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My point is that you cannot replace GDP with a better metric of societal "goodness" without objectivity defining "good", and that is an unsolved problem.

• musage 9y ago
  What makes the GDP "better" than any other "objective" measurement then? Why not take number of citizens multiplied with how many corners their furniture has in total? There is no easy metric for societal goodness, likely not even a complicated "objective" one. Capitalism is like a blind man demanding a painting make a sound for it to exist. Since it can only measure numbers, it doesn't even attempt to answer the question of societal goodness or any other interesting ones. That is beyond its scope, and that's that's why you shouldn't mix up things like "GDP" and "progress of society". You might say capitalism is a combustion engine, without anything additional it just eats energy and spins. The idea was, or rather is now claimed to have been, that since consumers are informed and aren't going to buy things that harm them, we'll end up with progress. Instead too many too powerful corporations are playing their clients like a piano and subvert governments, often enough in concert, and produce plenty of harm (and, to be fair, also good) that doesn't even get to enter the equation, because it's not a number or a contract etc.