101–110 of 369 posts
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Any idea who wrote that speech for Robert Kennedy?
While RFK sometimes got help from Edwin Guthman and Peter Edelman, he also spoke extemporaneously sometimes, most famously when he had to announce the death of Martin Luther King to a crowd that hadn't yet heard the news: https://kennedykingindy.org/full-rfk-speech
GDP might be the ultimate example of Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
I'd argue that "free market" pricing in general is. The attitude that "something is valuable if people are willing to pay for it" is being increasingly overfitted.
However this tells you very little about the health of the system - it could mean a river choked with invasive weeds and toxic algal blooms, or it could mean a river full of insects fed on by trout that local humans harvest regularly as a local source of protein.
Additionally, some ecosystems (like deserts) have low gross productivity, but as deserts go, are healthy ecosystems that just support less life than tropical rainforests do.
Hence, you just need a lot of other numbers besides GDP to make sense of how an economic system is doing overall. Proably about a dozen at least, but that's too many for simplistic propaganda and click-bait headline purposes.
I like Bhutan's constitutional adoption of "Gross National Happiness" as an alternative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
Having visited Bhutan and spent a considerable amount of time there, I've noticed the locals aren't that much happier than most other places in the world. It's difficult to be happy when you have to constantly worry about how to put food on the table. I've gotten swindled enough times in Bhutan, however not as much as in certain "shit-hole" cities that I shall not name. The whole "GNH" concept was created by McKinsey…
Our ruling Labour party (supposedly-but-not-really left-ish) does talk a lot about wellbeing budgets, but both our major parties are stuck in a neo-liberal trap where they refuse to allow national debt to get over 30% of GDP (crazy low by international standards), and also refuse to allow the tax ratio to get over that figure. This has meant that all our public services have been systematically underfunded for three decades, which has had a terrible impact on our poor. We like to smugly think that our Aussie neighbours are run by a bunch of knuckle-dragging troglodytes, but they have a vastly fairer tax system (see: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/07-09-2022/lets-copy-and-p...) and welfare system. The British High Commissioner recently said it very well (see: https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/300178615/o...): "You have Scandinavian ambitions in terms of quality of life and public services, but a US attitude to tax. The brand 100% Pure New Zealand lulled many into a false sense of security, when the environmental reality is far more challenging". Add to that the least affordable housing in the developed world (which politicians of all stripes refuse to touch), and the wellbeing of our less well-off is in a terrible state. If you are lucky enough to own a house, and have some money, you can live in a little bubble and pretend it's not happening to others here, but sadly you would be mistaken. God forbid you might need some of the dustier corners of the health or education systems, like having a kid with special needs.
Is this happening everywhere? Yes, it is, but I think there's a general perception that New Zealand is somehow better than a lot of other places, when in a lot of concrete, tangible, measurable ways it's actually significantly worse than most countries that we would like to compare ourselves to. I would struggle to recommend NZ as a place to move to for expats.
Reading an earlier thread on Perl I was thinking about how concepts, language and behaviour relate (as Wittgenstein and Ayer might have it). Someone mentioned how, as a Python user, they barely had to think about pointers/references. Things get magically referenced when needed. Seems like progress. When concepts get coded into a language, in this case "economics" (which is a tool for trying to see the world), they pu…
> So, we could certainly try to supplant GDP as a metric. This is very apparent, because it was only about 30 years ago that GDP itself replaced GNP as the preferred metric for the same purposes in the US. The article mentions the use of GDP internationally for longer, but the US preferred GNP until 1991. Its also worth noting that the creator of the GDP, a decade before it became dominant (internationally), also war…
If you have a colossal GDP, but it's all hinging on a very hot tulip (or housing) market, does that really do all the things a colossal GDP that's, say, service economy based?
One of the things people like about GDP is you can sort of get a good guess about how, when the rubber hits the road and countries start pushing and shoving each other, or a calamity like COVID occurs, how it's going to turn out. I wonder how the extremely bubbly (almost foam-like) post-70's economy factors into this.
From Luke Smith's post on GDP: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp/ "GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a place or country is on the global economy. Self-sufficiency has a GDP of 0. Wasteful consooomerism has an extremely large GDP."
Outside of that everything in it is just a generic "companies are bad" "fiat currency is bad" "government is bad" spiel that has been said a billion times already.
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…
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Because nobody cares about how many times you rolled your eyes. Presumably some people care about the other things, which - I think the speech was pointing this out - the oft-cited GDP does not measure
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that token why not exclude entertainment spending as useless. In reality people devote surplus to things they want rather than pure needs.
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…
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.