>GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.
Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time.
The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.
Quality of life scores are completely subjective. There is no scientific way to measure it and it involves thousands of vectors that differ in importance for each individual. There's no way to objectively balance it.
GDP, while imperfect, is at least rooted in a quantitative value.
I disagree. There are objective measures for wellbeing...
You've got health measures like life expectancy, infant / maternal mortality, disability adjusted life years, BMI, cortesol, blood pressure, suicide rates, etc. Economic ones like labor market participation, un[der]employment, poverty rates, gini coefficients. Societal ones like crime rates, trust levels, civic participation, environmental metric, public transit accessibility, international test scores, human rights, marriage and actual vs wanted fertility rates. The list goes on. There are countless measures, just few that economists genuinely value.
I googled some numbers for human development index, as the most developed/popular/reliable, and have following findings:
- there is strong correlation between index and EU countries GDP per capita: countries with high GDP are at the top, and countries with low GDP are at the bottom
- US index is higher than combined EU index, some EU countries with high GDP top US
I mean HDI includes GDP / capita as one of it's primary measures, so yes, the US does well if you double count the one metric where it outperforms Europe...
No, you don't even have life expectancy as it is confounded by several things: for one, there are racial differences between countries. It turns out some races are naturally prone to die earlier than other races, even when you control for income.
And how would you weigh life expectancy vs suicide rates? Let's say we try to create an index. You think life expectancy should be weighted at 80% and suicide rates at 20%? Why? There's no rhyme or reason for that figure, it just sounds good. Well it gets more and more confounding as you add up all the other vectors. Labor market participation now thrown into the same broad index, despite all three values being completely orthogonal.
That's like a textbook McNamara fallacy - Y is what we care about, but X is what we can measure, so what matters is improving X even if it means we diminish Y.
> If you can't quantify Y you can't even prove Y is diminishing
Indeed. But what matters is whether Y is diminishing, not what's easy for you to prove. The world is not obliged to make the important things easy to measure, and it generally doesn't.
Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time.
The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.