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

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191–200 of 369 posts

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

#191
post #90

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…

There is actually a lot of knowledge that's been built that shows many effects of inequality on societies. It might not seem obvious but inequality is actually a big driving factor in people's feelings of dissatisfaction in their everyday lives.

But to argue the point a bit more, and this is something that Thomas Piketty (an economist that studies inequality) always brings in his books: one measure is not enough. GDP is one measure, we need to look at many more measures. GDP does say something, it's not meaningless, but we need other measurements to get the full understanding of the picture.

And we actually have lots of them, GDP sadly fails to capture a lot of externalities, so it doesn't really capture very well for example environmental damage; think of china, their GDP is growing a lot but we can all see it's not growing in a sustainable manner. Or think of the USA, highest GDP in the planet but this isn't being reflected in life expectancy for example which actually has been declining for a while now.

And as I said in the beginning, inequality very much affects people's well being and the well being of an economy as a whole as well. So it is definitely a measurement that we ought to take seriously. It seems silly to me to say "these are left wing metric". These are metrics that have a reason of being, inequality has real effects on our economies and there is a lot of work, and good work at that, that you can read on why precisely this is the case.

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

#192
post #50
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".

That's called employment-population ratio and it is tracked by the BLS. It's actually a bit more valuable to track prime age employment-population ratio to factor out students and retirees. But it's still a broad indicator.

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

#193
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?

In the UK we have Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg, both of whom can and do regularly quote classical literature. You can have them. No, really, please take them.

Boris and Jacob strike me as politicians that understand how to play the UK system masterfully.

Doubt either of them are the solution for the country but neither is anyone in labour.

The corruption precedes them by centuries, and anyone who tries to fix things - like remove the special status of the City of London now will get a shorten career.

Kinda like in the US to even have a chance to be the presidential candidate, you need the monetary support of several billionaires.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hrm, I went to public school in the 1980s and received a fair facsimile of a classical education.

It seems like it coincided with differences in attitude about education. I’ve forgotten the exact stats, but in decades past college students overwhelming said the purpose of college was to develop a philosophy of life whereas now the predominant answer is to find a good job.

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

#195
post #68

The title/article seems to be a bit of a strawman, AFAICT countries (or their governments / citizens) do not consider the GDP as the one and only measure of national success. Politics are driven by tons of different interest groups (in the broadest sense, ranging from corporate interests, environmental activists, minority representatives, medical or teaching professionals, farmers, retirees living on state pensions,…

> In truth, pretty much nobody really knows for sure what policies actually will increase GDP [...]

Increase GDP?

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

It kind of feels like this comment is the straw man. There’s nothing wrong with GDP as a metric, especially if you want to know the economic horsepower of a nation. The argument being made is that it’s not a good metric when measuring success of a nation.

Exactly! Metrics aren't a problem, it is when they become targets (Goodhart's Law). It is when they become the primary focus instead of a useful tool in a whole toolchest.

> All metrics of scientific evaluation are bound to be abused. Goodhart's law [...] states that when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it.

— Mario Biagioli

We see Goodhart's playing out all throughout our society. Thus our duty is to add nuance to the conversation and speak as experts. Because experts can see through the measures, understanding their limitations but also what they are good at too. It is also our duty to recognize the limitations of our own knowledge and to not perpetuate this system. To not look down on others that acknowledge their limits, but to hold them with regard. To replace the fear of not knowing with the gleeful pursuit of finding the answer.

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

#197
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Initially, he means that a single self-sufficient person contributes 0 to the GDP

There is probably an argument that for accounting purposes a person should bill themselves at market costs for self-work. E.g. mowing the lawn, changing one's own oil, doing one's taxes -- all are economic activities with a value associated which is 'lost' in a traditional GDP calculation.

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

#198
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is incompatible with freedom. As soon as enough people decide I should die or lose my possessions or do some other thing I don't want to do, I am forced against my will with violence. So we are stuck relying on the intelligence and wisdom and foresight of the masses. No wonder we're screwed.

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? Dem…

   I imagine you've never really engaged in political philosophy very thoroughly?
The opposite, I grudgingly came to this conclusion after decades of believing (or I guess, hoping) differently. Not that it's an original conclusion, many philosophers called it out long before I was even born. Took me awhile to see it.

   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
Yes, and again I always hoped this not to be the case. But the reality is the majority of people either can't be bothered to think logically or simply aren't capable.

    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.
It's the only logical conclusion though. Government only grows. And with that growth comes more and more taxation to fuel the growth and more and more laws/restrictions/regulations on individual freedoms to justify the growth.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that math isn’t correct. If you are in the minority, there is no compromise in democracy. The level of care you receive is exactly 0 if the majority voted against you. 20 years ago you couldn’t have 40% of a gay marriage, it was just no gay marriage.

People typically live for more than just a single issue. Averaged over many thousands of issues, some of which you end up enjoying benefits from and some of which you end up suffering penalties from, and after many years of residence, it does work out that way.

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

#200
post #162
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is incompatible with freedom. As soon as enough people decide I should die or lose my possessions or do some other thing I don't want to do, I am forced against my will with violence. So we are stuck relying on the intelligence and wisdom and foresight of the masses. No wonder we're screwed.

Curious to know your definition of freedom, and what system of government it is compatible with.

If there are no systems of government compatible with freedom, does that indicate there is a problem with the idea of freedom or a problem with the idea of government?
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