Life is better for who? By what characteristics? You're not even remotely talking about economics at this point. You might as well be arguing: playing guitar

Life is better for who? By what characteristics? You're not even remotely talking about economics at this point. You might as well be arguing: playing guitar -> heroin: GDP drops, but life is better How do you know that your life is better because you have an mp3 player? Does it make music better? No. Musicians make music, mp3 players have nothing to do with the music. Honestly, my life feels way better when I pull an old vinyl off the shelf. I also like knowing that the artist is getting a better share of the vinyl sales than from YouTube or Spotify. And I kind of hate using my computer outside of work hours, it stresses me out to think about unread emails. So to me, I already don't agree that my life is better when I use an mp3 player. The point of economics is to measure real productivity based on the assumption that people need a place to live and they need to live and there's a pretty clear limit to the land and food that we start with. That you're trying to use economics to argue about subjective opinions on mp3 players? Come on, dude, that's just weak. Money talks, bullshit walks. End of story. Or maybe in your case you should seek some help with this technology addiction that you're trying to rationalize...