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Today’s economics has very little to do with anti-redistributive policies today. Your point about ideal allocation is among the core tenets of economics as the

Today’s economics has very little to do with anti-redistributive policies today. Your point about ideal allocation is among the core tenets of economics as the diminishing marginal value of money. The mechanism of incentive that allowing for unequal wealth creates is, unfortunately, a conflicting idea. These need to be balanced, but I assure you mainstream economic science would place the optimum at broadly European levels rather than what the US reality is.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I'm sure they have the tools available, whether they use them is another thing. Is there any country yet that doesn't just use GDP as their main measuring stick? I just skimmed through a proposal from the UK government about their plans to complement GDP with a suite of measure which take into account climate change and other trendy stuff but still manage to avoid any discussion about how raising incomes for the poor by X is better than raising incomes for the rich by X is something that should be a popular policy goal in a democratic country. Topically, the poorest quintile were the hardest hit financially from covid, but that won't show up in the stats that everyone uses to measure their performance, and any action that actually attempted to fix the real problem would look bad in the current stats. I have a feeling that if GDP really badly reflected the interests of the rich and powerful instead, we'd not have put up with it for so long.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  > Is there any country yet that doesn't just use GDP as their main measuring stick? Bhutan uses "Gross National Happiness" as their metric. If you ask me, they've got the right idea. I don't give a damn about numbers at the bottom of some calculation. I care whether peoples' lives have gotten better. See https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&type=99&nr=266&menu=1449 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&ty...

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I'm sure they have the tools available, whether they use them is another thing. Is there any country yet that doesn't just use GDP as their main measuring stick? I just skimmed through a proposal from the UK government about their plans to complement GDP with a suite of measure which take into account climate change and other trendy stuff but still manage to avoid any discussion about how raising incomes for the poor by X is better than raising incomes for the rich by X is something that should be a popular policy goal in a democratic country. Topically, the poorest quintile were the hardest hit financially from covid, but that won't show up in the stats that everyone uses to measure their performance, and any action that actually attempted to fix the real problem would look bad in the current stats. I have a feeling that if GDP really badly reflected the interests of the rich and powerful instead, we'd not have put up with it for so long.

actually_a_dog 5y ago
> Is there any country yet that doesn't just use GDP as their main measuring stick? Bhutan uses "Gross National Happiness" as their metric. If you ask me, they've got the right idea. I don't give a damn about numbers at the bottom of some calculation. I care whether peoples' lives have gotten better. See https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&type=99&nr=266&menu=1449 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&ty...