I really enjoyed reading this. it jives very well with my sentiment. When you go to a grocery store and see the stacks of sodas and chips while our country has an obesity epidemic, you need to wonder if the sale of these products should count towards or against our economic wellbeing. If products can have positive value, surely products can have negative value as well.

In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.

gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.

And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.

Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.

Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious

So many economic indicators are perverse - economically it would often be better for a family to get divorced, split into two homes, and then pay each other child support. Heck, economically it would be advantageous to divorce your stay-at-home wife and turn around and hire her to take care of the kids. You could even pay her more and charge her for room and board! You could charge the kids! Financialize everything!

We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.

The example he gave of GDP metrics going up when banks underpay interest on savings was wild. “Wow, these customers are effectively paying billions to the banks by accepting low interest rates, they must be receiving so much value in return!!”

>need an enormous car,

.gov requires cars to have so many features that the incentives push them further and further towards higher margin vehicles.

> gigabit internet

Why should this be a guilty pleasure when gigabit internet approaches a basic commodity that's broadly available in developed countries that built internet infra out after us and aren't captured by ancient telcos? Gig, multigig, 10G is going to start being available in places like South Korea. US lags behind on Speedtest charts: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

>Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time

If you stop working and maybe are in the right demographic, this can all be yours and have more provided if you just apply for it. Work with other families doing the same thing and you can get very creative with it.

Yes, it's true that GDP just measures economic activity (without judging it) and it actually matters what people spend money on.

But this doesn't change that richer countries really are better off than poorer countries, and GDP is a reasonable measure of that.