231–240 of 369 posts
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What makes you think he wasn’t beyond ‘sins of the father’?
When did I say he was a sinner? It's just really odd to characterize the a member of arguably the most powerful political dynasty in US history to be "challenging the status quo".
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> like remove the special status of the City of London For sure, because it would sink the country, these days the UK is more dependent on the city than the city is on the UK
Dependent like a cancerous organ that is slowly killing its host, while removing might kill it immediately sure.
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That's so laughable a statement I don't know where to begin. Maybe the private sector cares about it less (questionable in itself given how the stock market obsesses over recession signals) but governments absolutely use GDP for policy decisions.
can you name one, please?
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.
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...
Being valid in China is a very high bar, there is very little that a totalitarian government can't fake if it tries hard enough.
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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.
The silliness of GDP is one of the worst-kept secrets in politics and economics. It's like measuring the quality of a car by how fast it's going.
That’s a terrible analogy. GDP is like measuring how useful the car is.
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…
This is a BS political speech and it is very politically motivated. When you can't fix the economy (get GDP up), just claim the GDP doesn't matter. My country's president just claimed we should focus on National Happiness Product. Of course, when all your economical policies fail, economy is just numbers. And no, having an accident doesn't increase GDP. If the passengers dies, that will remove their GDP from society.…
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Entertainment is positive value ("I want to watch/play/whatever this because I enjoy it"), healthcare is compensation for negative value ("I got injured and want to feel a little less shit"). Nobody goes to the doctor just because they felt like doing it that day. Counting the positive contribution of healthcare without counting the negative contributions of the injuries that lead people to seek healthcare is going t…
First do you really think people will get more injured to game GDP? Anyway the metric is capacity to fulfill peoples wants. If the population has injuries then it will be less productive and therefore have a lower GDP. See the broken window fallacy.
I think politicians will be incentivized to adopt systems that underfund preventative care in favour of more expensive emergency care, and this has already happened.
> Anyway the metric is capacity to fulfill peoples wants. If the population has injuries then it will be less productive and therefore have a lower GDP.
Only to the extent that those injuries affect economic productivity. Someone at the bottom will "earn" more in one medical bankruptcy than in an entire lifetime of minimum-wage work.
I've thought the Gini coefficient was better than GDP ever since I learned of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient