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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)

#131

Post by 1dry »

hnews_account_1 wrote: post #93
dakial1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not difficult to fake (e.g. China for the last 20 years). But I agree with you, we should add new metrics (and targets) but keep a GDP as one of them, also for the other indicators to mature (how they are measure, methodologies, transparency, etc...). Maybe one day GDP would be able to be left behind...

GDP is not what people randomly think it is. It is a measure of the economic output of a country. It isn’t about equality or productivity or did the money build a ghost town etc. If we had the magical mathematics to encode that much in a single number, we’d be traveling the stars.

I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that "traveling the stars" is a worthy goal, even more worthy than stewardship of the paradise we already have. We are living in heaven. We have a wonderful planet that nurtures us yet we continue to sabotage our favorable situation for the sake of growing worthless numbers like GDP, all while some people starve or are forced into lives of misery. And yes, I have read Parable of the {Sower|Talents}, who's primary lesson I take to be, we should prevent that terrible situation in the first place.

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

#132

Post by ummonk »

BurningFrog wrote: post #102
nicoburns wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that "free market" pricing in general is. The attitude that "something is valuable if people are willing to pay for it" is being increasingly overfitted.

By definition, the monetary value of something is what people are willing to pay for it.

Yes but that's not the same as the more useful (no pun intended) definition of value - namely, utility.

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

#133

Post by mxkopy »

_skel wrote: post #90
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.

Seriously. If there was an obvious alternate metric, we'd already be using it. Measuring well-being and happiness will never be straightforward and uncontroversial, despite what the authors of the article say. You don't need to look much past the first few paragraphs of the article to see an obvious bias about income inequality. That reveals what attempts to find new metrics are really about: the authors want to use…

[flagged]

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

#134

Post by the-smug-one »

kortilla wrote: post #123
voisin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> filled it with dimwits? Not knowing Aeschylus has nothing to do with wit.

To be dim-witted just means stupid, hasn't got to do with wit.

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

#135

Post by ummonk »

kornhole wrote: post #96

The gig economy boosts GDP. If I work as an employee, I am just an expense to a company. If I setup an S corporation and contract my services to that same company, I am now growing the services sector and increasing GDP. I am still doing the same amount of work but just increasing transactions. I seem to be incentivized by pay and taxes to work as contractor, and this may be because the government is trying to pump G…

No, if you contract your services to that company, your contribution to GDP gets cancelled out by the intermediate consumption of that company purchasing your services. The GDP is the same either way.

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

#136

Post by keithnz »

nostromo wrote: post #81
lkrubner wrote: post #58

Robert Kennedy, on the campaign trail in 1968: "Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising…

Quoted post unavailable.

a strawman would be trying to claim that he was trying to say those things should be included as part of GDP. It seems he is saying GDP is a poor measure of a nations success and it doesn't measure a lot of the things we actually value.

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

#137

Post by mxkopy »

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…

> 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.

And all this is assuming that the community uses money. A self sufficient community would have 0 GDP iff no money was exchanged.

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

#138

Post by MichaelZuo »

kortilla wrote: post #128
RichEO wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Democracy absolutely does not care about you and thinking it does is damaging to democracy. Democracy is just executing the will of the majority. If your interests don’t align with thah majority, the country is not acting on your behalf. Knowing that an participating in democracy without tying up your identity in the outcomes is critical.

Well it does care about you, just that the level of care you receive is roughly what hundreds of millions of others also get. 1/250000000 is a pretty small amount in the grand scheme.

We typically round down small fractions to zero so a very niche opinion with a few hundred folks is still approximately zero.

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

#139

Post by strangeattractr »

Ambolia wrote: post #50
tootie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. There is simply no way we can replace GDP with another metric. There's always a thousand smartasses who say the unemployment rate is fake. It's not fake, it's an indicator and can never tell a complete story. Employment, economic activity, inflation, trade are all drowning in data points that inform some specific minutiae. The solution is to not base policy on indicators but politics needs to keep things simple.

Unemployment would be less misleading if it was just "total people working" / "total people in the country".

No it wouldn’t. It would be bloated by the number of people with serious disabilities, health conditions and retirees. As your population ages you would get a bump in unemployment that tells you nothing about the demand for labour.

In my first Economics subject in high school they told us to never look at unemployment without looking at the participation rate with it.

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

#140

Post by ram4jesus »

strangeattractr wrote: post #121
dakial1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not difficult to fake (e.g. China for the last 20 years). But I agree with you, we should add new metrics (and targets) but keep a GDP as one of them, also for the other indicators to mature (how they are measure, methodologies, transparency, etc...). Maybe one day GDP would be able to be left behind...

What do you mean when you say China fakes its GDP?

Not that I fully believe this, but the claims about Ghost Cities, for example. Infrastructure projects built to increase GDP and industrial activity without clear goals.
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