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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 inc

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.
    - hparadiz 2y ago
      I just picked up a $200 oneplus just for work accounts. It's completely fine. No lag. No issues. Zero bugs so far. 10 years ago were using what? Android 4 and iOS 6?
  - j33zusjuice 2y ago
    It’s also very common to be delusional.
    - shermantanktop 2y ago
      But not us, of course. That couldn’t happen to us. It’s those other people.
  - dpassens 2y ago
    Are better cell phones making everyone's life better? I am doing nothing on my current smartphone that I didn't do on my first. I'm not even sure if I'm charging it less often. I guess the camera is a little better.
    - photonthug 2y ago
      > I guess the camera is a little better. Like many of the other items on the list, it’s a change that few people actually asked for and it’s more in the name of surveillance capitalism than consumer preferences or consumer choice. Sure, social media can con children into thinking they need this. And after it’s normalized then adults might point it out as an improvement, but in the end it’s part of why the “improved” phone takes more hours of labor to pay for and the consumer has fewer options than ever with an illusion of more choice.
      - dpassens 2y ago
        Oh, definitely. I just wanted to list the one improvement I have actually used, even if I didn't actually need it.
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    >Cars are getting better. And expensive that , at least in Europe, nobody is buying them anymore so the industry is going through layoffs.
    - adamc 2y ago
      It's a problem in the US as well. New cars are basically too expensive for most people to afford.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        And it's no longer even legal to make basic cars without luxury toys like built in screens. Oh I'm sorry, I mean ""essential safety features"", that we managed to get on fine without only a few years ago.
        massysett 2y ago
        True, we did get along fine without them, but at the cost of injury, death, and property damage. "Backover crashes" cause hundreds of deaths in the US each year. https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/13237-parents_guide_playing_it_safe_tagged.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/13237-... Add the backup camera to the improved restraints, the collision warning system, the blind-spot monitor . . . and soon you're talking about some real money. One can argue about whether this is good or bad, but they're not really luxury toys.
        lupusreal 2y ago
        "Hundreds" in a country with hundreds of millions of people is inconsequential. The vast majority of people never backed over anybody because they used tricks called looking around and situational awareness. Techno gadgets meant to solve non-problems are toys in my books.
        adamc 2y ago
        They are certainly luxuries, given that we were willing to drive without them.
  - adamc 2y ago
    I don't really care a lot about any of those. I'm a lot more interested in relationships with people, the state of the environment, and general happiness. A better cell phone has never made more than the most marginal difference in my happiness.
  - tomcar288 2y ago
    what good is it if you have a ton of gadgets and iphones all over the place but no place to live? I'd take a home with a bed over all the gadgets in the world, if i could only choose 1. it's a fact that the housing standard of living has gone down for the last 26 years. See this graph: Nominal gpd per capita / case shiller housing index. and you'll see it's down 34% over the last 26 years!
  - dartos 2y ago
    Incremental improvements I don’t think counts as the innovation you were hinting at. Especially not when both phone manufacturers and car manufacturers are engaging in more and more rent seeking behavior
jprete 2y ago
The GP's point matters quite a lot, because the ratio of GDP to non-GDP value is going up. Terms like "financialization" or "commodification" describe a process that makes things visible and measurable. I think this is also what the book Seeing Like A State meant by "legibility". And the whole reason it's a bad thing is that the human values that can't be converted to a measurable, tradeable commodity are often thrown away, because they're invisible to the commodification process.
massysett 2y ago
> 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. But isn't that the issue? Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all. She (it was usually a she) could get the kids off to school, pick them up after school, check in on grandma, do the shopping, cook a simple meal. Now: the working-age person goes to work, perhaps because the family fell apart, perhaps because other rising costs (e.g. health care) forced it. Before and after school care is paid for. Someone is paid to check in on grandma. Walmart+ or Amazon occasionally delivers heat-and-eat meals. GDP went way up! Amazon contractor has a job delivering boxes. Someone is paid to check in on Grandma, and someone else to watch the kids. Someone works in the factory making heat-and-eat meals. But are we really better off? Is it better to staff out the kid- and Grandma-watching and to heat up a dinner in the microwave? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that question, but I'm certainly not sure that "we really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives."
- vel0city 2y ago
  I've got two young kids in full-time daycare. Our daycare is crazy expensive. We tried the route of one parent stay home to be a caregiver this year. In the end, our kids weren't continuing on the same trajectory as what they were when they were in daycare. One child continued on part-time at the daycare doing a two day a week schedule and was noticeably falling behind his peers in his education and socializing. Not for a lack of us trying, my wife was very active in trying to be with both kids. But two very young children can be quite demanding. And in the end our house was messier (kids tearing everything apart all day long versus just a few hours), we still had pretty much the same diet, my wife was more tired and frustrated at the end of the day, etc. My wife is back to having a wage, and both kids are back to full-time daycare. They both really enjoy school. And comparing them to their peers who stay at home, they're usually way ahead when it comes to counting and numbers, vocabulary, spelling, reasoning, and social skills. Which I mean makes sense, they're around people who got degrees in education with professionally thought-out lesson plans every day.
mapt 2y ago
You can assume what you want if it makes you feel better, but assuming that I am both seeing Grandma at 2PM and working for wages at 2PM is going to disappoint someone. One of the ways we seem to be absolutely destroying the social fabric for younger people is by eliminating ("privatizing") every last public space and time in which they're allowed to exist without driving there and paying a fee for a structured transactional recreation. We have privatized the commons in an analogous way to the Enclosure Movement in industrializing Great Britain.

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.
  - hparadiz 2y ago
    I just picked up a $200 oneplus just for work accounts. It's completely fine. No lag. No issues. Zero bugs so far. 10 years ago were using what? Android 4 and iOS 6?
- j33zusjuice 2y ago
  It’s also very common to be delusional.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    But not us, of course. That couldn’t happen to us. It’s those other people.
- dpassens 2y ago
  Are better cell phones making everyone's life better? I am doing nothing on my current smartphone that I didn't do on my first. I'm not even sure if I'm charging it less often. I guess the camera is a little better.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    > I guess the camera is a little better. Like many of the other items on the list, it’s a change that few people actually asked for and it’s more in the name of surveillance capitalism than consumer preferences or consumer choice. Sure, social media can con children into thinking they need this. And after it’s normalized then adults might point it out as an improvement, but in the end it’s part of why the “improved” phone takes more hours of labor to pay for and the consumer has fewer options than ever with an illusion of more choice.
    - dpassens 2y ago
      Oh, definitely. I just wanted to list the one improvement I have actually used, even if I didn't actually need it.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >Cars are getting better. And expensive that , at least in Europe, nobody is buying them anymore so the industry is going through layoffs.
  - adamc 2y ago
    It's a problem in the US as well. New cars are basically too expensive for most people to afford.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      And it's no longer even legal to make basic cars without luxury toys like built in screens. Oh I'm sorry, I mean ""essential safety features"", that we managed to get on fine without only a few years ago.
      - massysett 2y ago
        True, we did get along fine without them, but at the cost of injury, death, and property damage. "Backover crashes" cause hundreds of deaths in the US each year. https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/13237-parents_guide_playing_it_safe_tagged.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/13237-... Add the backup camera to the improved restraints, the collision warning system, the blind-spot monitor . . . and soon you're talking about some real money. One can argue about whether this is good or bad, but they're not really luxury toys.
        lupusreal 2y ago
        "Hundreds" in a country with hundreds of millions of people is inconsequential. The vast majority of people never backed over anybody because they used tricks called looking around and situational awareness. Techno gadgets meant to solve non-problems are toys in my books.
        adamc 2y ago
        They are certainly luxuries, given that we were willing to drive without them.
- adamc 2y ago
  I don't really care a lot about any of those. I'm a lot more interested in relationships with people, the state of the environment, and general happiness. A better cell phone has never made more than the most marginal difference in my happiness.
- tomcar288 2y ago
  what good is it if you have a ton of gadgets and iphones all over the place but no place to live? I'd take a home with a bed over all the gadgets in the world, if i could only choose 1. it's a fact that the housing standard of living has gone down for the last 26 years. See this graph: Nominal gpd per capita / case shiller housing index. and you'll see it's down 34% over the last 26 years!
- dartos 2y ago
  Incremental improvements I don’t think counts as the innovation you were hinting at. Especially not when both phone manufacturers and car manufacturers are engaging in more and more rent seeking behavior

jprete 2y ago

The GP's point matters quite a lot, because the ratio of GDP to non-GDP value is going up. Terms like "financialization" or "commodification" describe a process that makes things visible and measurable. I think this is also what the book Seeing Like A State meant by "legibility". And the whole reason it's a bad thing is that the human values that can't be converted to a measurable, tradeable commodity are often thrown away, because they're invisible to the commodification process.

massysett 2y ago

> 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. But isn't that the issue? Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all. She (it was usually a she) could get the kids off to school, pick them up after school, check in on grandma, do the shopping, cook a simple meal. Now: the working-age person goes to work, perhaps because the family fell apart, perhaps because other rising costs (e.g. health care) forced it. Before and after school care is paid for. Someone is paid to check in on grandma. Walmart+ or Amazon occasionally delivers heat-and-eat meals. GDP went way up! Amazon contractor has a job delivering boxes. Someone is paid to check in on Grandma, and someone else to watch the kids. Someone works in the factory making heat-and-eat meals. But are we really better off? Is it better to staff out the kid- and Grandma-watching and to heat up a dinner in the microwave? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that question, but I'm certainly not sure that "we really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives."

vel0city 2y ago
I've got two young kids in full-time daycare. Our daycare is crazy expensive. We tried the route of one parent stay home to be a caregiver this year. In the end, our kids weren't continuing on the same trajectory as what they were when they were in daycare. One child continued on part-time at the daycare doing a two day a week schedule and was noticeably falling behind his peers in his education and socializing. Not for a lack of us trying, my wife was very active in trying to be with both kids. But two very young children can be quite demanding. And in the end our house was messier (kids tearing everything apart all day long versus just a few hours), we still had pretty much the same diet, my wife was more tired and frustrated at the end of the day, etc. My wife is back to having a wage, and both kids are back to full-time daycare. They both really enjoy school. And comparing them to their peers who stay at home, they're usually way ahead when it comes to counting and numbers, vocabulary, spelling, reasoning, and social skills. Which I mean makes sense, they're around people who got degrees in education with professionally thought-out lesson plans every day.

mapt 2y ago

You can assume what you want if it makes you feel better, but assuming that I am both seeing Grandma at 2PM and working for wages at 2PM is going to disappoint someone. One of the ways we seem to be absolutely destroying the social fabric for younger people is by eliminating ("privatizing") every last public space and time in which they're allowed to exist without driving there and paying a fee for a structured transactional recreation. We have privatized the commons in an analogous way to the Enclosure Movement in industrializing Great Britain.