Building and maintaining social connections is very important.
Exercise and healthy diet are very important.
Personally helping others is very rewarding.
Comparing yourself to others is very detrimental.
Fixating on things and people you dislike is very detrimental.
Most of these are things that people are told as a child and struggle to do. Most of them you can't buy, outsource, or regulate.
My personal axe I like grinding is TV. The average American watches 20+ hours of TV a week. On average, I don't think it helps their long term happiness and I don't think it is restful.
I think most people would be happier if they literally stared at a wall or slept instead, let alone if they did some of the things I listed above.
Interesting idea but I am very skeptical that you could collect enough data on people to tease out how much their new toaster or app is contributing to their well-being.
Self selection and lack of random controls will always thwart such an effort.
It is still an interesting concept philosophically, and worthy of consideration.
I'm not too sure where the line is between a well being catalysis metric and old fashioned utils.
It is well understood that people can over or under pay for the utility of their purchases.
And that is exactly what New Zealand started doing in 2019[0].
A large problem with metrics is that they have a tendency of becoming a goal of their own. Instead of them being used as mere indicators, we end up with entire countries whose sole goal is to eternally increase their GDP - to the extent that it ends up harming the general population.
People do not solely exist to generate revenue, and it is about time we stop pretending they do.
Part of the issue (at least in public discourse) seems to be the conflation of "revenue" in the narrow sense of being measured in money, with "utility" or "value" or "welfare" in the broad sense.
> A large problem with metrics is that they have a tendency of becoming a goal of their own.
I read this in Project to Product:
"As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right." --Jeff Bezos
"It is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise."
- Terry Pratchett, from Thief of Time (2001)
>We confirm that both mortality and morbidity have a negative effect on GDP per capita growth. The effect of reducing mortality by 10 percent is that of adding at least 9.6 percentage points to GDP per capita growth over a period of about one quarter century, according to [13] bounding strategy.
That's a general trend. Obviously it's not going to apply to every case. Usually, reducing mortality is about improving healthcare and nutrition, especially during the period your study tracked (1990-2014). Keeping working age people healthy is obviously going to increase their productivity. This is very different from shutting down an entire city due to a few dozen Covid cases.
Given how overwhelming majority of Covid deaths are elderly and sickly people, it is virtually guaranteed that on net, Covid deaths themselves are positive for the economy. The elderly overwhelmingly have their productive years behind them, and in the retirement, they mostly consume the resources instead of producing them. So no, Covid deaths are not bad for GDP. Situation would have been much different if the Covid victims were younger and healthier on average.
The quality sure can, if you can catch COVID and increase your mortality by going to the hospital.
We saw this in the early days of both Wuhan and later NYC. The beds overfilled, then the hallways, then it start spilling into surrounding streets, and then the armed forces had to be called in to set up makeshift hospitals.
None of the makeshift military hospitals were actually used in NYC. They were only set up in the interest of preparedness, but they did not end up being necessary.
If a hospital is saturated then by definition no more people can further enter the hospital.
There's a physical limit to how many people can fit inside a hospital, and that limit is the saturation point, at least in my definition.
It's possible that a mildly sick patient became a moderately sick patient because they received some disease while within the premises that they otherwise wouldn't have.
And in an extreme scenario, hospitals could possibly kick out moderately sick patients to accommodate even more severely sick patients, which could cause the former to spread diseases to otherwise healthy people. But this seems highly likely.
While it is true that no _entire country_ has GDP increase for _sole goal_, it is often the main metric used for government driven economic and social policies, and more often than not, compared to concurrent and/or rival country GDPs, when applicable.
Trying to change that means going from a productivity driven economy to a social wellbeing driven economy (as per government economic policies).
That's quite a shift, in line with the idea of universal basic income.
> we end up with entire countries whose sole goal is to eternally increase their GDP
This is a pernicious straw-man. No county focuses only on GDP. No government focuses only on GDP.
Unemployment, interest rates, inflation, balance of payments, national debt etc, are all prominent indicators in any economy.
And show me a country that doesn’t also measure educational achievement, crime rates, divorce statistics, birth rates, suicides, alcohol consumption… the list is endless.
The only people who want an alternative to GDP are the ones who mistakenly think that the economy or society can be summed up in a single measure.
> So — suppose we give this sort of combined well-being survey to a random sample of people, and also measure what products and services they've used and purchased. From this dataset, we could make reasonable statistical inferences about the amount of well-being increase or decrease associated with a certain product or service among a certain class of people.
Unfortunately, no, you can't. There are lots and lots of problems. Just a few off the top of my head:
1. The effects of products are not uniform across the population. Alcohol, for example, catalyzes well-being for some people, but for others it has a dramatic negative effect.
2. The effects of consumption on well-being change with the time horizon over which you measure them. Eating ice cream might improve my subjective well-being today, but harm it tomorrow when it has a deleterious effect on my health.
3. Externalities. Owning a private jet might improve my subjective well-being, but harm everyone else's with its noise and emissions.
Measuring economic output is actually a not-entirely-unreasonable proxy for measuring well-being because in a free market people presumably make rational choices and spend their money in a way that maximizes their well-being. The problem is not that the proxy is wrong, the problem is that people turn out not to be very good at making these choices. It's not entirely their fault. A big part of the problem is information asymmetry: producers know a lot more about the potential negative outcomes of their products than consumers do.
I think a much better way to tackle this problem is with education and stronger consumer disclosure laws rather than trying to change the metric to something as poorly defined as "well-being catalysis".
Whether or not well-being is as easy to measur, your assumptions about free-market as a stand-in for well-being does not have a solid foundation.
> in a free market people presumably make rational choices and spend their money in a way that maximizes their well-being.
There is no particular reason to presume this is true, and many reasons to presume it is not.
Psychology is littered with well-demonstrated examples of humans acting against self-interest. 1) People are consistently willing to incur personal cost for the benefit of a perceived community, and are even willing to incur personal cost to punish those working against it. Community recognition is not required to observe this behavior. 2) People are quite susceptible to marketing. The history of the American tobacco industry is a great example.
The assumption that self-interested rational entities leads to a healthy or productive society has been similarly discredited. The Honduran Free Trade zones and Eddie Lampert's catastrophic reorganization of Sears are great counterexamples.
Fair enough. But I think most people are skeptical the government is in a better position to determine what makes them happiest. Government edicts/propaganda may, in fact, do the opposite merely by virtue of being edicts/propaganda.
only applies when countries have similar demographics. e.g. most countries are a magnitude smaller than the US(except for China, India). Most countries have a much more homogeneous population(e.g. China, India). Best comparison I can think of is EU vs US, and if you can show that Europeans are happier, then that calls for a very limited central government that is not elected, and states can model themselves after European countries. Scale and demographics are important.
That post wasn't meant in that way. I'm a supporter of decentralization, a strong local government and a weak federal government (city/county > state > federal), but I wanted to demonstrate how difficult it is to compare different countries. Which was evidently worthy of a downvote :shrug:.
> Psychology is littered with well-demonstrated examples of humans acting against self-interest.
That is often claimed, but it is far from clear that it is actually true. The problem is that in order to make this assessment at all, someone has to decide what a person's self-interest actually is. There is no universal objective measure of self-interest because different people want different things (this is the reason trade works at all).
> People are consistently willing to incur personal cost for the benefit of a perceived community, and are even willing to incur personal cost to punish those working against it. Community recognition is not required to observe this behavior.
Sure. But how is this working against self-interest? I for one like being part of a strong, cohesive community. But I also recognize that building community requires effort, and that effort incurs a cost. So who are you to say that the cost I personally bear to shoulder my share of that burden is "acting against my self-interest"?
> People are quite susceptible to marketing
One man's marketing is another man's education.
> The history of the American tobacco industry is a great example.
Sure, but that was, in retrospect, an example of the tobacco industry just flat-out lying to people. If you want to argue that society benefits from having some mechanism to discourage willful deception I certainly won't argue with that.
But even a case as clear-cut as tobacco still has grey areas. People still smoke despite the fact that the risks are now well known. If someone knows the risks and still chooses to take them on because they'd rather have a nicotine buzz than a long buzz-free life, who are you and I to tell them that they are wrong? Because once you take that step it's a very slippery slope from there to not allowing anyone to take any risks at all.
+1! I'd also add that social media seems to have a disproportionate effect on happiness and aspirations, so finding a moderator for social media should be a focus as well. Not as in censorship, but eg. being able to trace news articles back to source, allowing people to weight information/advice from friends, encouraging cross-pollination of memes rather than constructing bubbles etc.
"We should not measure Economic Productivity" isn't a great start.
Increasing well-being is a laudable goal, but it's nebulous in concept and in specifics even more tricky. "Well being" belongs in the world of political or philisophical discourse, but as a basis for economic planning is probably not going to be useful.
But now that we mention politics, we already have proxies for measurement of well-being. In western democracies the people vote for the politicians (or policies) that they believe will increase their well-being. So the polls and vote tallies are one form of measurement. One of the government's roles, as policy maker, is to balance the needs of the people with the ability to provide those needs.
The first part of this just boils down to "it's hard" and the second is a pure fantasy description of how governments are maybe supposed to work but none ever has in precisely that way.
These are both useful lines of reasoning in some conquests but I don't find them so in this one.
Only a minority of the people living in the US are registered to vote. An even smaller minority actually vote. A vanishingly smaller minority decides who is on the ballot via campaign contributions. Not sure voting results are a proxy of anything for the majority of people.
Numerous studies have spent 10s of millions trying to determine which leadership style and which technology made workers more economically productive.
The result was always too many variables creating an impenetrable mess of logic with no practical value. The research was almost unproductive economic activity except it made the researchers realize we are terrible at macro level measure of anything but movement of literal things.
Inferring numbers today from past economic truth is not intelligent guidance but biasing inequality into the system from past imperialism. A whole lot of our rich would not be without our government meddling. What I don’t need is government pissing off the world to normalize business conditions for aristocrats who don’t do real work of keeping themselves alive.
It's funny, I commented about this a few months back saying happiness is a better indicator than GDP and people were so offended by the mere suggestion.
Edit:
Clearly no one is offended, hyperbole is a lost art form, and happiness is at all-time highs judging by the responses I got.
I don't think there's an argument for what you were saying. If you disagree, feel free to justify. You keep replying, so I'm curious as to where you want to go with this.
This is what is being measured. It is the "real" progress happening in the economy. There's no circular logic, you can measure multiple things at once.
The issue with GDP-replacements is that GDP is a good proxy for many things, not just one. GDP / capita is a proxy for well being. GDP is a proxy for how credit worthy a country is. It's good proxy for how well a country could wage war if they switched to war economy. It's proxy for how much slack there is in the system that could be used to deal with bad times.
Funnily enough when you look at the countries in the 'happiness index' they all happen to be countries which fundamentally have pretty good underlying economies (and often they tend to be from european countries that have decent social support structure).
Well-being is probably a third-order effect from a strong economy, good healthcare / social care, culture and a variety of other factors. But because it is a third-order it is very hard to measure the impact of policy, because:
* They are 'arms length' from policy changes.
* The indexes are slow to respond to changes.
* They are noisy and affected by unrelated factors (i.e. does a colder winter decrease happiness?)
* A policy which improves well-being today could very well decrease well-being far into the future (e.g. increasing a countries spending and decreasing tax).
How does one obtain a realistic and reliable measure of the 'happiness index' for any particular country? I imagine this is something that's subject to massive propaganda efforts (for example, East Germany attempted to keep its suicide rate hidden from view, at least according to the movie 'The Lives of Others').
It's tricky - also because it's very hard to aggregate 'happiness'; for economy you can reasonably get the total and just calculate an average, but any 'happiness' measure inherently has to be bottom-up and then the differences between subpopulations in a single country become critical.
Like, someone can compare their well-being at San Francisco versus Paris and see which one is better but that would be a comparison of well-being for them which won't necessarily hold for Parisians and SanFranciscans of a different income level or with different cultural values - while wealth can be compared directly in a mostly objective manner (e.g. adjusting for purchasing parity).
Is the well-being a result of a strong economy or vice versa? You seem to assume directionality that might be the opposite. Perhaps workers not fearful of losing their healthcare if they leave their jobs are more productive, or do more broad schooling because there is less pressure to immediately start making money to avoid poverty, and this leads to more productivity or innovation.
But in one direction you have more wealth enabling people to live better, and on the other direction you have people with better lives being able to work better. It is very clear those effects do not have the same intensity.
why are we speaking about happiness and not about the colonisation of the solar system or about finding out what truly lies behind our existence? simulation, multiverse or what and if so, why?
That said, a good metric obviously mesures power on this planet so it must be something like how fast an economy can build a space station or advanced military equipment.
Honestly it reminds me most of how some people try to spin Bitcoin’s power use as a good thing.
The comment does have some similarity to a point which I think reasonable, but doesn’t quite capture the thing.
Specifically, it questions happiness as a goal. This, I think, has something to it, but not quite in the way they said. For an individual who is neither unhappy nor “feeling nothing”, “being happy” is, I think, a questionable goal, as I think it puts things backwards.
But, valuing others being happy, is, I think, very often a rather good heuristic, as “things that make someone happy” are often “things that benefit them” (though not always. Non-voluntarily chemically inducing a euphoria in someone, doesn’t benefit them. ) .
Looking at “how happy and satisfied are people generally” is a pretty decent heuristic for estimating how well things are going for people overall, though this heuristic can be goodharted.
Perhaps somewhat better than “how happy are you” would be “how well are things going for you? How much do the general states of affairs align with your preferences, and how is the rate of change of the degree to which the general state of affairs aligns with your preferences? How’s it going?”.
This combination of things is, I think, closer to what we should ideally want for each-other than “happiness”, but, “happiness” is still a pretty good approximation in most reasonable circumstances.
(It is best to avoid the unreasonable circumstances where it ceases to be a good approximation)
Nations that practiced colonialism didn't actually benefit those "nations", more like specific people in the nations. It probably made them poorer if anything, though people will sacrifice wealth for feeling proud of being in a cool empire and getting to drink tea.
The former colonial nations do always show up high in every index, but that's correlation because they're in Europe. The colonised Finland and Ireland are always in there too.
A few things worth mentioning: in the countries highest on the happiness indices, taxes are also among the highest in the world, and distribution of wealth less skewed.
If more financially homogeneous (i.e., less wealth skew) societies are happier, would you expect more culturally homogeneous (i.e., shared norms/history) societies to be happier?
I would expect this to be true to some degree, with declining marginal returns to homogeneity after some point maybe even tipping negative with too much homogeneity.
Neither of those seem that important at the country level as long as it's true at some level somewhere.
If you're in a small country richer people in the neighboring country seem about as likely to have the same effect. On the other hand, if you're in a large country and they live in a different city you're not running into them.
An issue with nationalism is that nations are in some ways very real and in some ways fake.
Maybe we are measuring happiness incorrectly. Instead of most people being happy, what if we made a small number of people REALLY happy? Maybe the 0.1% are so happy that it balances out the sadness of everyone else?
If you used the median then only actions which affected the utility of someone in the top 50% and bottom 50% would have any moral impact. e.g. two miserable people torturing each other or helping each other would be neither good nor bad, since the median would not change.
As sarcastic as this is, you still end up with the same just less intensity. If statistics and estimation are involved, this proposed happiness index will leave some behind and end up with everybody the same.
There seems to be a lot of countries that are culturally homogenious, and yet they are poor and miserable. So it does not seem to check out.
It is also not clear how one should calculate this - for example you could have white americans of german dissent violently disagreeing in issues of Trump, or hell, this about civil war. You could have people of different background hold very similar opinions.
My general hypothesis is that most people are happier when they feel typical or normal (even when they claim to value being different). This seems to be the essence of lots of advertising. To increase their own happiness, most people want to "normalize" everyone around them (levels of wealth, values, etc).
Perhaps national happiness (since that is the level of society being discussed) is a joint function of cultural AND financial homogeneity? Many poor countries with high cultural homogeneity have tremendous financial heterogeneity (e.g., wealthy strongmen and their lackeys), which leads to unhappiness.
There are more ways that people want to be normal than just cultural and financial. For example, I would also posit that people with more common personality traits are probably happier. However, money and culture seem to cover a large fraction of how people perceive normality.
I lived and worked in both systems: socialist France and laissez faire capitalist Hong Kong, and I can assure you that despite the constant possibility of losing job and healthcare in Hong Kong, the amount of money, the motivation of the people around me, and the success of the state as a whole (economically) sure trumps all the bells and whistles of the tax heavy nanny state breeding a country of uninspired Karens :D
Im not saying there arent nice things in France but it s not as fun to be in than HK, anecdotally.
I concur. Ask the Filipino nannies fresh out of the Chungking Mansions what their experience is. Or how they’re hoy every Sunday being a public holiday because otherwise their employers would work them 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
A key consideration should be how easy it is to 'game' well-being measurements.
It's pretty hard to game economic measurements as a whole. Metrics with smaller scope are generally much easier to game so while they may be a slightly more accurate measurement initially, they may be more vulnerable to corruption.
>If a genie wish made everyone healthy and brought about world peace, The US's GDP would drop, quite dramatically!
Would it? 'We must invest in a strong military to keep the peace!' and 'Everyone is healthy, lets invest in preventative care and longevity to keep it that way!'
The US could easily take much of that military funding and put it into infrastructure, job programs and healthcare spending and allow European countries to increase their military spending. This would keep our GDP and reduce our deficit with tax collection.
Every time I suggest this, however, I seem to be downvoted into oblivion and poopooed by the Europeans on the forum. I guess a more isolationist policy isn't that great of an idea after all.
I’m European and I fully understand that our free health care and giant social programs (on many countries) are paid for by our minuscule military spending - which turned out to be a terrible idea considering actually we live next to a revisionist and expansionist power.
But Europeans liked to believe that WW2 had somehow “shown the world” that wars were unwinnable bla bla bla while really the US just installed a giant protectorate system on Europe and kept it under their nuclear umbrella (one which the continent largely decided to maintain after 1991).
So yes, there are Europeans who understand (and should) that European prosperity was bought with an American military umbrella, one which we don’t pay for.
But - the Trumpian argument that this architecture is “useless” is also wrong in my view. The system was constructed to benefit the US, and so it did. The problem is that after 1991 everyone got sloppy, and capital took enormous control over politics of the US and the West in general (since there were no enemies but only “opportunities for investment”) and this led to a series of poorly thought out disasters - including China in GATT/WTO hoping it would democratize, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no Trumper, and don't think we should leave NATO. But the US military expansionist policy is tiresome for the US as well as for the European population who complain about it. There are a vocal minority (maybe not even a minority) who want our young men and women to come home and have our spending aimed towards education, our crumbling infrastructure, clean energy, climate cleanup, paying down our national debt, health care and fixing social security. Those are just the top things, there are other items to do that don't involve violent expansion or nation building. We don't mind working with NATO for peace keeping missions, though. Those seem to have broad support, but the media's spell seems to have been broken for a while on this rah rah, invade every country for any manufactured reason so the few can make billions =[
I agree in a sense. As far as US military expansionism - I think the overall security architecture is sound (NATO, AUSUKNZ, Four Eyes and Japan/South Korea means that the US effectively surrounds all of its major challengers on all sides). It’s kept US dominance in place for almost a century now. And I believe that’s a good thing.
But it’s on the implementation that things went haywire.
Because pre-fracking the US was so dependent on foreign energy, adventurism was encouraged in Iraq which led to a major geopolitical disaster (and a huge sink for the country’s resources). In that respect, yes the expansionist policy went totally overboard, due to poor leadership and planning and unrealistic political objectives.
Overall I think:
- the overall architecture is sound. The US dominates and reaps benefits for it, while in my opinion maintaining peace through strength
- but Europe should be spending enormous amounts more in military power - something like 5% of GDP at least - so it has a realistic chance to defeat Russia on the battlefield on its own
- if that happened then the US could probably reduce its military spending (im not even sure they would because of the issues you listed though).
It's easy to game military spending metrics depending on what you choose to include. For example, some countries include pension payments for retired veterans and others do not.
The US spends more than anyone on healthcare as a percentage of GDP and gets mediocre results at best. The most frequently proposed solution to this is to turn over more of the control of our healthcare to the people who created the current system and also lied us into the Iraq war where we killed millions of people for corporate profits.
I remember about a decade ago I was living in Singapore and there was a minor controversy coz the country appeared near the bottom of some "happiness" country ranking. A lot of people felt vindicated by this.
The government got really mad and decided, in true Singaporean fashion that the only logical solution was to create their own metric and ranking. One where, coincidentally they were #1/#2 happiest instead of #1/2 unhappiest. A completely different set of people felt equally vindicated by this.
I'd argue that politicians have completely gamed the U-3 unemployment rate based on their positions toward gig work, part time work, minimum wage, etc.
The various unemployment metrics used to be highly correlated, but they've diverged in recent decades.
And you can absolutely dial up GDP without dialing up median income per capita as well.
Which of these countries you're referring to doesn't support a highly extractive (no matter the cost as long as there's sufficient profit in it), "greed is good" version of capitalism? If you're referring to the Nordic countries, from a Marxist perspective, they exploit workers plenty, just mostly not their workers. Lenin talks about this practice in _Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism_ wherein capitalist countries have an incentive to make conditions at home just good enough to stave off revolution, but not so good as to overly damage profit margins. They do so by essentially exporting misery to other countries the way the US has basically turned China into a large US manufacturing annex. The global south is highly exploited by capitalist nations. Norway in particular struggles with huge issues related to climate change, being something like the 13th largest oil producer in the world.
TL;DR: are any of these countries you're referring to not capitalist countries that just export misery?
I suspect that different cultures apply different meanings to "happiness". Heck, if you ask the same person on different days how happy he is, I bet you get different answers. I don't see how such a measure across cultures can be reliable.
Happiness indexes are rather meaningless and arbitrary, often reflecting more the political biases of the index creators rather than things that regular people care about. Instead of making indexes it's better to look at revealed preferences in terms of voluntary migration rate. The USA has a positive net migration rate with all major European countries despite having lower index scores.
Well the most conspicuous thing is that the countries that top these indices have mixed economies with a heavy degree of public participation, plus high and progressive taxation and a strong social safety net.
Good well-being should be the desired outcome. It should be the measurement by which "success" is determined.
What tools are necessary to achieve good well-being should be the topic of research and political debate.
I think the problem we have today is that, politicians in particular, are only interested in the metrics that make their preferred tools look good. So a hard line socialist is inclined to ignore the benefits a free market provides and focus solely on how state-run programs can solve everything. On the flip-side, conservatives see a strong economy, put all their faith behind the free market, and ignore the proven effectiveness social programs have in areas where capitalism struggles like healthcare.
A lot of them are also in places where the climate spends half the year trying to freeze you to death. I've always wondered if that's coincidental.
I could imagine it going a few different ways. Maybe every day when you wake up and have not frozen to death, you already feel accomplished, so start the day with a win. Or maybe there's a certain resilience already in people who would choose to continue to live in such a climate. Or maybe you just don't have much time to care much about your neighbors' negative qualities when there are homes to keep warm.
Maybe you can just afford to complain more about everything else when you don't have the weather as an easy (and unifying) adversary to complain about.
My guess was a dark and horrible "adverse selection" where suicide or emmigration already weeded out the unhappy. Reducing suicide decreases overall happiness - even though it also avoids the damage.
I suspect one of the main things you'd figure out is that wealthy people are inefficiently turning their wealth into well being. I know some people with generational wealth who don't seem to be significantly more happy than your average Joe. OTOH there's also going to be a lot of poor people that we can justify in not helping as they are already happier than you'd think from a consumption point of view. Indeed people I know at the bottom of the income scale don't seem to be any different in terms of perceived well being.
There's been some research I've heard of in the area about people who won the lottery or have some life altering accident, somehow nothing changes how happy they are in the long run. Wonder if the evidence still supports that.
It makes sense that when you take consumption into overdrive, you don't gain much happiness. You can pay a 1000$ for a meal, but it won't taste a 100 times better than my 10$ meal.
You can build a house with 20 bedrooms but you can still only sleep in one, and you've just created a new problem to manage: cleaning all of them.
You can buy a 1$ million car but it's not a 100 times more comfortable or faster, nor does it do anything in a traffic jam. It'll bore you after 2 weeks as it becomes the new normal.
-National income and national happiness are different, but are positively correlated
-Average levels of happiness have been rising internationally for decades, with the notable exception of the united states
-While economic inequality has been rising in countries like the US, happiness inequality has been falling. From a happiness perspective, our lives are less unequal than they were decades ago.
The most interesting Insight from the US data is that happiness is very poorly tied to how much people actually have, and more tied to perceptions of where they stand relative to others.
It is like the classic experiment of a monkey being outraged when given less treats than another monkey, despite having more treats than they otherwise would have.
I think it is tied to the expectation of fairness and the perception of fairness.
If you expect to get the same bonus, and you perceive you were slighted, you will probably be unhappy.
Perspective plays a huge part.
That's not to say people don't have valid grievances, but there is a huge amount of cognitive dissonance, and large gaps between expectations and reality.
Take the parent example of US inequality. Low earners are unhappy that they make so much less than US high earners. Well that's unfair! However, they certainly don't gain much comfort by being a high earner globally. That's not unfair, that is deserved!
Our perception of fairness is parochial, so it's biased against the outgroup, but it works very well within the ingroup. But in- and outgroup are not rigidly defined and can be changed. If you maximize the size of the ingroup, there's nothing wrong with innate farness.
It seems fundamental to the human condition that working on something (whether mastering the creation of artistic work, building businesses, becoming an amazing teacher, literally any productive use of time) is what drives true happiness. Once a society largely moves beyond Maslow's hierarchy, the ability to productively work on something of your choosing, whether as your main job or as a hobby/side gig is what brings passion and meaning to life.
Being paid in some way for this work is one way for people to support the creator/teacher/builder. This will add to economic activity and continue to grow the economic pie.
No one looks back on their life and wishes they spent more time laying on the couch.
So while economic productivity/growth is a crude measure for sure, it might be the best one we've found so far.
I'm not sure it's ever appropriate to speculate on what elements of life drive happiness for other people.
Everything everyone does is by definition in pursuit of satisfying some internal motivation, and it doesn't seem reasonable to me to second-guess other people's choices for the purpose of optimizing their happiness against external criteria -- only for the purpose of preventing externalities that harm our own pursuit of happiness.
Attempting to create macro-scale metrics that attempt to approximate the optimality of of individuals' subjective experience, rather than measuring objective consequences of their manifest behavior -- like their actual economic activity -- seems both too abstract to be useful and too susceptible to manipulation by those with ulterior motives.
So I agree that economic productivity is the best measure, but for quite different reasons.
> No one looks back on their life and wishes they spent more time laying on the couch.
Clearly true. Now, how many people look back on their life and wish they had spent more time building their business rather than spending time with family, friends, etc?
Even more fundamental to the human condition is our social nature. Living a life that prioritizes that is what drives true happiness.
> Now, how many people look back on their life and wish they had spent more time building their business rather than spending time with family, friends, etc?
I do. Most of the "social time" has been wasted: some projects I did each bring me more lasting happiness that even all the time spent with family and friends put together.
> working on something... is what drives true happiness
Couldn't disagree more. The most joyous time in the past few years has been when I took half a year off work and pretty much spent it playing video games or hanging out with my wife.
In fact the joyous times in my life have been when I have no responsibilities and can just get drunk with my friends. Unfortunately the best way to meet good, fun people is to be involved with some kind of productive activity, but as we get older none of us have time for each other anyway.
I hate responsibility and I somewhat hate being productive because once other people see you're capable, they start expecting more of you, and that's the last thing I want
I know of many people who wish they spent more time laying on the couch. I think you're making the mistake of assuming that your personal / bubble / society cultural preferences are universal.
it's interesting seeing our intentional or subconscious goal of "dominating" nature disconnect us further from the planetary systems that we are a part of. The economy and money was invented by us. Putting the economy's well-being in front of the human's or the earth's was very plainly a mistake.
Great article, lots of food for thought. The only thing that seems to be left out is agricultural productivity, which is fairly closely related to ecological productivity.
Economics would be a more reliable field if it incorporated the work of people like the founder of ecological studies, G. Evelyn Hutchinson:
People don't want to be happy or well. They want to hoard wealth and hate their fellow man. This is the sad truth that western democratic capitalism reveals :(
If you ever become so powerful that you can dictate what the gov of a 350 mln nation should do, you'll find it difficult to constrain yourself with a made up metric that you "can't fernangle with".
The Human Development Index is another measure that was developed as a result of similar reasoning back in the 90's, specially accounting for such development in the third world.
> The point is not that these measures give us a perfect way to measure human well-being, but rather that they give us a decent stab at it, which is definitely worth taking.
The old motte-and-bailey tactic, nice!
If he thinks productivity metrics are "voodoo", wait til he learns more about those measurements of happiness and well-being. It hurts that we don't have a good way to measure well-being rigorously and consistently, but given that we do not it seems like step one should be to get to the point where we can do that, and only then should we consider whether we should replace existing measurements and paradigms with it.
I do strongly agree that we should be clear that we care about GDP because it lets us buy more quality of life (in many cases, literally more life), and if GDP diverged from providing that we should stop caring about GDP
I’m not sure I buy that the right metric is hedonic well-being though; the issues with Mills’ Hedonic Utilitarianism are well-known, and I don’t want to prescribe heroin or wireheading for everyone to maximize their subjective happiness. I think some metric of Eudaimonic Utility is probably more what we want.
What are the factors of human flourishing? How do we measure and improve those? Things like health, education (in the broadest sense including trades/crafts), economic security/opportunity, physical safety, community, etc.
One can easily imagine higher-GDP configurations that trample most of the populace on the above, and we should not choose those merely because “growth is good”.
208 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadThe real challenge IMHO, is that most people don't like the answers or want to make improvements.
Building and maintaining social connections is very important.
Exercise and healthy diet are very important.
Personally helping others is very rewarding.
Comparing yourself to others is very detrimental.
Fixating on things and people you dislike is very detrimental.
Most of these are things that people are told as a child and struggle to do. Most of them you can't buy, outsource, or regulate.
My personal axe I like grinding is TV. The average American watches 20+ hours of TV a week. On average, I don't think it helps their long term happiness and I don't think it is restful.
I think most people would be happier if they literally stared at a wall or slept instead, let alone if they did some of the things I listed above.
https://adam.nz/2001/zen-tv-experiment/
I don't agree with everything written in that essay and reject the Zen aspect but it was definitely a life-changing moment for me.
Self selection and lack of random controls will always thwart such an effort.
It is still an interesting concept philosophically, and worthy of consideration.
I'm not too sure where the line is between a well being catalysis metric and old fashioned utils.
It is well understood that people can over or under pay for the utility of their purchases.
A large problem with metrics is that they have a tendency of becoming a goal of their own. Instead of them being used as mere indicators, we end up with entire countries whose sole goal is to eternally increase their GDP - to the extent that it ends up harming the general population.
People do not solely exist to generate revenue, and it is about time we stop pretending they do.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/07/11/new-ze...
I read this in Project to Product:
"As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right." --Jeff Bezos
What countries are you talking about? I don't know of a single country that does this.
This has become less so only fairly recently.
>We confirm that both mortality and morbidity have a negative effect on GDP per capita growth. The effect of reducing mortality by 10 percent is that of adding at least 9.6 percentage points to GDP per capita growth over a period of about one quarter century, according to [13] bounding strategy.
We saw this in the early days of both Wuhan and later NYC. The beds overfilled, then the hallways, then it start spilling into surrounding streets, and then the armed forces had to be called in to set up makeshift hospitals.
There's a physical limit to how many people can fit inside a hospital, and that limit is the saturation point, at least in my definition.
It's possible that a mildly sick patient became a moderately sick patient because they received some disease while within the premises that they otherwise wouldn't have.
And in an extreme scenario, hospitals could possibly kick out moderately sick patients to accommodate even more severely sick patients, which could cause the former to spread diseases to otherwise healthy people. But this seems highly likely.
Trying to change that means going from a productivity driven economy to a social wellbeing driven economy (as per government economic policies).
That's quite a shift, in line with the idea of universal basic income.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
This is a pernicious straw-man. No county focuses only on GDP. No government focuses only on GDP.
Unemployment, interest rates, inflation, balance of payments, national debt etc, are all prominent indicators in any economy.
And show me a country that doesn’t also measure educational achievement, crime rates, divorce statistics, birth rates, suicides, alcohol consumption… the list is endless.
The only people who want an alternative to GDP are the ones who mistakenly think that the economy or society can be summed up in a single measure.
Unfortunately, no, you can't. There are lots and lots of problems. Just a few off the top of my head:
1. The effects of products are not uniform across the population. Alcohol, for example, catalyzes well-being for some people, but for others it has a dramatic negative effect.
2. The effects of consumption on well-being change with the time horizon over which you measure them. Eating ice cream might improve my subjective well-being today, but harm it tomorrow when it has a deleterious effect on my health.
3. Externalities. Owning a private jet might improve my subjective well-being, but harm everyone else's with its noise and emissions.
Measuring economic output is actually a not-entirely-unreasonable proxy for measuring well-being because in a free market people presumably make rational choices and spend their money in a way that maximizes their well-being. The problem is not that the proxy is wrong, the problem is that people turn out not to be very good at making these choices. It's not entirely their fault. A big part of the problem is information asymmetry: producers know a lot more about the potential negative outcomes of their products than consumers do.
I think a much better way to tackle this problem is with education and stronger consumer disclosure laws rather than trying to change the metric to something as poorly defined as "well-being catalysis".
> in a free market people presumably make rational choices and spend their money in a way that maximizes their well-being.
There is no particular reason to presume this is true, and many reasons to presume it is not.
Psychology is littered with well-demonstrated examples of humans acting against self-interest. 1) People are consistently willing to incur personal cost for the benefit of a perceived community, and are even willing to incur personal cost to punish those working against it. Community recognition is not required to observe this behavior. 2) People are quite susceptible to marketing. The history of the American tobacco industry is a great example.
The assumption that self-interested rational entities leads to a healthy or productive society has been similarly discredited. The Honduran Free Trade zones and Eddie Lampert's catastrophic reorganization of Sears are great counterexamples.
That is often claimed, but it is far from clear that it is actually true. The problem is that in order to make this assessment at all, someone has to decide what a person's self-interest actually is. There is no universal objective measure of self-interest because different people want different things (this is the reason trade works at all).
> People are consistently willing to incur personal cost for the benefit of a perceived community, and are even willing to incur personal cost to punish those working against it. Community recognition is not required to observe this behavior.
Sure. But how is this working against self-interest? I for one like being part of a strong, cohesive community. But I also recognize that building community requires effort, and that effort incurs a cost. So who are you to say that the cost I personally bear to shoulder my share of that burden is "acting against my self-interest"?
> People are quite susceptible to marketing
One man's marketing is another man's education.
> The history of the American tobacco industry is a great example.
Sure, but that was, in retrospect, an example of the tobacco industry just flat-out lying to people. If you want to argue that society benefits from having some mechanism to discourage willful deception I certainly won't argue with that.
But even a case as clear-cut as tobacco still has grey areas. People still smoke despite the fact that the risks are now well known. If someone knows the risks and still chooses to take them on because they'd rather have a nicotine buzz than a long buzz-free life, who are you and I to tell them that they are wrong? Because once you take that step it's a very slippery slope from there to not allowing anyone to take any risks at all.
The last 3 years have thought us that you can't live in a dream world. There is a reality and it will bite you in the a**.
Increasing well-being is a laudable goal, but it's nebulous in concept and in specifics even more tricky. "Well being" belongs in the world of political or philisophical discourse, but as a basis for economic planning is probably not going to be useful.
But now that we mention politics, we already have proxies for measurement of well-being. In western democracies the people vote for the politicians (or policies) that they believe will increase their well-being. So the polls and vote tallies are one form of measurement. One of the government's roles, as policy maker, is to balance the needs of the people with the ability to provide those needs.
These are both useful lines of reasoning in some conquests but I don't find them so in this one.
The result was always too many variables creating an impenetrable mess of logic with no practical value. The research was almost unproductive economic activity except it made the researchers realize we are terrible at macro level measure of anything but movement of literal things.
Inferring numbers today from past economic truth is not intelligent guidance but biasing inequality into the system from past imperialism. A whole lot of our rich would not be without our government meddling. What I don’t need is government pissing off the world to normalize business conditions for aristocrats who don’t do real work of keeping themselves alive.
Edit: Clearly no one is offended, hyperbole is a lost art form, and happiness is at all-time highs judging by the responses I got.
That seems a large stretch when describing someone called "blocked_again" asking "is this sarcasm?"
Happiness is a better metric of how well the economy is producing happiness.
GDP is is a better metric of how well the economy is producing products.
This of course ignores the core questions of IF the economy produces happiness, CAN he economy produce happiness, and how the relationship might work.
This is what is being measured. It is the "real" progress happening in the economy. There's no circular logic, you can measure multiple things at once.
Economy is but one factor that maybe feeds into happiness.
Well-being is probably a third-order effect from a strong economy, good healthcare / social care, culture and a variety of other factors. But because it is a third-order it is very hard to measure the impact of policy, because:
* They are 'arms length' from policy changes.
* The indexes are slow to respond to changes.
* They are noisy and affected by unrelated factors (i.e. does a colder winter decrease happiness?)
* A policy which improves well-being today could very well decrease well-being far into the future (e.g. increasing a countries spending and decreasing tax).
That one's hardly far into the future, more like the next election cycle.
Policies that improve well being today and screw us in the far future would be more like resource depletion, pollution, ecological destruction.
Like, someone can compare their well-being at San Francisco versus Paris and see which one is better but that would be a comparison of well-being for them which won't necessarily hold for Parisians and SanFranciscans of a different income level or with different cultural values - while wealth can be compared directly in a mostly objective manner (e.g. adjusting for purchasing parity).
But in one direction you have more wealth enabling people to live better, and on the other direction you have people with better lives being able to work better. It is very clear those effects do not have the same intensity.
You improve your position relative to other nations both ways!
This is a great example of how focus on metrics can lead to a race to the bottom.
Better yet, save money and don't even bother importing the happiness. Just sow misery, and your country will have better and better stats!
That said, a good metric obviously mesures power on this planet so it must be something like how fast an economy can build a space station or advanced military equipment.
With Nick Land, maybe, yeah, I guess.
Honestly it reminds me most of how some people try to spin Bitcoin’s power use as a good thing.
The comment does have some similarity to a point which I think reasonable, but doesn’t quite capture the thing.
Specifically, it questions happiness as a goal. This, I think, has something to it, but not quite in the way they said. For an individual who is neither unhappy nor “feeling nothing”, “being happy” is, I think, a questionable goal, as I think it puts things backwards.
But, valuing others being happy, is, I think, very often a rather good heuristic, as “things that make someone happy” are often “things that benefit them” (though not always. Non-voluntarily chemically inducing a euphoria in someone, doesn’t benefit them. ) . Looking at “how happy and satisfied are people generally” is a pretty decent heuristic for estimating how well things are going for people overall, though this heuristic can be goodharted.
Perhaps somewhat better than “how happy are you” would be “how well are things going for you? How much do the general states of affairs align with your preferences, and how is the rate of change of the degree to which the general state of affairs aligns with your preferences? How’s it going?”.
This combination of things is, I think, closer to what we should ideally want for each-other than “happiness”, but, “happiness” is still a pretty good approximation in most reasonable circumstances.
(It is best to avoid the unreasonable circumstances where it ceases to be a good approximation)
The former colonial nations do always show up high in every index, but that's correlation because they're in Europe. The colonised Finland and Ireland are always in there too.
https://www.socialprogress.org/global-index-2022-results
Looking at US states:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/247034/hawaii-tops-wellbeing-re...
…I have no idea what's going on here. Is this native marketing for Wyoming?
If you're in a small country richer people in the neighboring country seem about as likely to have the same effect. On the other hand, if you're in a large country and they live in a different city you're not running into them.
An issue with nationalism is that nations are in some ways very real and in some ways fake.
/sarcasm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
It is also not clear how one should calculate this - for example you could have white americans of german dissent violently disagreeing in issues of Trump, or hell, this about civil war. You could have people of different background hold very similar opinions.
Perhaps national happiness (since that is the level of society being discussed) is a joint function of cultural AND financial homogeneity? Many poor countries with high cultural homogeneity have tremendous financial heterogeneity (e.g., wealthy strongmen and their lackeys), which leads to unhappiness.
There are more ways that people want to be normal than just cultural and financial. For example, I would also posit that people with more common personality traits are probably happier. However, money and culture seem to cover a large fraction of how people perceive normality.
Im not saying there arent nice things in France but it s not as fun to be in than HK, anecdotally.
It's pretty hard to game economic measurements as a whole. Metrics with smaller scope are generally much easier to game so while they may be a slightly more accurate measurement initially, they may be more vulnerable to corruption.
Two immediate examples:
Healthcare and GDP.
Military Spending and GDP.
If a genie wish made everyone healthy and brought about world peace, The US's GDP would drop, quite dramatically!
Would it? 'We must invest in a strong military to keep the peace!' and 'Everyone is healthy, lets invest in preventative care and longevity to keep it that way!'
Every time I suggest this, however, I seem to be downvoted into oblivion and poopooed by the Europeans on the forum. I guess a more isolationist policy isn't that great of an idea after all.
But Europeans liked to believe that WW2 had somehow “shown the world” that wars were unwinnable bla bla bla while really the US just installed a giant protectorate system on Europe and kept it under their nuclear umbrella (one which the continent largely decided to maintain after 1991).
So yes, there are Europeans who understand (and should) that European prosperity was bought with an American military umbrella, one which we don’t pay for.
But - the Trumpian argument that this architecture is “useless” is also wrong in my view. The system was constructed to benefit the US, and so it did. The problem is that after 1991 everyone got sloppy, and capital took enormous control over politics of the US and the West in general (since there were no enemies but only “opportunities for investment”) and this led to a series of poorly thought out disasters - including China in GATT/WTO hoping it would democratize, etc.
But it’s on the implementation that things went haywire.
Because pre-fracking the US was so dependent on foreign energy, adventurism was encouraged in Iraq which led to a major geopolitical disaster (and a huge sink for the country’s resources). In that respect, yes the expansionist policy went totally overboard, due to poor leadership and planning and unrealistic political objectives.
Overall I think: - the overall architecture is sound. The US dominates and reaps benefits for it, while in my opinion maintaining peace through strength - but Europe should be spending enormous amounts more in military power - something like 5% of GDP at least - so it has a realistic chance to defeat Russia on the battlefield on its own - if that happened then the US could probably reduce its military spending (im not even sure they would because of the issues you listed though).
The government got really mad and decided, in true Singaporean fashion that the only logical solution was to create their own metric and ranking. One where, coincidentally they were #1/#2 happiest instead of #1/2 unhappiest. A completely different set of people felt equally vindicated by this.
The various unemployment metrics used to be highly correlated, but they've diverged in recent decades.
And you can absolutely dial up GDP without dialing up median income per capita as well.
TL;DR: are any of these countries you're referring to not capitalist countries that just export misery?
This is not the gotcha you think it is.
After 3 decades of US etc. travelling backwards on nearly every index despite economic expansion, and people are still buying it.
What tools are necessary to achieve good well-being should be the topic of research and political debate.
I think the problem we have today is that, politicians in particular, are only interested in the metrics that make their preferred tools look good. So a hard line socialist is inclined to ignore the benefits a free market provides and focus solely on how state-run programs can solve everything. On the flip-side, conservatives see a strong economy, put all their faith behind the free market, and ignore the proven effectiveness social programs have in areas where capitalism struggles like healthcare.
Cubed? f°g°h(x) ?
It means an effect of an effect of an effect of the original thing. "X because Y because Z because original thing A."
Think like Five Whys and so on.
In this case it's shorthand for "not a direct outcome but most likely correlated"
You start working out regularly.
First order effect: you get healthier.
Second order effect: you feel more confident.
Third order effect: you start going out on the weekends more.
B causes C (second order)
C causes D (third order)
I could imagine it going a few different ways. Maybe every day when you wake up and have not frozen to death, you already feel accomplished, so start the day with a win. Or maybe there's a certain resilience already in people who would choose to continue to live in such a climate. Or maybe you just don't have much time to care much about your neighbors' negative qualities when there are homes to keep warm.
Maybe you can just afford to complain more about everything else when you don't have the weather as an easy (and unifying) adversary to complain about.
There's been some research I've heard of in the area about people who won the lottery or have some life altering accident, somehow nothing changes how happy they are in the long run. Wonder if the evidence still supports that.
It doesn't. Bereavement, disability, unemployment all make people less happy over the long term
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235657/
You can build a house with 20 bedrooms but you can still only sleep in one, and you've just created a new problem to manage: cleaning all of them.
You can buy a 1$ million car but it's not a 100 times more comfortable or faster, nor does it do anything in a traffic jam. It'll bore you after 2 weeks as it becomes the new normal.
https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
Some highlights:
-National income and national happiness are different, but are positively correlated
-Average levels of happiness have been rising internationally for decades, with the notable exception of the united states
-While economic inequality has been rising in countries like the US, happiness inequality has been falling. From a happiness perspective, our lives are less unequal than they were decades ago.
It is like the classic experiment of a monkey being outraged when given less treats than another monkey, despite having more treats than they otherwise would have.
It is all tied to expectations
For example, if everybody where you work gets a 20% year end bonus and you get a 5% bonus you would probably be unhappy even though you got a bonus.
I think it is tied to the expectation of fairness and the perception of fairness.
If you expect to get the same bonus, and you perceive you were slighted, you will probably be unhappy.
Perspective plays a huge part.
That's not to say people don't have valid grievances, but there is a huge amount of cognitive dissonance, and large gaps between expectations and reality.
Take the parent example of US inequality. Low earners are unhappy that they make so much less than US high earners. Well that's unfair! However, they certainly don't gain much comfort by being a high earner globally. That's not unfair, that is deserved!
"Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to someone else today"
Being paid in some way for this work is one way for people to support the creator/teacher/builder. This will add to economic activity and continue to grow the economic pie.
No one looks back on their life and wishes they spent more time laying on the couch.
So while economic productivity/growth is a crude measure for sure, it might be the best one we've found so far.
Everything everyone does is by definition in pursuit of satisfying some internal motivation, and it doesn't seem reasonable to me to second-guess other people's choices for the purpose of optimizing their happiness against external criteria -- only for the purpose of preventing externalities that harm our own pursuit of happiness.
Attempting to create macro-scale metrics that attempt to approximate the optimality of of individuals' subjective experience, rather than measuring objective consequences of their manifest behavior -- like their actual economic activity -- seems both too abstract to be useful and too susceptible to manipulation by those with ulterior motives.
So I agree that economic productivity is the best measure, but for quite different reasons.
Clearly true. Now, how many people look back on their life and wish they had spent more time building their business rather than spending time with family, friends, etc?
Even more fundamental to the human condition is our social nature. Living a life that prioritizes that is what drives true happiness.
I do. Most of the "social time" has been wasted: some projects I did each bring me more lasting happiness that even all the time spent with family and friends put together.
This is one of the most insightful comments I've read for a while, and this one liner perfectly summarize your reply.
Couldn't disagree more. The most joyous time in the past few years has been when I took half a year off work and pretty much spent it playing video games or hanging out with my wife.
In fact the joyous times in my life have been when I have no responsibilities and can just get drunk with my friends. Unfortunately the best way to meet good, fun people is to be involved with some kind of productive activity, but as we get older none of us have time for each other anyway.
I hate responsibility and I somewhat hate being productive because once other people see you're capable, they start expecting more of you, and that's the last thing I want
Economics would be a more reliable field if it incorporated the work of people like the founder of ecological studies, G. Evelyn Hutchinson:
https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/4200-the-founder-of-...
This becomes even more relevant as the global human population starts running up against basic resource constraints in many places.
I'm not sure well being metrics currently (or perhaps can ever even in principle) fit the bill.
The main issue is how to measure it properly?
The old motte-and-bailey tactic, nice!
If he thinks productivity metrics are "voodoo", wait til he learns more about those measurements of happiness and well-being. It hurts that we don't have a good way to measure well-being rigorously and consistently, but given that we do not it seems like step one should be to get to the point where we can do that, and only then should we consider whether we should replace existing measurements and paradigms with it.
I’m not sure GDP is as wacky right now, e.g. https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/all-poverty-is-energy-pov...
I do strongly agree that we should be clear that we care about GDP because it lets us buy more quality of life (in many cases, literally more life), and if GDP diverged from providing that we should stop caring about GDP
I’m not sure I buy that the right metric is hedonic well-being though; the issues with Mills’ Hedonic Utilitarianism are well-known, and I don’t want to prescribe heroin or wireheading for everyone to maximize their subjective happiness. I think some metric of Eudaimonic Utility is probably more what we want.
What are the factors of human flourishing? How do we measure and improve those? Things like health, education (in the broadest sense including trades/crafts), economic security/opportunity, physical safety, community, etc.
One can easily imagine higher-GDP configurations that trample most of the populace on the above, and we should not choose those merely because “growth is good”.