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

Literacy rates in Western Europe and North America were quite high. There was an bustling trade in almanacs, pamphlets, periodicals and Bibles. Go read about Charles Dickens' career and how he succeeded by appealing to the tastes of the common man.

You're assuming zero population growth and that people "over there" who look and/or talk different that it separately doesn't matter if they starve.

When we make things more efficent it is reasonable to remember this is the /world/ economy getting more efficient and the most important thing we are making efficent is growing enough food for 7b people through specialisation and trade and espeically technical progress. The second most important thing is making it so that parents don't routinely and commonly watch their children die in pain.

In Mill's time at the height of the biggest empire ever known, right at its centre of wealth children starved. Their parents watched them die from what we now refer to as "preventable disease" and are outraged when any child in the world dies of it.

I'm taking that faustian bargain we took as a species every f*king time. No we did not "take the wrong turn." There remains plenty to discuss on how to do it better going forward.

2c worth, YMMV.

That was not how he was campaigning, was it? Nor was it his fault he was born that way.

The most difficult attacks to stop are inside jobs.

Where he came from doesn't dictate where he was headed.

The most difficult attacks to stop are inside jobs

I imagine you've never really engaged in political philosophy very thoroughly?

Much like any political system you can imagine, a democratic system requires a complex web of rules and regulations to function properly. For one, so-called democracies always require more specification. Are you talking about direct democracy? Are you talking about deliberative democracy? Are you talking about representative democracy?

Democracy does not mean, by the way, the "rule of the majority" because "demos" does not mean majority but people. And for the common people to rule you need a system to encompass it. Of course, over time there have been a lot of criticism and a lot of work done in deciding which rules and which structures are the most appropriate to make the necessary compromises for our political systems to work.

To put things on perspective, in Switzerland for example they have decided that the will of the swiss people is above international treaties. And this does pose a problem, for example there was a referendum a couple years back for the banning of face covering; a policy which affects everyone, yes, but affects most a particular group (muslim women). But in most cases, swiss people have a very full participatory democracy and their political system is incredibly stable. It's not perfect, and a lot of experts in the field consider countries should never be above international treaties such as the human rights treaty that most countries have signed.

When you say "we are stuck relying on the intelligence and wisdom of the masses" you're making a pro-elitism argument. In that the masses ought to be ruled by people better than the masses; and in many ways, this is the approach countries like China have taken. To me, a big problem with this approach comes from the ego of individuals. Is it really possible to change someone's mind who happens to be in a position of power such as that? Is it easy? Personally I believe this to be a much more dangerous prospect. A good example of this can be seen, I think, in Meta (the company) where Zuckerberg is pretty much destroying the company and everyone but him can see it. Yes, this man build the company, but does that expertise translate to every future challenge? It is why we tend to prefer collective decision making, usually smaller bodies, but could there be space to make better use of bigger collectives? I think so.

So in short, I think you should probably read a little more about political philosophy to be able to say something as big as "Democracy is incompatible with freedom". It's a pretty big statement.

“Input factors” have many imperfections, but at least they can lead to more objectively comparable metrics.

When comparing between populations, subjective measures such as surveyed happiness make for very poor and very noisy metrics - you often can’t even simply compare answers between different populations within a country. It is even dependent upon your age demographic https://archive.ph/sAzDA and there are some surprisingly counterintuitive properties to reported happiness: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox

I would think that life expectancy is a poor metric, because: (1) the differences become smaller as it rises so it becomes dominated by noise, (2) it overvalues the last few years of life compared to the rest of a life, and (3) expectancy is highly dependent on how it is calculated along with parameters such as input factors, similar to those that you dislike!

In summary: intuition can often be a very poor substitute for research, and before relying on your intuition it is a good idea to look at the basics.