Since many people in the thread have already raised really good objections about the myopic nature of focusing on GDP growth to measure social progress, I'd lik

Since many people in the thread have already raised really good objections about the myopic nature of focusing on GDP growth to measure social progress, I'd like to add a comment on the final paragraph of the post: > These are huge numbers. The worst estimates of climate change are 7% of GDP in 2100. And those are surely overstated (see the excellent new paper by José Luis Cruz and Estban Rossi-Hansberg) You may admire the NHS for saving money, but even if the 20% of GDP we spend on health care is totally wasted, we're still ahead. Lots of people admire the European model. Just how far Europe is behind the US is remarkable -- and getting worse. It really bothers me that the guy casually waves away the problem of climate change, reducing it to at most a cost of 7% of GDP by 2100 - this is a major error that many economists make. If the worst of climate change happens, there won't be much of a GDP left to count - you just can't capture catastrophic changes with macro-economic time series forecasting. It's also astonishingly simplistic to do back of the envelope extrapolations of GDP growth and healthcare costs and conclude that the US will 'come up ahead'. What people admire about the NHS is not that it saves money, it's that it delivers good healthcare to everybody (also more cheaply than the private US system).