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

Relying on growth generally means taking on debt and risking large sums of capital on projects with the hope that it brings a return.

Some projects will work out, and some won't. When you're a company this is largely fine -- the worst case is that the company goes under, dissolves, and employees move on to new positions at new companies.

When you're a city, failure is not an option. Chicago officials can't simply say "welp, that investment didn't pay off like expected", shut down the water lines, and ride a golden parachute into the sunset while its citizens fend for themselves.

What's more, at the local level, the city's revenue is largely unaffected by successful growth-targeting projects. Any revenue that comes from GDP is largely in the form of sales and income taxes, which largely go to the state and the fed. So if a city is tracking GDP as a key metric they're in for a rough time. It means they're getting saddled with 100% of the maintenance liability of projects, and (usually) 0% of the revenue.

Unless a project is bringing in more citizens and growing the tax base, it's going to operate in the red no matter what. Most commonly, the project will be a road or highway that ends up displacing people, spreading them out, and diluting the tax base.

So at least at the local level, focusing on growth, specifically as measured by GDP, is a recipe for disaster (e.g. Detroit). I'd much rather my city focus on some other metric that's tied to sustainability.

The system crushed us so bad that people like you think we're living in the utopiest of utopias, even the idea of a better future disappeared, even suggesting it could have been better seems to trigger an allergic reaction, the cogs are willing to die for the machine that grinds them, and they seem happy about it. You focus on material goods while completely ignoring what came with it and what it took away from us, as if accumulating goods was a goal in itself. The bed of a min wage worker might be more luxurious than a king's bed from 200 years ago I very much doubt his life is anything luxurious, especially in comparison of a king's life

> Compared to what?

Compared to what it could have been

I have a worse life than my grandparents by almost any conceivable metrics besides the fact that I own and consume more useless shit. They had no degrees, five kids and could afford to live in a city center. I have 0 kids, a master's degree and will never be able to afford 5 kids, let alone in a city center

> Human progress has brought us to the point where we have the free time to complain about how disadvantaged we are and how unfair life is

I work more and will work longer than my grandparents, I don't expect I'll be able to retire before 70, if not more. In France 25% of the poorest already die before reaching retirement age.

> that our daily lives are far more luxurious than those of kings who lived 200 years ago.

I'm still sitting a desk desk 8 hours a day, probably for the next 40 years, while technocrats of the 60s promised automation would bring the 3 days/15 hours workweek

> The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires.

> The pseudoneeds imposed by modern consumerism cannot be opposed by any genuine needs or desires that are not themselves also shaped by society and its history. But commodity abundance represents a total break in the organic development of social needs. Its mechanical accumulation unleashes an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desire. The cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life.

Guy Debord, 1962

> The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive.

> The distance has not changed between those who possess a lot and those who possess a small but ever-increasing amount; but the intermediate stages have multiplied, and have, so to speak, brought the two extremes, rulers and ruled, closer to the same centre of mediocrity. To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Raoul Vaneigem, 1967

I was hesitant to mention this, but yes, it run counter to widespread initiatives to reduce light pollution

Company A reports $250K in non-employee-compensation expenses to the government. This intermediate consumption gets removed from their share of the GDP, so the total is ($1M-$250K) + $250K = $1M.

Again, Can you name one law which ties deficit spending to GDP?

Newsflash,

We did deficit spending when ratio was 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 1.0, 1.2

We will do deficit spending when ratio was 1.4, 1.6 or 2