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U.S. does not use pavers for its sidewalks. Instead they concrete over the surface. Europe uses pavers (clay, concrete, whatever). Anytime the city needs to acc
by shortsunblack 3y ago
U.S. does not use pavers for its sidewalks. Instead they concrete over the surface. Europe uses pavers (clay, concrete, whatever). Anytime the city needs to access the utilities under the concrete, they get sledgehammers and start destroying the concrete. They access their utilities, fix the stuff and order new concrete to be poured. Concrete trucks come over. City gets billed 25,000 US$ for couple square meters of fresh new concrete. GDP number gets 25,000 US$ added to it, despite no real wealth being created. Contrast this to Europe, where utilities come, grab the little pavers, move them to side, access and fix the utilities, reinstall the old pavers back in same fashion as they took it out. No 25,000 US$ concrete bill.
And this is just one of the examples of inefficiency in your "wealthy" society. What we have here is broken window fallacy and misappropriation of resources, but there's also negative wealth you create. Wealth that costs more then it ever has created. Think of all the asphalt you love to create, which creates heat island effect, which requires ACs to handle. Along all the steps of the production "wealth" is being "created".
- mytailorisrich 3y agoI already called the straw man. Please don't double down on it, especially when what you wrote is not even factual.
- boxed 3y agoJust FYI this is a different person that replied to you. And no, it's not a straw man. And it's not incorrect. GDP is extremely vulnerable to broken window economics. The entire US healthcare system for example. It should really be subtracted from the GDP, not added to it.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoObviously I know it is not the same person (you). It is still a straw man to the point of the discussion, you are still adding to the straw man and making strange claims, which at this points make me suspect that you simply do not understand it despite the explanation or are too blinded by ideological bias. Either way, that's a 'bye' from me because there is discussion possible ("we all know this" was a big red flag). Lasty, his comment was indeed not factual because what he wrote about sidewalks in Europe is plainly BS (an I am an European).
- namaria 3y agoYou're building a strawman out of a red herring my friend. If you're gonna be pedantic at least get it right.