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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)

#271

Post by diordiderot »

harry8 wrote: post #183
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…

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.…

IMHO

The idea that the the current economic order is the most efficient is... idealistic

> "over there" who look and/or talk different that it separately doesn't matter if they starve.

The global economy is about expanding the wealth and consumption of the.01% while maintaining a standard of living well enough that the next 20% won't murder them and guard then from the bottom 80%

> is growing enough food for 7b people

We're well well beyond this capability. Westerners need to eat less meat, waste less electricity (more fuel for fertilizer etc).

Most westerner economies are rentier economies. They need more wealth taxes and more antitrust.

Rishi Sunak, the billionaire banker, conservative leader of the UK himself said that cutting corporate tax doesn't result in more productive investment

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

#272

Post by antman »

dirtyid wrote: post #257
strangeattractr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're probably referring to the rudimentary Martinez study that's making PRC collapists convinced PRC is over reporting GDP. For reference, much more sophisticated light study by NBER (staffed by FED economists) concluded PRC growth was higher than PRC reported GDP. But more broadly, it's important to understand GDP in PRC is (and has always been) guestimate to appease foreign investers / media for comparison wank.…

Those things you say are well known are in general new to me at least. What are the main references/links for these arguments?

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

#273

Post by jimbob45 »

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…

On the other hand, our progression has allowed us to overcome challenges that could have been extinction-level events otherwise. Who’s to say what happens if we stagnate and don’t get a COVID vaccine out in time to largely stunt the disease? What sort of knock-on effects might that have had on other areas of progress?

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

#274

Post by antupis »

diordiderot wrote: post #271
harry8 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

IMHO The idea that the the current economic order is the most efficient is... idealistic > "over there" who look and/or talk different that it separately doesn't matter if they starve. The global economy is about expanding the wealth and consumption of the.01% while maintaining a standard of living well enough that the next 20% won't murder them and guard then from the bottom 80% > is growing enough food for 7b peopl…

It is best what we have and doing pretty good job https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/03/Famine-death-rate... and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-w...

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

#275

Post by mjevans »

nitwit005 wrote: post #262

This has been known since the idea was first conceived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitat... The real issue is simply that, a lot of the things we want to convert to simple metrics can't be. Suppose I hand you a list of the exact rate each crime in a country was committed, and I ask you to convert that list to a single number, how would you do so? You could assign a weight to each crime, bu…

Hypothetical; somehow the total dollar impact of the divergence from an ideal timeline, including the cost of detection, correction, and the related punishments / restitution etc is totaled. For figures that are emotionally priceless the actuarial figures used in major disaster calculation will be used.

However the crime example also isn't very useful. Crimes aren't discouraged based on money cost, but a cost that is emotional and related to maintaining order and stability for society.

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

#276

Post by shawn-butler »

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…

>> Yes, we took the wrong turn.

As long as there is scarcity there will be competition and a "rat race"

I would say we have two real scarcities left remaining: energy and the conjoined pair food/water.

It can be argued that that the latter is entirely dependent on the former and the failure of modernity was our collective inability to adopt/secure nuclear power in the period between 1940-1970, the global adoption and security of which would have pushed us very close to a post-scarcity economy and the major cultural (re)evolution that would entail.

Instead it was weaponized resulting in its demonization by reactionaries and the poisoning of it as "toxic" in the public discourse and we are now stuck in Adam Smith style economies of warfare that will eternally just create new scarcities in new cycles. I would imagine major warfare will soon begin towards the middle/end of this century over habitable space and water scarcities all problems of our own creation.

Just my $0.02

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

#277

Post by neilwilson »

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.

"GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake"

Government expenditure on services is included in GDP at cost. Transfers to individuals are not.

Transfer the same to an individual in return for their hours and it will be included in GDP. Instant boost of GDP with no material change in output.

It's very easy to fake because GDP isn't all transfers, it's just some of them and like all dividing lines the one chosen is largely arbitrary.

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

#278

Post by DeathArrow »

didibus wrote: post #254
DeathArrow wrote: post #250

>GDP measures mainly market transactions. It ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. But GDP's role was never to measure income inequality, environmental impacts, diversity, affirmative actions. It was always an economic tool, not a SJW tool. As an economic tool it just measures how well a country is able to produce and sell goods and services. And for that purpose I know no other better to…

> GDP per capita adjusted for PPP What's the point of per-capita here? I've found personally this is the part that cause confusion. The per-capita makes it look like each person is equally participating in the gross production and receiving an equal income from it. Obviously that's false, the distribution is very uneven, so I've always wondered why we want it per-capita? If 1 out of 100 people produces 100% of the GD…

>why adjust it by capita

Because we might want to measure efficiency and compare two economies of different sizes.

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

#279

Post by harry8 »

diordiderot wrote: post #271
harry8 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

IMHO The idea that the the current economic order is the most efficient is... idealistic > "over there" who look and/or talk different that it separately doesn't matter if they starve. The global economy is about expanding the wealth and consumption of the.01% while maintaining a standard of living well enough that the next 20% won't murder them and guard then from the bottom 80% > is growing enough food for 7b peopl…

>The idea that the the current economic order is the most efficient is... idealistic

Nope. It's a fact that the current world economy is the most efficient yet seen. Imagination is not implementation. There remains plenty to discuss on how to do it better going forward.

>The global economy is about expanding the wealth and consumption of the.01% while maintaining a standard of living well enough that the next 20% won't murder them and guard then from the bottom 80%

Not worth arguing with it goes nowhere interesting, the gloabl economy isn't designed. Billionaire influence is quite limited for we rail that it exceed our own. Whatever. And yet somehow, despite what you think and I think about the global economy structure the bottom %80, hell the bottom 20% are objectively much better off in terms of food and health than Mill's time. While the sheer numbers of people have expoded. We've never had so many in absolute numbers and perecentage lifted out of sickness and poverty. That isn't nothing. Continue hating billionaires by all means. I do.

>We're well well beyond this capability.

So by design or accident even you acknowledge it has "worked" for those who would otherwise be sick and hungry.

>Westerners need to eat less meat, waste less electricity (more fuel for fertilizer etc).

Maybe? Why not? This has absolutely nothing to do with feeding 7billion and treating their diseases. Really. Nothing at all.

>Rishi Sunak

Who? Be careful whose leadership you follow. I somehow doubt you'd accept him as an authority on anything you didn't like the sound of. Myself, I sure wouldn't on anything at all... Billionaire by marriage or not adds nothing to the quality or thought.

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

#280

Post by NavinF »

Supermancho wrote: post #116
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 meas…

> the president announcing the stockmarket gains were being rolled into the accounting

Of GDP? Source?

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