15 ms·

GDP is a measure of the marketisation of society. If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant f

GDP is a measure of the marketisation of society. If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant for $800 per day to do so, that's $800 to national GDP. The encroachment of the market into society correlates with record levels of mental and physical health crisis. US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, even as 'the economy' has surged ahead. The measures are wrong - and we all know it - apart from the financial press it seems

fooker 2y ago
> US life expectancy has declined over the past three years Do you have a source for this ?
- Terr_ 2y ago
  There was a big dip in 2021, but it has started rising again, and it's possible it might rendezvous again with the old trend. This means parent-poster might be technically correct in the sense of "between T to T+3 it decreased", but I would not jump straight to blaming the the longer-term background horribleness of US health insurance for it. It's far more likely to be that teensy-weensy COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of direct damage and also reduced care for everything else. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expectancy-rises-after-two-year-dip-00148193 https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expecta...
  - topkai22 2y ago
    Covid and opioid deaths. Opioids are bad. To quote the lancet “Opioid overdose mortality rates are alarmingly high, but measures based on death counts alone do not fully capture the impact of this crisis as they do not account for the young age at which most opioid-related deaths occur…” (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(24)00140-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...) The particular article found opioid deaths lowered life expectancy by 0.67 years, which is a crazy number. Drug overdose deaths finally seem to be trending down in 2024, but they are still elevated and awful.
    - concordDance 2y ago
      > Opioids are bad. Years of life aren't the most important thing. Opiods might reduce life expectancy but increase the averge quality of life of those living in a given year.
      - kataklasm 2y ago
        For those using them according to prescriptions maybe, sure. But the opioid crisis isn't an opioid crisis because people are using them according to what their doc told them. It's a crisis because they are abused.
- tekkk 2y ago
  Quick googling shows that WHO/World Bank at least.
- reedciccio 2y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=us%20life%20expectancy%20&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m https://www.google.com/search?q=us%20life%20expectancy%20&ie...
nnechm 2y ago
Feels more and more like it's the best of times and the worst of times... Things feel off,but you have (mostly well-off) people talking about how great things are going to be and are. I suspect a lot of this correlates to the stock market. For the median millenial atleast, whatever you were taught growing up is just the wrong guide to understanding the world today. I think social media by its very nature, has to be understood inverted. A high number of posts about how great things are suggests otherwise. Comparisons with Europe have gone exponential that tells you more about how the posters feel than anything else...
- vladgur 2y ago
  As I complete my travels through Argentina and a layover in Lima I realize that differences between poor and rich are much less stark in my opinion in the US and these LatAm countries where the percentage of population living below the local poverty line is 3 to 5 times higher than that of the USA So whatever you feel - it’s all relative
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    People don't realize that being broke poor in the US is a luxury life in most developing countries. I'm not from the US but I saw some video of of how some homeless people live in the US, and it's a lifestyle most of the developing world would kill for: dumpster dive for freshly made pizza or quality supermarket produce that's still good just not legal to be sold anymore, all free of charge. If you have a medical issue, go to the ER and get top quality healthcare. Dumpster dive for perfectly usable clothes, computers, etc. That's a luxury life for 80% of the planet.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > That's a luxury life for 80% of the planet. Not anymore, maybe 20 years ago but many nations developed a lot since then.
      - Cumpiler69 2y ago
immibis 2y ago
It's also a measure of price level. If I pay $100 for a doctor's visit that's $100 to GDP. If it costs $1000 that's $1000 to GDP. If it "costs" $1000 but that's just to get $100 from insurers who only pay 10% and I only have to pay 10% too? Still $1000 to GDP - I think.
- pas 2y ago
  GDP is C + G + ... and the C is personal consumption, so I guess if you pay 100 USD that's what gets added, and the premiums (and whatever your employer pays for you)
  - immibis 2y ago
    Taking a loan for $1000, buying something for $1000, paying back $100 and then declaring bankruptcy also increases GDP by $1000. The intention is to measure the total value of services exchanged, which is $1000 in both cases.
    - pas 2y ago
      Yes. GDP tries to measure "production", it's just easier to add up various types of spending, investment, etc. But if the service has been consumed then it was - by definition - produced, or in this case the service was rendered, I guess. That's why bubbles are a problem because they represent a misallocation of real resources. (Especially when they're debt fueled. And crucially so when it's private debt like the typical mortgage.) But that's why the fiscal multiplier is above one, because public debt is usually cough spent on things that increase productivity, growth, or at least has a positive ROI (eg. regularly screening the mythical token at-risk individuals likely prevents enough very expensive private+public spending, and people will spend that money on things like education or mayhaps even just allows them to have more productive years), etc.
      - immibis 2y ago
        If a $1000 service was provided but not paid for, that's $1000 to GDP, and it was an expense for the person providing it instead of the person receiving it. It's as if you paid $100 to the hospital and the hospital paid $900 to itself. I think. Probably depends on the measurement methodology.
mrtksn 2y ago
Seriously, just looking at the examples of "stagnated and failing economies" like Japan should be a give away that this measure is total BS. In Germany a life saving brain surgery creates 5K USD of economic activity and the same surgery creates 500K USD of economic activity in the USA. True story, a YouTuber I'm following recently had her mother operated in Germany and then again in the USA and she made a video about the experience and the numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-p1nP6hH6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-p1nP6hH6U This obsession with GDP isn't healthy, among other obsessions like the "Number of gigantic companies" which is supposed to show that you are falling back in technology if you don't have extremely large companies by market capitalization metric. It worries me because it's BS and BS can last just till a point. What happens if at one point in the future people start demanding benefiting from all that riches and success? I'm worried because I don't believe in(goodness of?) revolutions and the situation makes me anxious that the west with the US in particular is headed to some kind of revolution. They had one with the last election I guess but the revolutionaries appear to be pushing for the extreme version of the same thing which eventually might collapse with another revolution with the opposite thing like what UK ended up getting as a Labour landslide after Libertarian landslide.
- penguinburglar 2y ago
  > What happens if at one point in the future people start demanding benefiting from all that riches and success? With any luck, what will happen is that future people will benefit from all those riches and success.
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    The problem is that those riches and success is just on paper. They are projections and IOUs. It's like the property market, if everyone has so much money the number of people who can live in Malibu doesn't actually go up. Just the prices of homes in Malibu go up. No matter what the numbers in the bank account says, the number of people who can get the good stuff will be limited to the actual infrastructure and actual production output. If Americans get even richer, it will simply mean that more millionaires will room share in SV. EU and Japan, largely cited as economical failure, happen to provide just as good or even better living conditions to their citizens because their infrastructure and actual production output is as good or better than the US.
INTPenis 2y ago
Very good point because in my country elder care is free. Daily visits by an assistant is on the municipality. We're not a leader in GDP, but we take care of our citizens, whether they be sick or old.
- gregshap 2y ago
  Municipality spending is part of GDP
  - sofixa 2y ago
    But without the profit motive and the need to turn a profit for a few layers of middlemen, the impact on GDP will be much smaller than in the US. There's a reason why healthcare expenditure per capita in the US is multiple times higher than any other OECD country, and why health insurance companies are some of the biggest public ones.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  That is not the point GP was making. The assistant you mention is still paid by the municipality, so they show up in GDP numbers just as much as if you paid them yourself. What doesn't show up in GDP numbers are cultures where people take their elderly relatives into their own homes and care for them themselves. Same as hiring someone to look after your kids, or taking them to day care, shows up in GDP; while having their grandparents or other family care for the kids while you're off to work does not.
  - INTPenis 2y ago
    I can't believe you're actually arguing these semantics when one person has to pay 800 dollars for an assistant and the other person gets it for free. One person's elderly parents never have to worry about being assisted, while the other can only do so if they can afford it. And you're arguing GDP semantics? There is something seriously wrong and sick with this.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
Guthur 2y ago
And if you borrow that money is even better because they just created the money for you to add to the GDP, and now it will have lots of sweet service fees and interest in top of that. And on a side note because US dollars are the reserve currency and only created in one country they can go shopping around hovering up every asset and resource.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  The US produces a lot of things others want to buy, including stability and security, and that is why non Americans want USD and hence others give Americans purchasing power.
  - Guthur 2y ago
    They are not given a choice mate, the US has shown itself quite willing to unilaterally dispose of any government it feels to not be doing exactly what they want. And is on record to at least plan to kill it's own citizens to justify such actions. The narrative that we all have peace because of the US is well and truly broken, the propoganda can't cover the smell, it stinks to bad.
    - jumping_frog 2y ago
      The other important stuff is due to petrodollars and US controlled swift system, there is no real price discovery in the world economic system.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      I’m sure China/Russia/Israel/India/Saudi Arabia/Iran/North Korea/Pakistan/etc are all doing exactly what the US wants. The US is so effective that it can force a country that it embargoes (Iran) to sell oil in USD to a country with its own currency (India). https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/10/17/inside-the-secret-oil-trade-that-funds-irans-wars https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/10/17/i... And the US allows articles to be written about China and Saudi Arabia considering buying and selling oil in Yuan, ostensibly to provide cover for the fact that the US is actually forcing both China to buy in USD and Saudi Arabia to sell in USD. https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-instead-of-dollars-for-chinese-oil-sales-11647351541 https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-acceptin... It couldn’t possibly be that Iran trusts USD to have a more reliable purchasing power than an Indian Rupee, or that Saudi Arabia would rather bet on stability from USD rather than the Yuan.
DanielHB 2y ago
I was thinking the same thing the other day. Like how much of the US GDP is tied to their suburb-living car-dependent lifestyle. What percentage of the GDP is all that infrastructure (sewage, heating, power plants, power transmission, car production, road maintenance)? Sure that create jobs, especially lower-skilled jobs which are important for society. But at the same time they didn't really need to exist. It feels like much like defense spending, it create jobs, but it doesn't create value.
- clarionbell 2y ago
  Defense spending is necessary, if you want to keep your globalised markets and reasonable level of international security. Europe is now experiencing what happens if drop the "useless" defense spending too low.
  - throawayonthe 2y ago
    [dead]
  - rdm_blackhole 2y ago
    I agree with you. I will go even further by saying that the EU being caught with it's pants down is by design. Everybody rushed to join NATO and decided since the US was there as a backstop, they no longer needed to invest in their own defense. It's a little bit like what happened in 2008 with the too big too fail banks and the bailout. If someone else is always there to pick up the slack, then what is the point of changing the status quo. The EU countries were happy about this because they are broke. The US was happy to keep it's status as the global cop of the world making sure everybody stays in line. This line of thinking worked since the fall of the USSR but the rise of China, India and the global south is changing the world order as we speak.
    - rwyinuse 2y ago
      Everybody except Eastern EU countries closest to Russia. It's not just NATO, but also knowledge that they won't be attacked first which has resulted in low defense spending in Western Europe.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
How's that related to the magnificent 7 and then SpaceX/StarLink and the AI revolution (which is nearly virtually only happening in the US: even if there are a few models in France, China, etc. it's a US game)? I don't think you realize what's going on in the EU (failing into a third world continent at an alarming rate) or in China (where "little" cities of 30 million inhabitants are all about tech and feeling like you live in the future: not that everything is rosy in China). EU carmakers are all in big trouble while Chinese EVs and Tesla are soaring. The EU has nothing to answer the mag 7, let alone SpaceX (the ESA was already way behind NASA). That the US is growing at a faster rate than most other nation and continents is a fact and it's got nothing to do whether you or a care assistant goes to visit your grandma.
- Retric 2y ago
  You’ve got an overly rosy view of what’s happening in the US and underestimating Europe. AI is big in the tech world, but it’s hardly moving the needle on the overall economy. Every 1% GDP growth roughly requires the equivalent of adding a new Google sized company every year, or as actually happens a more widespread increase. Just as an example, Tesla’s 2024 Q1 deliveries where below 2023’s Q1 deliveries hardly a sign of rapid growth. https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-vehicle-deliveries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v... SpaceX is facing the limits of how much people want to send into orbit. Plenty of growth in the next few years, but Starlink is only generating ~6 billion a year in revenue and not much else really wants to put that much stuff into orbit. Worse, Starlink is facing ever increasing competition from cheaper ground based providers especially cellular internet, so that business may start to shrink.
  - gizmo 2y ago
    Tesla is suffering from Chinese EV competition, but the German car brands are suffering much worse. Just look at this UX disaster: https://x.com/teslaxander/status/1864202319925035083 https://x.com/teslaxander/status/1864202319925035083 Is it any wonder that the German car industry is imploding? I also don't share your pessimism about Starlink. Right now it's unclear what the killer application for Starlink will be, but it's awesome technology and even if it's only used in very remote areas it will still be worth it. When you only invest in technology that is immediately valuable you lose out on the technological revolutions that take a while to play out. Imagine having the capability of building something like Starlink but not doing it because the bean counters don't see the point.
skirge 2y ago
if you hired care assistant then you have time for some other activities like work which is more profitable than cost of care assistant thus economy has more goods. Life expectancy lowers when young people die, most often in work accidents which is related to low unemployment.
- ThunderSizzle 2y ago
  My wife had a good job. She made the median household income in the area on her salary alone (my salary was still better, but that's beside the point). When we had our second kid, the hustle wasn't worth it. Two kids in daycare took 90% of her take home pay. It was costing us more for her to work than to stay home with the kids. Also, kids need their parents. An infant being away from their mom for that long is unhealthy for the infant
  - skirge 2y ago
    It's a choice, economy is about choices and math (staying at home cost < cost of kindergarten) is the tool. (in EU you may prefer to go to work because additional income is that time is added to retirement, even if money is low it has some value).
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > An infant being away from their mom for that long is unhealthy for the infant But not their dad?
- jprete 2y ago
  You're completely missing the problem. The care assistant, being a fungible and commoditized service provider, can never provide the kinds of illiquid unmeasurable goods that are generated by long-term and durable relationships.
- badmintonbaseba 2y ago
  Your argument hinges on my work being more profitable than a care assistants. While that's maybe true, the difference showing in GDP is not the difference of profitability or "value" in our work. What if I'm a care assistant myself? Imagine two care assistants and two scenarios: 1. They are working from Monday to Saturday. They can't take Saturday off, so they hire a care assistant to take care of their grandma on Saturdays, they happen to hire each other. 2. They are working from Monday to Friday. They take care of their own grandma over the weekends. Scenario 1 adds more to the national GDP.
jack_riminton 2y ago
The problem is that countries who don't want to compete on the marketisation of everything will lose out eventually. In your example of elderly care, an extended family in Italy may care for their own grandmother (and they'd probably live longer). But the market in Italy isn't so bouyont so the younger generation can't get high paying jobs and move out even if they wanted to. The high spending and marketisation in the US skews the game for everyone whether they like it or not. (no moral judgements here, just observations)
- ak_111 2y ago
  You highlight and try and predict the eventual problems of non-marketisation but you don't seem and try and do the same to the eventual problems of marketisation. These things are difficult to predict, but already for example we notice some problems with ultra-marketisation in the UK where house prices are now 10-12x average annual salary (it used to average 6-8x for the last two decades), and all the social strife this is causing in society. For example it can eventually lead to mass violent protests against migrants or electing extreme political parties. Another example is that it has seriously degraded public services, since nurses can barely survive on their salary there is huge shortage of medical employees leading to huge waiting list for medical, even critical, operations.
  - pas 2y ago
    If there would be a market for better urban zoning (instead of the mandatory bribing "attempts" of various officials) housing could be built much much more efficiently. (It's a tragedy that most housing constructions are basically suburb expansions or "terraced properties" or these few sad few storey things. There's no vision at all.)
  - casey2 2y ago
    Interesting that you call this a problem of marketization and not of the governments callous immigration policy and the racism/nationalism of the average brit. If people can't afford a house then they can easily look to other markets, they just don't want to because they feel entitled to "their county". The largest culprit after mass immigration is the unwarranted fear of bodily harm from living "poor countries"
akudha 2y ago
Financial press knows it too, they just don’t care. They gotta fill their pages with something, right?
valval 2y ago
I also like the example where if you break someone’s window and they fix it for $300, that’s at least an extra $300 in GDP.
- adammarples 2y ago
  But they would have spent the 300 on something else
  - Jensson 2y ago
    No, many people save their money.
  - Sloowms 2y ago
    The point is that someone who spent 300$ to be in the exact same situation as they were before but the gdp seemingly is doing well. So they could have had a window and a sofa but only have a window in the example. So the gdp is increased but the people are not better of. This example also cuts into personal efficiency going up. Not needing a car or burning gas because of a badly insulated house is negative for the gdp but good for the wealth of individuals.
- grecy 2y ago
  The best example is: I give you $10,000 to eat a pile of shit. You give me $10,000 to eat a pile of shit. What's the result? Two shit-eating grins and $20,000 added to the GDP.
tarkin2 2y ago
Any metric that most directly relates to military spending ability seems the most pertinent these days. But of course GDP doesn’t relate to quality of life—I don’t think anyone suggested it did but of course many think it should.
divan 2y ago
If you marry your fitness trainer, GDP goes down :) There are some good talks of Mariana Mazzucato about it (and questioning of what we consider value in economy) [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZSdgQB99w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZSdgQB99w
slibhb 2y ago
> If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. Yes they do. How do you visit her? What do you do while you're together? Eat some food? There's almost no way your visit doesn't register on GDP. In reality, economic growth makes peoples lives better in simple, concrete ways. Ironically, we've started to question this only because we've become so rich due to so much growth that we're no longer dealing with "simple" problems (hunger, cold, etc).
- Jensson 2y ago
  > What do you do while you're together? Eat some food? There's almost no way your visit doesn't register on GDP. People typically eat food even when they don't visit someone as well, the total amount remains the same. It is really common to just cook food and eat together, your life doesn't get better if you go out to eat eating your parents home cooking doesn't register on the GDP.
crazygringo 2y ago
That doesn't really matter if all you're doing is measuring the relative change in GDP though, and the amount of activity that doesn't register on GDP isn't increasing. In other words, if you assume non-GDP activity is constant, then GDP does genuinely and accurately reflect economic growth. Indeed, this is one reason why economists recommend GDP as a useful measure of growth in a country year-over-year, but not for comparing different countries' GDP directly -- the ratio of activity not counted as GDP may be quite different between countries. Now, if you think that a massive social transformation is underway of non-GDP-registering activities to GDP-registering activities -- e.g. people used to care for their grandmas, now all those people have gotten jobs to pay for care assistants to do it instead -- then yes GDP will show "false growth" in productivity. But that really doesn't seem to be a major factor. We really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives. Economists don't just look at GDP -- they look at lots of measures that all tell the same story. Productivity really is going up. GDP growth may not be 100.00% accurate, but it is mostly.
- dartos 2y ago
  > We really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives Name some? The issues people care most about atm seem to be getting worse (housing prices, cost of living, etc)
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Cell phones are getting better. There are lots of websites on the internet. Batteries are getting better. Cars are getting better. It is very common to focus on some large things that are bad and think that is the big picture without considering how much all the little things really add up to.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      All cell phones in my price range now have buggy firmware: this did not used to be the case. Good websites are much harder to find than they were in 2014. Cars are bigger and scarier and more numerous than ever before. There are things that are better, but "batteries" is the only one from your list that I agree with.
crawshaw 2y ago
Enormous amounts of valuable activity is not captured in GDP and never has been. This makes it dangerous to take two GDP numbers from different polities (or even GDP PPP) and compare them to compare their wealth. However, change in GDP can tell you something broader about a society. It is a compounding value, which means only a trivial amount of GDP change can be explained by moving some of a society's value into or out of the GDP measure. Over a century, the compounding effect eclipses the non-measured component. So if two societies, over the long term, have different GDP growth numbers, one of those societies will end up rich and the other end up poor. Slow down GDP growth even a little and you will impoverish your grandchildren. They will have to choose between becoming doctors in their poor society, or emigrating and waiting tables in the rich society.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Perhaps growth rates in GDP PPP would be even better for comparing between countries? For example in the case of Ireland people might be misled if they looked only at nomial GDP growth…
  - crawshaw 2y ago
    Growth is only valuable in the long-term, and in a long-term analysis PPP (which I generally find very hard to reason about) is going to wash out, just as the fraction of the economy measured by GDP washes out. The non-linear function dominates. Year-to-year, the difference between 2.5% and 5% doesn't matter, which is how people convince themselves to downplay growth. But they are two radically different worlds for your grandkids.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Huh? Why wouldn’t that matter? A 250 basis point difference in growth rate is enormous for pretty much every industry in the US. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars extra circulating in tne economy.
konschubert 2y ago
Are you saying that the US has gotten poorer even though GDP has risen? Are you saying that you visiting your grandma one weekend is the same as someone washing, feeding and walking her every day?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  This is the worst possible interpretation of the comment. No and No.
jayd16 2y ago
> If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. How do you mean? There are travel expenses and you were also doing that instead of consuming. Saving shows up in the numbers so I'm really not following what you mean here.
- startupsfail 2y ago
  There are no travel expenses, if grandma lives in a walking distance (or a couple of bus stops away, not that uncommon in Europe). She is also fine watching her grandkids from time to time, to everyone’s delight.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  If you pay someone to clean their room or watch their kids, that becomes part of GDP, whereas if they simply do it out of love or social obligation, that isnt part of GDP. Savings isn't part of GDP.
mvdtnz 2y ago
Are you implying that GDP has only been measured for the last 3 years? Because I think it has been much longer, over a period where physical health has improved greatly.
seizethecheese 2y ago
This is a good point, but at the same time GDP correlates with many metrics of national wellbeing. The USA isn’t the destination of choice for migrants for no razón
eevilspock 2y ago
The marketing dollars spent by the care assistant service is additional GDP. Using GDP to measure the health or rank of a company is like rating writers by the number of words they produce.
tomcar288 2y ago
that plus, the CPI is completely messed up. Housing accounts for easily half of people's spending these days, especially the younger generation. So, here's how you calculate standard of living: Nominal GDP per capita / Case shiller housing index. Chart this and you'll see that we peaked in 1998 and have been in decline ever since then. We're actually down about 34% since that peak.

fooker 2y ago

> US life expectancy has declined over the past three years Do you have a source for this ?

Terr_ 2y ago
There was a big dip in 2021, but it has started rising again, and it's possible it might rendezvous again with the old trend. This means parent-poster might be technically correct in the sense of "between T to T+3 it decreased", but I would not jump straight to blaming the the longer-term background horribleness of US health insurance for it. It's far more likely to be that teensy-weensy COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of direct damage and also reduced care for everything else. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expectancy-rises-after-two-year-dip-00148193 https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expecta...
- topkai22 2y ago
  Covid and opioid deaths. Opioids are bad. To quote the lancet “Opioid overdose mortality rates are alarmingly high, but measures based on death counts alone do not fully capture the impact of this crisis as they do not account for the young age at which most opioid-related deaths occur…” (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(24)00140-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...) The particular article found opioid deaths lowered life expectancy by 0.67 years, which is a crazy number. Drug overdose deaths finally seem to be trending down in 2024, but they are still elevated and awful.
  - concordDance 2y ago
    > Opioids are bad. Years of life aren't the most important thing. Opiods might reduce life expectancy but increase the averge quality of life of those living in a given year.
    - kataklasm 2y ago
      For those using them according to prescriptions maybe, sure. But the opioid crisis isn't an opioid crisis because people are using them according to what their doc told them. It's a crisis because they are abused.
tekkk 2y ago
Quick googling shows that WHO/World Bank at least.
reedciccio 2y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=us%20life%20expectancy%20&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m https://www.google.com/search?q=us%20life%20expectancy%20&ie...

nnechm 2y ago

Feels more and more like it's the best of times and the worst of times... Things feel off,but you have (mostly well-off) people talking about how great things are going to be and are. I suspect a lot of this correlates to the stock market. For the median millenial atleast, whatever you were taught growing up is just the wrong guide to understanding the world today. I think social media by its very nature, has to be understood inverted. A high number of posts about how great things are suggests otherwise. Comparisons with Europe have gone exponential that tells you more about how the posters feel than anything else...

vladgur 2y ago
As I complete my travels through Argentina and a layover in Lima I realize that differences between poor and rich are much less stark in my opinion in the US and these LatAm countries where the percentage of population living below the local poverty line is 3 to 5 times higher than that of the USA So whatever you feel - it’s all relative
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  People don't realize that being broke poor in the US is a luxury life in most developing countries. I'm not from the US but I saw some video of of how some homeless people live in the US, and it's a lifestyle most of the developing world would kill for: dumpster dive for freshly made pizza or quality supermarket produce that's still good just not legal to be sold anymore, all free of charge. If you have a medical issue, go to the ER and get top quality healthcare. Dumpster dive for perfectly usable clothes, computers, etc. That's a luxury life for 80% of the planet.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > That's a luxury life for 80% of the planet. Not anymore, maybe 20 years ago but many nations developed a lot since then.
    - Cumpiler69 2y ago

immibis 2y ago

It's also a measure of price level. If I pay $100 for a doctor's visit that's $100 to GDP. If it costs $1000 that's $1000 to GDP. If it "costs" $1000 but that's just to get $100 from insurers who only pay 10% and I only have to pay 10% too? Still $1000 to GDP - I think.

pas 2y ago
GDP is C + G + ... and the C is personal consumption, so I guess if you pay 100 USD that's what gets added, and the premiums (and whatever your employer pays for you)
- immibis 2y ago
  Taking a loan for $1000, buying something for $1000, paying back $100 and then declaring bankruptcy also increases GDP by $1000. The intention is to measure the total value of services exchanged, which is $1000 in both cases.
  - pas 2y ago
    Yes. GDP tries to measure "production", it's just easier to add up various types of spending, investment, etc. But if the service has been consumed then it was - by definition - produced, or in this case the service was rendered, I guess. That's why bubbles are a problem because they represent a misallocation of real resources. (Especially when they're debt fueled. And crucially so when it's private debt like the typical mortgage.) But that's why the fiscal multiplier is above one, because public debt is usually cough spent on things that increase productivity, growth, or at least has a positive ROI (eg. regularly screening the mythical token at-risk individuals likely prevents enough very expensive private+public spending, and people will spend that money on things like education or mayhaps even just allows them to have more productive years), etc.
    - immibis 2y ago
      If a $1000 service was provided but not paid for, that's $1000 to GDP, and it was an expense for the person providing it instead of the person receiving it. It's as if you paid $100 to the hospital and the hospital paid $900 to itself. I think. Probably depends on the measurement methodology.

mrtksn 2y ago

Seriously, just looking at the examples of "stagnated and failing economies" like Japan should be a give away that this measure is total BS. In Germany a life saving brain surgery creates 5K USD of economic activity and the same surgery creates 500K USD of economic activity in the USA. True story, a YouTuber I'm following recently had her mother operated in Germany and then again in the USA and she made a video about the experience and the numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-p1nP6hH6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-p1nP6hH6U This obsession with GDP isn't healthy, among other obsessions like the "Number of gigantic companies" which is supposed to show that you are falling back in technology if you don't have extremely large companies by market capitalization metric. It worries me because it's BS and BS can last just till a point. What happens if at one point in the future people start demanding benefiting from all that riches and success? I'm worried because I don't believe in(goodness of?) revolutions and the situation makes me anxious that the west with the US in particular is headed to some kind of revolution. They had one with the last election I guess but the revolutionaries appear to be pushing for the extreme version of the same thing which eventually might collapse with another revolution with the opposite thing like what UK ended up getting as a Labour landslide after Libertarian landslide.

penguinburglar 2y ago
> What happens if at one point in the future people start demanding benefiting from all that riches and success? With any luck, what will happen is that future people will benefit from all those riches and success.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  The problem is that those riches and success is just on paper. They are projections and IOUs. It's like the property market, if everyone has so much money the number of people who can live in Malibu doesn't actually go up. Just the prices of homes in Malibu go up. No matter what the numbers in the bank account says, the number of people who can get the good stuff will be limited to the actual infrastructure and actual production output. If Americans get even richer, it will simply mean that more millionaires will room share in SV. EU and Japan, largely cited as economical failure, happen to provide just as good or even better living conditions to their citizens because their infrastructure and actual production output is as good or better than the US.

INTPenis 2y ago

Very good point because in my country elder care is free. Daily visits by an assistant is on the municipality. We're not a leader in GDP, but we take care of our citizens, whether they be sick or old.

gregshap 2y ago
Municipality spending is part of GDP
- sofixa 2y ago
  But without the profit motive and the need to turn a profit for a few layers of middlemen, the impact on GDP will be much smaller than in the US. There's a reason why healthcare expenditure per capita in the US is multiple times higher than any other OECD country, and why health insurance companies are some of the biggest public ones.
tsimionescu 2y ago
That is not the point GP was making. The assistant you mention is still paid by the municipality, so they show up in GDP numbers just as much as if you paid them yourself. What doesn't show up in GDP numbers are cultures where people take their elderly relatives into their own homes and care for them themselves. Same as hiring someone to look after your kids, or taking them to day care, shows up in GDP; while having their grandparents or other family care for the kids while you're off to work does not.
- INTPenis 2y ago
  I can't believe you're actually arguing these semantics when one person has to pay 800 dollars for an assistant and the other person gets it for free. One person's elderly parents never have to worry about being assisted, while the other can only do so if they can afford it. And you're arguing GDP semantics? There is something seriously wrong and sick with this.
  - lupusreal 2y ago

Guthur 2y ago

And if you borrow that money is even better because they just created the money for you to add to the GDP, and now it will have lots of sweet service fees and interest in top of that. And on a side note because US dollars are the reserve currency and only created in one country they can go shopping around hovering up every asset and resource.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
The US produces a lot of things others want to buy, including stability and security, and that is why non Americans want USD and hence others give Americans purchasing power.
- Guthur 2y ago
  They are not given a choice mate, the US has shown itself quite willing to unilaterally dispose of any government it feels to not be doing exactly what they want. And is on record to at least plan to kill it's own citizens to justify such actions. The narrative that we all have peace because of the US is well and truly broken, the propoganda can't cover the smell, it stinks to bad.
  - jumping_frog 2y ago
    The other important stuff is due to petrodollars and US controlled swift system, there is no real price discovery in the world economic system.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    I’m sure China/Russia/Israel/India/Saudi Arabia/Iran/North Korea/Pakistan/etc are all doing exactly what the US wants. The US is so effective that it can force a country that it embargoes (Iran) to sell oil in USD to a country with its own currency (India). https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/10/17/inside-the-secret-oil-trade-that-funds-irans-wars https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/10/17/i... And the US allows articles to be written about China and Saudi Arabia considering buying and selling oil in Yuan, ostensibly to provide cover for the fact that the US is actually forcing both China to buy in USD and Saudi Arabia to sell in USD. https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-instead-of-dollars-for-chinese-oil-sales-11647351541 https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-acceptin... It couldn’t possibly be that Iran trusts USD to have a more reliable purchasing power than an Indian Rupee, or that Saudi Arabia would rather bet on stability from USD rather than the Yuan.

DanielHB 2y ago

I was thinking the same thing the other day. Like how much of the US GDP is tied to their suburb-living car-dependent lifestyle. What percentage of the GDP is all that infrastructure (sewage, heating, power plants, power transmission, car production, road maintenance)? Sure that create jobs, especially lower-skilled jobs which are important for society. But at the same time they didn't really need to exist. It feels like much like defense spending, it create jobs, but it doesn't create value.

clarionbell 2y ago
Defense spending is necessary, if you want to keep your globalised markets and reasonable level of international security. Europe is now experiencing what happens if drop the "useless" defense spending too low.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  [dead]
- rdm_blackhole 2y ago
  I agree with you. I will go even further by saying that the EU being caught with it's pants down is by design. Everybody rushed to join NATO and decided since the US was there as a backstop, they no longer needed to invest in their own defense. It's a little bit like what happened in 2008 with the too big too fail banks and the bailout. If someone else is always there to pick up the slack, then what is the point of changing the status quo. The EU countries were happy about this because they are broke. The US was happy to keep it's status as the global cop of the world making sure everybody stays in line. This line of thinking worked since the fall of the USSR but the rise of China, India and the global south is changing the world order as we speak.
  - rwyinuse 2y ago
    Everybody except Eastern EU countries closest to Russia. It's not just NATO, but also knowledge that they won't be attacked first which has resulted in low defense spending in Western Europe.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

How's that related to the magnificent 7 and then SpaceX/StarLink and the AI revolution (which is nearly virtually only happening in the US: even if there are a few models in France, China, etc. it's a US game)? I don't think you realize what's going on in the EU (failing into a third world continent at an alarming rate) or in China (where "little" cities of 30 million inhabitants are all about tech and feeling like you live in the future: not that everything is rosy in China). EU carmakers are all in big trouble while Chinese EVs and Tesla are soaring. The EU has nothing to answer the mag 7, let alone SpaceX (the ESA was already way behind NASA). That the US is growing at a faster rate than most other nation and continents is a fact and it's got nothing to do whether you or a care assistant goes to visit your grandma.

Retric 2y ago
You’ve got an overly rosy view of what’s happening in the US and underestimating Europe. AI is big in the tech world, but it’s hardly moving the needle on the overall economy. Every 1% GDP growth roughly requires the equivalent of adding a new Google sized company every year, or as actually happens a more widespread increase. Just as an example, Tesla’s 2024 Q1 deliveries where below 2023’s Q1 deliveries hardly a sign of rapid growth. https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-vehicle-deliveries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v... SpaceX is facing the limits of how much people want to send into orbit. Plenty of growth in the next few years, but Starlink is only generating ~6 billion a year in revenue and not much else really wants to put that much stuff into orbit. Worse, Starlink is facing ever increasing competition from cheaper ground based providers especially cellular internet, so that business may start to shrink.
- gizmo 2y ago
  Tesla is suffering from Chinese EV competition, but the German car brands are suffering much worse. Just look at this UX disaster: https://x.com/teslaxander/status/1864202319925035083 https://x.com/teslaxander/status/1864202319925035083 Is it any wonder that the German car industry is imploding? I also don't share your pessimism about Starlink. Right now it's unclear what the killer application for Starlink will be, but it's awesome technology and even if it's only used in very remote areas it will still be worth it. When you only invest in technology that is immediately valuable you lose out on the technological revolutions that take a while to play out. Imagine having the capability of building something like Starlink but not doing it because the bean counters don't see the point.

skirge 2y ago

if you hired care assistant then you have time for some other activities like work which is more profitable than cost of care assistant thus economy has more goods. Life expectancy lowers when young people die, most often in work accidents which is related to low unemployment.

ThunderSizzle 2y ago
My wife had a good job. She made the median household income in the area on her salary alone (my salary was still better, but that's beside the point). When we had our second kid, the hustle wasn't worth it. Two kids in daycare took 90% of her take home pay. It was costing us more for her to work than to stay home with the kids. Also, kids need their parents. An infant being away from their mom for that long is unhealthy for the infant
- skirge 2y ago
  It's a choice, economy is about choices and math (staying at home cost < cost of kindergarten) is the tool. (in EU you may prefer to go to work because additional income is that time is added to retirement, even if money is low it has some value).
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > An infant being away from their mom for that long is unhealthy for the infant But not their dad?
jprete 2y ago
You're completely missing the problem. The care assistant, being a fungible and commoditized service provider, can never provide the kinds of illiquid unmeasurable goods that are generated by long-term and durable relationships.
badmintonbaseba 2y ago
Your argument hinges on my work being more profitable than a care assistants. While that's maybe true, the difference showing in GDP is not the difference of profitability or "value" in our work. What if I'm a care assistant myself? Imagine two care assistants and two scenarios: 1. They are working from Monday to Saturday. They can't take Saturday off, so they hire a care assistant to take care of their grandma on Saturdays, they happen to hire each other. 2. They are working from Monday to Friday. They take care of their own grandma over the weekends. Scenario 1 adds more to the national GDP.

jack_riminton 2y ago

The problem is that countries who don't want to compete on the marketisation of everything will lose out eventually. In your example of elderly care, an extended family in Italy may care for their own grandmother (and they'd probably live longer). But the market in Italy isn't so bouyont so the younger generation can't get high paying jobs and move out even if they wanted to. The high spending and marketisation in the US skews the game for everyone whether they like it or not. (no moral judgements here, just observations)

ak_111 2y ago
You highlight and try and predict the eventual problems of non-marketisation but you don't seem and try and do the same to the eventual problems of marketisation. These things are difficult to predict, but already for example we notice some problems with ultra-marketisation in the UK where house prices are now 10-12x average annual salary (it used to average 6-8x for the last two decades), and all the social strife this is causing in society. For example it can eventually lead to mass violent protests against migrants or electing extreme political parties. Another example is that it has seriously degraded public services, since nurses can barely survive on their salary there is huge shortage of medical employees leading to huge waiting list for medical, even critical, operations.
- pas 2y ago
  If there would be a market for better urban zoning (instead of the mandatory bribing "attempts" of various officials) housing could be built much much more efficiently. (It's a tragedy that most housing constructions are basically suburb expansions or "terraced properties" or these few sad few storey things. There's no vision at all.)
- casey2 2y ago
  Interesting that you call this a problem of marketization and not of the governments callous immigration policy and the racism/nationalism of the average brit. If people can't afford a house then they can easily look to other markets, they just don't want to because they feel entitled to "their county". The largest culprit after mass immigration is the unwarranted fear of bodily harm from living "poor countries"

akudha 2y ago

Financial press knows it too, they just don’t care. They gotta fill their pages with something, right?

valval 2y ago

I also like the example where if you break someone’s window and they fix it for $300, that’s at least an extra $300 in GDP.

adammarples 2y ago
But they would have spent the 300 on something else
- Jensson 2y ago
  No, many people save their money.
- Sloowms 2y ago
  The point is that someone who spent 300$ to be in the exact same situation as they were before but the gdp seemingly is doing well. So they could have had a window and a sofa but only have a window in the example. So the gdp is increased but the people are not better of. This example also cuts into personal efficiency going up. Not needing a car or burning gas because of a badly insulated house is negative for the gdp but good for the wealth of individuals.
grecy 2y ago
The best example is: I give you $10,000 to eat a pile of shit. You give me $10,000 to eat a pile of shit. What's the result? Two shit-eating grins and $20,000 added to the GDP.

tarkin2 2y ago

Any metric that most directly relates to military spending ability seems the most pertinent these days. But of course GDP doesn’t relate to quality of life—I don’t think anyone suggested it did but of course many think it should.

divan 2y ago

If you marry your fitness trainer, GDP goes down :) There are some good talks of Mariana Mazzucato about it (and questioning of what we consider value in economy) [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZSdgQB99w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZSdgQB99w

slibhb 2y ago

> If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. Yes they do. How do you visit her? What do you do while you're together? Eat some food? There's almost no way your visit doesn't register on GDP. In reality, economic growth makes peoples lives better in simple, concrete ways. Ironically, we've started to question this only because we've become so rich due to so much growth that we're no longer dealing with "simple" problems (hunger, cold, etc).

Jensson 2y ago
> What do you do while you're together? Eat some food? There's almost no way your visit doesn't register on GDP. People typically eat food even when they don't visit someone as well, the total amount remains the same. It is really common to just cook food and eat together, your life doesn't get better if you go out to eat eating your parents home cooking doesn't register on the GDP.

crazygringo 2y ago

That doesn't really matter if all you're doing is measuring the relative change in GDP though, and the amount of activity that doesn't register on GDP isn't increasing. In other words, if you assume non-GDP activity is constant, then GDP does genuinely and accurately reflect economic growth. Indeed, this is one reason why economists recommend GDP as a useful measure of growth in a country year-over-year, but not for comparing different countries' GDP directly -- the ratio of activity not counted as GDP may be quite different between countries. Now, if you think that a massive social transformation is underway of non-GDP-registering activities to GDP-registering activities -- e.g. people used to care for their grandmas, now all those people have gotten jobs to pay for care assistants to do it instead -- then yes GDP will show "false growth" in productivity. But that really doesn't seem to be a major factor. We really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives. Economists don't just look at GDP -- they look at lots of measures that all tell the same story. Productivity really is going up. GDP growth may not be 100.00% accurate, but it is mostly.

dartos 2y ago
> We really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives Name some? The issues people care most about atm seem to be getting worse (housing prices, cost of living, etc)
- bluGill 2y ago
  Cell phones are getting better. There are lots of websites on the internet. Batteries are getting better. Cars are getting better. It is very common to focus on some large things that are bad and think that is the big picture without considering how much all the little things really add up to.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    All cell phones in my price range now have buggy firmware: this did not used to be the case. Good websites are much harder to find than they were in 2014. Cars are bigger and scarier and more numerous than ever before. There are things that are better, but "batteries" is the only one from your list that I agree with.

crawshaw 2y ago

Enormous amounts of valuable activity is not captured in GDP and never has been. This makes it dangerous to take two GDP numbers from different polities (or even GDP PPP) and compare them to compare their wealth. However, change in GDP can tell you something broader about a society. It is a compounding value, which means only a trivial amount of GDP change can be explained by moving some of a society's value into or out of the GDP measure. Over a century, the compounding effect eclipses the non-measured component. So if two societies, over the long term, have different GDP growth numbers, one of those societies will end up rich and the other end up poor. Slow down GDP growth even a little and you will impoverish your grandchildren. They will have to choose between becoming doctors in their poor society, or emigrating and waiting tables in the rich society.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Perhaps growth rates in GDP PPP would be even better for comparing between countries? For example in the case of Ireland people might be misled if they looked only at nomial GDP growth…
- crawshaw 2y ago
  Growth is only valuable in the long-term, and in a long-term analysis PPP (which I generally find very hard to reason about) is going to wash out, just as the fraction of the economy measured by GDP washes out. The non-linear function dominates. Year-to-year, the difference between 2.5% and 5% doesn't matter, which is how people convince themselves to downplay growth. But they are two radically different worlds for your grandkids.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Huh? Why wouldn’t that matter? A 250 basis point difference in growth rate is enormous for pretty much every industry in the US. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars extra circulating in tne economy.

konschubert 2y ago

Are you saying that the US has gotten poorer even though GDP has risen? Are you saying that you visiting your grandma one weekend is the same as someone washing, feeding and walking her every day?

s1artibartfast 2y ago
This is the worst possible interpretation of the comment. No and No.

jayd16 2y ago

> If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. How do you mean? There are travel expenses and you were also doing that instead of consuming. Saving shows up in the numbers so I'm really not following what you mean here.

startupsfail 2y ago
There are no travel expenses, if grandma lives in a walking distance (or a couple of bus stops away, not that uncommon in Europe). She is also fine watching her grandkids from time to time, to everyone’s delight.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
If you pay someone to clean their room or watch their kids, that becomes part of GDP, whereas if they simply do it out of love or social obligation, that isnt part of GDP. Savings isn't part of GDP.

mvdtnz 2y ago

Are you implying that GDP has only been measured for the last 3 years? Because I think it has been much longer, over a period where physical health has improved greatly.

seizethecheese 2y ago

This is a good point, but at the same time GDP correlates with many metrics of national wellbeing. The USA isn’t the destination of choice for migrants for no razón

eevilspock 2y ago

The marketing dollars spent by the care assistant service is additional GDP. Using GDP to measure the health or rank of a company is like rating writers by the number of words they produce.

tomcar288 2y ago

that plus, the CPI is completely messed up. Housing accounts for easily half of people's spending these days, especially the younger generation. So, here's how you calculate standard of living: Nominal GDP per capita / Case shiller housing index. Chart this and you'll see that we peaked in 1998 and have been in decline ever since then. We're actually down about 34% since that peak.