The regulations that make it hard to lay off someone have an equal and opposite effect of making companies very reluctant to hire. This impedes the efficient allocation of labor, resulting in a poorer GDP.
How much of this years GDP growth in the USA went to average citizens? What does GDP growth matter if your citizens have zero access to healthcare, can't improve their conditions, can't innovate, can't try new ideas because they are tied to healthcare via their current job?
How much of American GDP growth goes to Billionaires and isn't a useful health metric?
Billionaires become billionaires by making and selling things people want. Obviously, a lot of people want what they are selling, and think it is worth buying.
That's such an excessively naive, childlike take that it's hard to know where to start. You don't become a billionaire by "making and selling things". That doesn't scale beyond the low millions. You become a billionaire by leveraging existing capital to rearrange bits of the economy in such a way that money flows towards you [note]. Productive output, be it goods or services (which you seem to have forgotten exist) is strictly optional. You think Warren Buffet sits in his garage cranking out widgets? What planet are you on?
[note] For example, you might contrive to purchase the entire supply of some valuable resource with inelastic demand, and then sell it back to people, perhaps at an inflated price.
> You don't become a billionaire by "making and selling things".
See Microsoft, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Pixar, Lego, and on and on.
> you might contrive to purchase the entire supply of some valuable resource with inelastic demand, and then sell it back to people, perhaps at an inflated price.
It is irrelevant, if both are available as base package.
I guess you want to point out that choices are subjective.
That subjectivity is relevant within their classes (air—food-water, security-health-plumbing-heating, smartphone-car-vacation, yaht-designerBrands)
Definitely there will be one person who choses to die, just to get latest smartphone, but most people will not.
These classes get less clear/useful as you go up, but most people will agree on the basics.
Tangent: it is important for me personally for my neighbour to have the basics (and more), as that increases my basics like security, sanitary conditions.
it's not. An economy where only a select few benefit from the GDP (e.g. via stocks - the richest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stocks!) is not a "quality of life" measure at all.
It's not a good one though, because weird effects like the AI bubble incest investment web artificially blow up the GDP, and because it doesn't reflect the economy "feeling" the population experiences.
To expand on the latter point - say you have automation enabling more economic growth. A significant amount of people lose their jobs, others are afraid they'll be the next ones on the chopping block, and people hold their money together as a result - if you ask general people on the street or in representative surveys, you'll get the feedback that the economy is going to the dogs, but "the numbers" don't reflect that.
The regulations that make it hard to lay off someone have an equal and opposite effect of making companies very reluctant to hire. This impedes the efficient allocation of labor, resulting in a poorer GDP.