5 ms·

The global average PPP GDP per capita is 18k USD/year. 18k USD/year is not remotely close to abundance.

PeterStuer 3y ago
If I watch my kids and you watch yours, our contribution to GDP is 0$. If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP. Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?
- samus 3y ago
  This device only works if these are two completely equal services served by two equally capable persons with the same investment of time and resources. And it assumes that we mutually trust each other to actually do the thing. Also, bringing money into the game makes the responsibility stronger. Especially if those two persons are not living in a vacuum, but have other bills to pay [edit: i.e., to make other people do things for them]. Money is there to make people do things more reliably if there is no other relationship between the buyer and the seller.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    One could argue GDP measures the degree of financialization of a society more than it measures the presence or absense of abundance.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      In fact, Kusnetz the actual inventor of the modern GDP measure said something similar: “ Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.”
- logicchains 3y ago
  >If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP. This isn't the case with purchasing-power adjusted GDP, which is specifically adjusted to account for the actual purchasing power of people's money.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    Would that still not in the above toy example lead to 0$ vs 2.000.000$/(some factor)?
    - logicchains 3y ago
      Yes, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on the overall gdp because it couldn't happen at scale (requires one party to have 1.000.000$ to spend in the first place).
      - VaxWithSex 3y ago
        All money is fiat.
        logicchains 3y ago
        Yes, but the average Joe Bloe can't print money to pay a babysitter, only the government can.
      - PeterStuer 3y ago
        But isn't this exactly what has been happening on a macro scale with the 'service economy'? We drew ever larger segments of people and activities into the world of financial transactions because of the massive amount of rentseeking money to be made in this environment. We doubled the amount of time the average family had to spend in salaried activity, and we passed start twice as now all activities that were previously selfserviced were also 'market' procured as no-one had time/energy left to take care of this after a long workday.
- torginus 3y ago
  I'm ignorant about economics, but that sounds wrong - if I offered my services as a babysitter, my contribution to GDP wouldn't be zero. If then I took the earnings from that job and hired a babysitter I would be at the same place.
- mafuy 3y ago
  What changed? You are now paying 250k$ or so in taxes, which benefits the government :)
huytersd 3y ago
That is a surprisingly high figure though for 18k a year you could clothe, feed yourself and have shelter especially considering healthcare is cheap or free in most of the world. That’s way better than I thought the world was doing.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  That's mean vs median for you. In this[1] analysis, average is £12k, but median global per-capita household income is under $3k: 50 percent of humans earn less than that (to be fair, it's actually rising quite fast and steadily since the 90s). Not sure where PPP puts it but the median figure will be lower because you can get a lot richer than you can get poorer. 1: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/
morsch 3y ago
I think it's pretty close, actually. Our family could easily live off that. Easily worth it if it got rid of income inequality. And it'd still increase a percent or two, every year, inflation-adjusted! Thanks for the argument.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >Our family could easily live off that. Easily worth it if it got rid of income inequality Nobody's stopping you giving all your excess income above 18k to charity. If you try to make other people do it, you'll find a lot of people would rather just stop working than give away the majority of their income, which is why the economy collapsed and tens of millions of people starved in China and Russia after their communist revolutions.
  - morsch 3y ago
    Oh, I don't think my post was advocating anybody give anything away. But if we just arrived there, magically, it would be pretty great, from a utilitarian point of view. But thanks for the knee-jerk anti-communist rant, it's really great that we're back to that. Life was great in the 50s.
    - logicchains 3y ago
      >Life was great in the 50s. Americans in the 50s were a lot happier than Americans in the 2020s, very little mental illness or obesity, housing was affordable, people weren't at each others' throats like nowadays.
      - morsch 3y ago
        Also: much lower income inequality. Strange, huh. And the average family income was 4400 USD, ie. 50000 USD in 2023, so pretty much the 18000 USD per capita we started with. Shame about the institutional racism, mysoginy, homophobia, etc though.
losteric 3y ago
Median incomes might be a better figure. Per-capita is skewed by outliers. Look at the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs_median_household_income.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs_me... - huge disparity between mostly flat income versus rapidly growing per-capita

If I watch my kids and you watch yours, our contribution to GDP is 0$. If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP. Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?

samus 3y ago
This device only works if these are two completely equal services served by two equally capable persons with the same investment of time and resources. And it assumes that we mutually trust each other to actually do the thing. Also, bringing money into the game makes the responsibility stronger. Especially if those two persons are not living in a vacuum, but have other bills to pay [edit: i.e., to make other people do things for them]. Money is there to make people do things more reliably if there is no other relationship between the buyer and the seller.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  One could argue GDP measures the degree of financialization of a society more than it measures the presence or absense of abundance.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    In fact, Kusnetz the actual inventor of the modern GDP measure said something similar: “ Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.”
logicchains 3y ago
>If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP. This isn't the case with purchasing-power adjusted GDP, which is specifically adjusted to account for the actual purchasing power of people's money.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  Would that still not in the above toy example lead to 0$ vs 2.000.000$/(some factor)?
  - logicchains 3y ago
    Yes, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on the overall gdp because it couldn't happen at scale (requires one party to have 1.000.000$ to spend in the first place).
    - VaxWithSex 3y ago
      All money is fiat.
      - logicchains 3y ago
        Yes, but the average Joe Bloe can't print money to pay a babysitter, only the government can.
    - PeterStuer 3y ago
      But isn't this exactly what has been happening on a macro scale with the 'service economy'? We drew ever larger segments of people and activities into the world of financial transactions because of the massive amount of rentseeking money to be made in this environment. We doubled the amount of time the average family had to spend in salaried activity, and we passed start twice as now all activities that were previously selfserviced were also 'market' procured as no-one had time/energy left to take care of this after a long workday.
torginus 3y ago
I'm ignorant about economics, but that sounds wrong - if I offered my services as a babysitter, my contribution to GDP wouldn't be zero. If then I took the earnings from that job and hired a babysitter I would be at the same place.
mafuy 3y ago
What changed? You are now paying 250k$ or so in taxes, which benefits the government :)

huytersd 3y ago

That is a surprisingly high figure though for 18k a year you could clothe, feed yourself and have shelter especially considering healthcare is cheap or free in most of the world. That’s way better than I thought the world was doing.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
That's mean vs median for you. In this[1] analysis, average is £12k, but median global per-capita household income is under $3k: 50 percent of humans earn less than that (to be fair, it's actually rising quite fast and steadily since the 90s). Not sure where PPP puts it but the median figure will be lower because you can get a lot richer than you can get poorer. 1: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/

morsch 3y ago

I think it's pretty close, actually. Our family could easily live off that. Easily worth it if it got rid of income inequality. And it'd still increase a percent or two, every year, inflation-adjusted! Thanks for the argument.

logicchains 3y ago
>Our family could easily live off that. Easily worth it if it got rid of income inequality Nobody's stopping you giving all your excess income above 18k to charity. If you try to make other people do it, you'll find a lot of people would rather just stop working than give away the majority of their income, which is why the economy collapsed and tens of millions of people starved in China and Russia after their communist revolutions.
- morsch 3y ago
  Oh, I don't think my post was advocating anybody give anything away. But if we just arrived there, magically, it would be pretty great, from a utilitarian point of view. But thanks for the knee-jerk anti-communist rant, it's really great that we're back to that. Life was great in the 50s.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >Life was great in the 50s. Americans in the 50s were a lot happier than Americans in the 2020s, very little mental illness or obesity, housing was affordable, people weren't at each others' throats like nowadays.
    - morsch 3y ago
      Also: much lower income inequality. Strange, huh. And the average family income was 4400 USD, ie. 50000 USD in 2023, so pretty much the 18000 USD per capita we started with. Shame about the institutional racism, mysoginy, homophobia, etc though.

losteric 3y ago

Median incomes might be a better figure. Per-capita is skewed by outliers. Look at the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs_median_household_income.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs_me... - huge disparity between mostly flat income versus rapidly growing per-capita