfk-speech

Where are the politicians today who can quote Aeschylus at will? What happened to our national discourse that we’ve filled it with dimwits?

That was a result of an elite education in the Latin and Greek classics. We don't do this anymore because most of us are not middle-class private boarding school-educated British people (where it was mandatory), not because we're dimwits.

Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#113

Post by hot_gril »

paxys wrote: post #107
dongobongo wrote: post #79

From Luke Smith's post on GDP: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp/ "GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a place or country is on the global economy. Self-sufficiency has a GDP of 0. Wasteful consooomerism has an extremely large GDP."

I have no idea who Luke Smith is but none of that article makes any sense. GDP is the measure of economic activity. A self-sufficient community would not have a GDP of 0 because they would still have transactions among themselves. Perfect self-sufficiency would actually generate a very high GDP number because of how diverse and specialized the community would have to be to take care of itself. Outside of that everyth…

Initially, he means that a single self-sufficient person contributes 0 to the GDP. Then it seems like he means people in this village don't trade with each other, but I'm not sure. If they trade without money, first of all that's very inefficient, secondly there's still a GDP of sorts but maybe he means it's not measured.

But he doesn't care about efficiency. He's not saying GDP is a poor indicator of economic growth. He's more saying that economic growth is bad, globalism is bad, and maybe hinting that *skims other article on site* an ancient, simple life according to Orthodox Christianity is the true path to happiness. And this is too off-topic for me to discuss, I'm just laying out what the dude is saying.

Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#115

Post by ComputerGuru »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #89
scotty79 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually we can get better metrics than GDP by measuring amount of light on satellite night images. It fits GDP more or less for western democracies, but it it better measure for other countries.

Night light is easy to fake with upward-facing illuminators.

Any good metric ceases to be meaningful once it’s actually used as a metric, because that’s when the gamification starts.

Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#116

Post by Supermancho »

nostromo wrote: post #62

It's hard to overstate how terrible this idea is. GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. Once you start arguing about the economic value of volunteering, divorce, income inequality, and crime -- you've opened the door to never being able to trust GDP again. Should we create new metrics to track progress? Sure. Should we stop tracking GDP? No way.

> that is difficult to fake.

Changing the included values and operands, then calling it a new standard, is common in the US. GDP has been an unreliable metric for decades.

I noticed when the multitude of chip fabs, across california, closed down had coincided with the president announcing the stockmarket gains were being rolled into the accounting. I thought it was obvious that it was not a meaningful metric for measuring production.

Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#117

Post by RichEO »

fleddr wrote: post #75

"The philosopher John Stuart Mill noted more than 200 years ago that, once decent living standards were assured, human efforts should be directed to the pursuit of social and moral progress and the increase of leisure, not the competitive struggle for material wealth" Yes, we took the wrong turn. Most people are subjected to a life long rat race of economic relevance/volatility where most of their waking hours are sp…

> A business? No. A bank? No. A country? No.

In a modern democracy, only one of those three could conceivably have your interests at heart. Lumping them all together damages participation in democracy, which exacerbates the problem.

Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#118

Post by viburnum »

nostromo wrote: post #62

It's hard to overstate how terrible this idea is. GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake. Once you start arguing about the economic value of volunteering, divorce, income inequality, and crime -- you've opened the door to never being able to trust GDP again. Should we create new metrics to track progress? Sure. Should we stop tracking GDP? No way.

LOL. GDP is fake to begin with.

Re: Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)

#120

Post by ummonk »

Does anyone think GDP is a measure of national success?

What it is is an indispensable measure of the strength of a nation's market economy - which is a major limiting factor in tackling actual end goals such as the well-being of the population.

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