8 ms·

Do not mistake economic indicators such as GDP or "growth" for meaningful measures of economic health.

by BrenBarn 10mo ago

p0pularopinion 10mo ago
I try to see it positive. With the AI bubble, I finally habe a tangible example to point to when I say that GDP growth is a bad indicator for economic success
- p-e-w 10mo ago
  Unless you can demonstrate that there is in fact an AI bubble, that is simply begging the question. Notice how the term “housing bubble” is used much less frequently today than 10 years ago? That’s because that so-called bubble has been ballooning in size for three decades now, and almost nobody still believes that it will “burst” in any meaningful sense. The Dotcom bubble was in many ways an outlier.
  - Epa095 10mo ago
    OT: I enjoyed seeing a dictionary-correct use of the term 'begging the question' in the wild :-)
    - p-e-w 10mo ago
      What other uses are there? I only know the phrase as a synonym for “assuming the conclusion”, i.e., a type of circular reasoning.
      - Epa095 10mo ago
        People often use it instead of 'raises the question'. E.g "There was very little fallout to the Y2K bug, which begs the question: was the Y2K crisis real and well handled or not really a crisis at all?" E.g https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22begs+the+question%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22begs+the+question%22
        p-e-w 10mo ago
        Wow, now that you pointed this out, that interpretation actually makes far more sense than the “correct” one.
  - watwut 10mo ago
    It is cause housing bubble was a thing of 2000 and burst in 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_United_States_housing_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_United_States_housing_bu... People dont talk about housing bubble as much, because it is history at this point. Not something that would go on now. And no, housing being expensive is not the same thing as a bubble. We dont have bubble in housing now.
    - Quarrel 10mo ago
      > It is cause housing bubble was a thing of 2000 and burst in 2008 <Australia weeps>
  - mschuster91 10mo ago
    > That’s because that so-called bubble has been ballooning in size for three decades now, and almost nobody still believes that it will “burst” in any meaningful sense. That's because Boomers live far longer than prior generations thanks to medical advances. The housing bubble will collapse (at least outside of the megalopolises) once the Boomers finally start to die en masse due to their over-representation in demographics. But before that, the pension systems will crash hard. For people in systems with redistributions (like most of Europe), there simply aren't enough working age people contributing payments for the pensioners, and for people in stonk-based systems (e.g. US 401k), they will run into the issue that someone has to buy the stocks that the pensioners sell off to fund their retirement, and ain't no one of my generation buying stocks, thanks to us having to spend insane amounts of rent.
    - eecc 10mo ago
      Well, that rent and the debts incurred to finance consumption is also keeping the profits up and thus stonks valuations
      - mschuster91 10mo ago
        The problem is, people more and more can't manage to pay these rents, so they're either cutting back on any absolutely not necessary spending or going homeless outright. For now, there are enough desperate people that still have some money to pay rent... but retail, no matter which industry, is feeling the impact of people having no spending money hard. Without the AI bubble artificially propping up the GDP, it is most likely the US economy is in a recession [1]. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/ai-infrastructure-boom-masks-potential-us-recession-analyst-warns.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/ai-infrastructure-boom-masks...
  - Tade0 10mo ago
    It's bursting as we speak, but certain actors are pulling every lever there is to slow down the process: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/housing-index https://tradingeconomics.com/china/housing-index Unsuccessfully, I might add.
    - torginus 9mo ago
      I think housing as an appreciating is a weird Western capitalist socio-cultural artifact - in order to enter the middle class, you have to buy one, and the way to go about it smartly is to get a bank loan. Most people have no way of affording one otherwise, and if they did, paying sticker price for it would be dumb. So everyone who's not considered a deadbeat shall be indebted to the bank for decades to come. Their prices are also supported by the collective power of the people - for whatever unreasonable price they're charging for it, you can be certain that someone (or some bank) has paid it, therefore it's in the best interest of significant chucks of regular folks that house prices don't go down. Imo something similar is going on with retail investing. Btw housing in China is not an appreciating asset, because you don't own the land, you merely lease it from the government for 70-100 years, which is about the natural lifespan of a lot of buildings, after which maintaining them becomes more expensiv than rebuilding them.
  - dijit 10mo ago
    The longer it takes to burst, the worse the outcome. Housing is being propped up by the governments of the west because it was already so problematic if it fails that millions of people would be severely impacted. Even the housing backed mortgage crisis of 2008 was as large a shock as the great depression, the reason we’re not all using money as toilet paper is due to government intervention. Rightly or wrongly. Some people believe that this intervention makes something worse bound to happen later- and based on the cost of housing I tend to believe them. It is not sustainable to keep housing at its current cost, and the financial model requires that they continue to increase in price. If house prices fall it is a disaster for millions.
  - p0pularopinion 10mo ago
    There are a few noticeable differences between housing as an asset and AI datacenters. Beyond the obvious difference that a house has a depreciation in the order of decades, whereas AI GPUs are a few years. Then there is the fact that housing is a fundamental human need whereas AI, as frequently demonstrated, isn‘t even a want by many people. I am not saying that AI cannot demonstrate todays value 20 years into the future. But there is zero reason to believe the short to medium term payoffs on AI investment will be proportional to the investment we‘ve seen over the past few years
    - p-e-w 10mo ago
      > a house has a depreciation in the order of decades, whereas AI GPUs are a few years. That’s no longer true for datacenter-class GPUs. The A100 came out six years ago, and it still sells for $15k+, with no meaningful drop in the foreseeable future.
- theozaurus 10mo ago
  The book the 'Growth Delusion' has some great examples on this as well. To quote the FTs[1] review of the book. "The official protocols define the scope of GDP as measuring all monetised activity between willing parties in a given period. It is a pragmatic definition, but leads to some counterintuitive results. The sale of stolen goods for cash contributes positively to GDP, for example — so theft is good for growth. A parent’s housework and childcare, however, being unpaid, are excluded — resulting, by one recent evaluation, in a $3.8 trillion underestimate of the size of the US economy." I vaguely remember a similar one around traffic jams as well. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/b6182440-f21e-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974e9f https://www.ft.com/content/b6182440-f21e-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974...
  - BrenBarn 10mo ago
    There is also a book called "Mismeasuring our lives" that makes some similar points about the overreliance on GDP as "the" measure of economic health.
  - graemep 10mo ago
    The UK is just starting official statistics that include the value of household self supply. I do not know whether there is good enough historical data to compare it with.
- bojan 10mo ago
  You could have used the example of Ireland before. They score extremely well on GDP, and yet the quality of life of an average Irish person is on par with the rest of the Western Europe, with the costs of housing pressuring everything else.
  - refurb 10mo ago
    Yeah, but everyone knows why. The IMF has called out that 40% of Ireland’s GDP isn’t real because it flows into and back out (back to the US mostly) due to tax schemes.
EZ-E 10mo ago
What is a good measure of meaningful growth? Genuinely asking. I imagine all measures have pros and cons.
- adaml_623 10mo ago
  Infant mortality
  - Manuel_D 10mo ago
    Sure, but once countries hit a moderate level of development the bulk of preventable infant deaths are handled. E.g. Frances' rate has been flat since the turn of the millennium.
  - MattDamonSpace 10mo ago
    Seems like you’d asymptotically approach 0% and then this metric would ignore eg space travel or food production efficiency
- the8472 10mo ago
  The kardashev scale? https://energyforgrowth.org/article/watch-countries-climb-the-energy-ladder/ https://energyforgrowth.org/article/watch-countries-climb-th...
- jandrewrogers 10mo ago
  Most meaningful alternative measures of growth very strongly correlate with GDP. Which is why we just go with GDP. It has issues but GDP has practical utility.
- vbezhenar 10mo ago
  You can't estimate a country with a single number. It makes no sense and actually hurts when someone decides to optimise for that number.
- toenail 10mo ago
  - Time to affordability ratios (Hours of work for food, energy, housing etc) - Intergenerational social mobility trend Not doing great on either.
TacticalCoder 10mo ago
It is an indicator and it's not totally non-meaningful. But GDP growth, when it's at the price of increasing the public debt and inflation, is no real growth. Instead of looking at the US, let's look at what used to be a relevant ally... In the eurozone, for example, politicians are hiding the lack of growth behind a growing mountain of public debt and the GDP growth ain't even beating inflation since the 2008 crisis. In 2008 the eurozone represented about 25% of the world's GDP. Now it's not even 15% anymore. Falling into irrelevancy doesn't begin to describe the state of things for the eurozone: from 25% of the world's GDP to less than 15% in 17 years is more than alarming. And yet if you look at the eurozone in Euro, it looks like it's been growing since 2008. But it's actually been stuck since nearly two decades now and there aren't signs of anything getting any better in the eurozone. German carmarkers, the number one export of the eurozone, are in huge trouble (with China eating their lunch). The US and China are, obviously, less fucked than the eurozone but the USA's growth has also been achieved at the cost of a runaway public debt and runaway inflation. I don't know what protectionism can and cannot do for the US and it's not clear if manufacturing can really come back to the US but one thing is certain: the eurozone is a failure and whatever it is that they did or do should definitely not be copied. Unelected bureaucrats have managed, in 17 years, to drive the eurozone into the ground. It's mostly true for non-eurozone EU countries as well but some, like Poland (which is in the EU but not in the eurozone), are doing fine. Basically: if you want to slash your part of the world's GDP by 40% in 17 years, do what the eurozone did. Now we must understand this: the eurozone didn't just slash it's part of the global GDP by 40% in 17 years... They did so while, at the same time, creating a gigantic mountain of public debt and experiencing inflation. Another 17 years of this, so another 40% loss, and the eurozone would only represent 9% of the world's GDP. And these unelected bureaucrats are so incompetent that I don't discard the possibility that they'll actually be able to crash the eurozone even faster than that. For example at the moment, while german carmarkers are in trouble, EU bureaucrats are hard at work trying to kill them for good. Anti-americanism and anti-trumpism is a thing on HN but people should really look more closely at what's happening elsewhere. What about an article from The Economist as to the reasons the eurozone managed to lose 40% of their share of the world's GDP since the 2008 financial crisis?
- watwut 10mo ago
baxtr 10mo ago
I think it’s not perfect but probably the best we have. People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth).
- djtango 10mo ago
  Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations. A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite. Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...
  - zmgsabst 10mo ago
    Millennials are 30-45, roughly. There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
  - huhkerrf 10mo ago
    > Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time... This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50. "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age." "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age." https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
    - vanviegen 10mo ago
      If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
wewxjfq 10mo ago
> Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
jmward01 10mo ago
Agreed. Long term economic health is always tied to long term social health. We should be, ultimately, trying to look at a broader index than some simplistic view of just money. It is a hard problem though to pin down an index for social health. As soon as we name a measure or index it becomes a target and its value drops. I tried to think of a more 'universal' index, one that could be applied to civilizations in the past and present and the best I could come up with is the healthier a civilization the more people can live together, longer, without killing each other. Not rigorous, but in general when I view history it seems to fit reasonably well.
HPsquared 10mo ago
GDP as a concept, and "growth" and "inflation" figures, remind me of that line from HBO's Chernobyl: "They gave them the propaganda number".
intended 10mo ago
Do not mistake indicators by using them for things they do not measure. There’s a lot of work being done by the term “all other things being equal” when using a measure like GDP. I don’t think we are in times when all else is equal.
refurb 10mo ago
Unless you have better alternatives you’re not really saying much. And I don’t think anyone relies only on GDP. Typically you’d look at employment rates, inflation, etc.
gadders 10mo ago
GDP per person should be the measure. The UK managed to make GDP go up while making GDP per person go down.
- BrenBarn 10mo ago
  GDP per capita has basically all the same problems.
  - gadders 10mo ago
    I'm sure it has problems, but if I look at the top of this list (and exclude the tax havens) the answer to "Would I like to live there?" is Yes. Likewise for the bottom of the list it's an emphatic No. Is it a completely accurate indicator? Probably not. Is it directionally accurate? Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
    - BrenBarn 10mo ago
      Part of the problem though is that people often try to use GDP (or GDP per capita) to compare within the top of the list. Like they try to draw conclusions about whether "Germany is doing better than Italy". It's true that big differences in GDP per capita can distinguish between really good and really bad places, but so can many other measures (like life expectancy or education expectancy). Plus, even on a coarse rubric GDP isn't perfect. I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in Spain than Qatar or Greenland. :-)
- p0pularopinion 10mo ago
  GDP is not useful to measure how good an economy works. The core problem of GDP is that it does not account for usefulness of spending. GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.
  - 10mo ago
ErigmolCt 10mo ago
GDP and growth are blunt instruments, but they're not meaningless... They tell you something about aggregate capacity, incomes, and whether the system is shrinking or expanding
ernst_klim 10mo ago
> meaningful measures of economic health As someone who lived in a handful of countries with GDP per capita ranging from $3k to $70k I must say that GDP is a great proxy of the QoL and median citizen wealth. Not the only one and not the perfectly correlated one, but a very good one.

Do not mistake economic indicators such as GDP or "growth" for meaningful measures of economic health.

I try to see it positive. With the AI bubble, I finally habe a tangible example to point to when I say that GDP growth is a bad indicator for economic success

p-e-w 10mo ago
Unless you can demonstrate that there is in fact an AI bubble, that is simply begging the question. Notice how the term “housing bubble” is used much less frequently today than 10 years ago? That’s because that so-called bubble has been ballooning in size for three decades now, and almost nobody still believes that it will “burst” in any meaningful sense. The Dotcom bubble was in many ways an outlier.
- Epa095 10mo ago
  OT: I enjoyed seeing a dictionary-correct use of the term 'begging the question' in the wild :-)
  - p-e-w 10mo ago
    What other uses are there? I only know the phrase as a synonym for “assuming the conclusion”, i.e., a type of circular reasoning.
    - Epa095 10mo ago
      People often use it instead of 'raises the question'. E.g "There was very little fallout to the Y2K bug, which begs the question: was the Y2K crisis real and well handled or not really a crisis at all?" E.g https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22begs+the+question%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22begs+the+question%22
      - p-e-w 10mo ago
        Wow, now that you pointed this out, that interpretation actually makes far more sense than the “correct” one.
- watwut 10mo ago
  It is cause housing bubble was a thing of 2000 and burst in 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_United_States_housing_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_United_States_housing_bu... People dont talk about housing bubble as much, because it is history at this point. Not something that would go on now. And no, housing being expensive is not the same thing as a bubble. We dont have bubble in housing now.
  - Quarrel 10mo ago
    > It is cause housing bubble was a thing of 2000 and burst in 2008 <Australia weeps>
- mschuster91 10mo ago
  > That’s because that so-called bubble has been ballooning in size for three decades now, and almost nobody still believes that it will “burst” in any meaningful sense. That's because Boomers live far longer than prior generations thanks to medical advances. The housing bubble will collapse (at least outside of the megalopolises) once the Boomers finally start to die en masse due to their over-representation in demographics. But before that, the pension systems will crash hard. For people in systems with redistributions (like most of Europe), there simply aren't enough working age people contributing payments for the pensioners, and for people in stonk-based systems (e.g. US 401k), they will run into the issue that someone has to buy the stocks that the pensioners sell off to fund their retirement, and ain't no one of my generation buying stocks, thanks to us having to spend insane amounts of rent.
  - eecc 10mo ago
    Well, that rent and the debts incurred to finance consumption is also keeping the profits up and thus stonks valuations
    - mschuster91 10mo ago
      The problem is, people more and more can't manage to pay these rents, so they're either cutting back on any absolutely not necessary spending or going homeless outright. For now, there are enough desperate people that still have some money to pay rent... but retail, no matter which industry, is feeling the impact of people having no spending money hard. Without the AI bubble artificially propping up the GDP, it is most likely the US economy is in a recession [1]. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/ai-infrastructure-boom-masks-potential-us-recession-analyst-warns.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/ai-infrastructure-boom-masks...
- Tade0 10mo ago
  It's bursting as we speak, but certain actors are pulling every lever there is to slow down the process: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/housing-index https://tradingeconomics.com/china/housing-index Unsuccessfully, I might add.
  - torginus 9mo ago
    I think housing as an appreciating is a weird Western capitalist socio-cultural artifact - in order to enter the middle class, you have to buy one, and the way to go about it smartly is to get a bank loan. Most people have no way of affording one otherwise, and if they did, paying sticker price for it would be dumb. So everyone who's not considered a deadbeat shall be indebted to the bank for decades to come. Their prices are also supported by the collective power of the people - for whatever unreasonable price they're charging for it, you can be certain that someone (or some bank) has paid it, therefore it's in the best interest of significant chucks of regular folks that house prices don't go down. Imo something similar is going on with retail investing. Btw housing in China is not an appreciating asset, because you don't own the land, you merely lease it from the government for 70-100 years, which is about the natural lifespan of a lot of buildings, after which maintaining them becomes more expensiv than rebuilding them.
- dijit 10mo ago
  The longer it takes to burst, the worse the outcome. Housing is being propped up by the governments of the west because it was already so problematic if it fails that millions of people would be severely impacted. Even the housing backed mortgage crisis of 2008 was as large a shock as the great depression, the reason we’re not all using money as toilet paper is due to government intervention. Rightly or wrongly. Some people believe that this intervention makes something worse bound to happen later- and based on the cost of housing I tend to believe them. It is not sustainable to keep housing at its current cost, and the financial model requires that they continue to increase in price. If house prices fall it is a disaster for millions.
- p0pularopinion 10mo ago
  There are a few noticeable differences between housing as an asset and AI datacenters. Beyond the obvious difference that a house has a depreciation in the order of decades, whereas AI GPUs are a few years. Then there is the fact that housing is a fundamental human need whereas AI, as frequently demonstrated, isn‘t even a want by many people. I am not saying that AI cannot demonstrate todays value 20 years into the future. But there is zero reason to believe the short to medium term payoffs on AI investment will be proportional to the investment we‘ve seen over the past few years
  - p-e-w 10mo ago
    > a house has a depreciation in the order of decades, whereas AI GPUs are a few years. That’s no longer true for datacenter-class GPUs. The A100 came out six years ago, and it still sells for $15k+, with no meaningful drop in the foreseeable future.
theozaurus 10mo ago
The book the 'Growth Delusion' has some great examples on this as well. To quote the FTs[1] review of the book. "The official protocols define the scope of GDP as measuring all monetised activity between willing parties in a given period. It is a pragmatic definition, but leads to some counterintuitive results. The sale of stolen goods for cash contributes positively to GDP, for example — so theft is good for growth. A parent’s housework and childcare, however, being unpaid, are excluded — resulting, by one recent evaluation, in a $3.8 trillion underestimate of the size of the US economy." I vaguely remember a similar one around traffic jams as well. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/b6182440-f21e-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974e9f https://www.ft.com/content/b6182440-f21e-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974...
- BrenBarn 10mo ago
  There is also a book called "Mismeasuring our lives" that makes some similar points about the overreliance on GDP as "the" measure of economic health.
- graemep 10mo ago
  The UK is just starting official statistics that include the value of household self supply. I do not know whether there is good enough historical data to compare it with.
bojan 10mo ago
You could have used the example of Ireland before. They score extremely well on GDP, and yet the quality of life of an average Irish person is on par with the rest of the Western Europe, with the costs of housing pressuring everything else.
- refurb 10mo ago
  Yeah, but everyone knows why. The IMF has called out that 40% of Ireland’s GDP isn’t real because it flows into and back out (back to the US mostly) due to tax schemes.

EZ-E 10mo ago

What is a good measure of meaningful growth? Genuinely asking. I imagine all measures have pros and cons.

adaml_623 10mo ago
Infant mortality
- Manuel_D 10mo ago
  Sure, but once countries hit a moderate level of development the bulk of preventable infant deaths are handled. E.g. Frances' rate has been flat since the turn of the millennium.
- MattDamonSpace 10mo ago
  Seems like you’d asymptotically approach 0% and then this metric would ignore eg space travel or food production efficiency
the8472 10mo ago
The kardashev scale? https://energyforgrowth.org/article/watch-countries-climb-the-energy-ladder/ https://energyforgrowth.org/article/watch-countries-climb-th...
jandrewrogers 10mo ago
Most meaningful alternative measures of growth very strongly correlate with GDP. Which is why we just go with GDP. It has issues but GDP has practical utility.
vbezhenar 10mo ago
You can't estimate a country with a single number. It makes no sense and actually hurts when someone decides to optimise for that number.
toenail 10mo ago
- Time to affordability ratios (Hours of work for food, energy, housing etc) - Intergenerational social mobility trend Not doing great on either.

TacticalCoder 10mo ago

It is an indicator and it's not totally non-meaningful. But GDP growth, when it's at the price of increasing the public debt and inflation, is no real growth. Instead of looking at the US, let's look at what used to be a relevant ally... In the eurozone, for example, politicians are hiding the lack of growth behind a growing mountain of public debt and the GDP growth ain't even beating inflation since the 2008 crisis. In 2008 the eurozone represented about 25% of the world's GDP. Now it's not even 15% anymore. Falling into irrelevancy doesn't begin to describe the state of things for the eurozone: from 25% of the world's GDP to less than 15% in 17 years is more than alarming. And yet if you look at the eurozone in Euro, it looks like it's been growing since 2008. But it's actually been stuck since nearly two decades now and there aren't signs of anything getting any better in the eurozone. German carmarkers, the number one export of the eurozone, are in huge trouble (with China eating their lunch). The US and China are, obviously, less fucked than the eurozone but the USA's growth has also been achieved at the cost of a runaway public debt and runaway inflation. I don't know what protectionism can and cannot do for the US and it's not clear if manufacturing can really come back to the US but one thing is certain: the eurozone is a failure and whatever it is that they did or do should definitely not be copied. Unelected bureaucrats have managed, in 17 years, to drive the eurozone into the ground. It's mostly true for non-eurozone EU countries as well but some, like Poland (which is in the EU but not in the eurozone), are doing fine. Basically: if you want to slash your part of the world's GDP by 40% in 17 years, do what the eurozone did. Now we must understand this: the eurozone didn't just slash it's part of the global GDP by 40% in 17 years... They did so while, at the same time, creating a gigantic mountain of public debt and experiencing inflation. Another 17 years of this, so another 40% loss, and the eurozone would only represent 9% of the world's GDP. And these unelected bureaucrats are so incompetent that I don't discard the possibility that they'll actually be able to crash the eurozone even faster than that. For example at the moment, while german carmarkers are in trouble, EU bureaucrats are hard at work trying to kill them for good. Anti-americanism and anti-trumpism is a thing on HN but people should really look more closely at what's happening elsewhere. What about an article from The Economist as to the reasons the eurozone managed to lose 40% of their share of the world's GDP since the 2008 financial crisis?

watwut 10mo ago

baxtr 10mo ago

I think it’s not perfect but probably the best we have. People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth).

djtango 10mo ago
Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations. A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite. Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...
- zmgsabst 10mo ago
  Millennials are 30-45, roughly. There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
- huhkerrf 10mo ago
  > Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time... This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50. "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age." "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age." https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
  - vanviegen 10mo ago
    If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.

wewxjfq 10mo ago

> Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

jmward01 10mo ago

Agreed. Long term economic health is always tied to long term social health. We should be, ultimately, trying to look at a broader index than some simplistic view of just money. It is a hard problem though to pin down an index for social health. As soon as we name a measure or index it becomes a target and its value drops. I tried to think of a more 'universal' index, one that could be applied to civilizations in the past and present and the best I could come up with is the healthier a civilization the more people can live together, longer, without killing each other. Not rigorous, but in general when I view history it seems to fit reasonably well.

HPsquared 10mo ago

GDP as a concept, and "growth" and "inflation" figures, remind me of that line from HBO's Chernobyl: "They gave them the propaganda number".

intended 10mo ago

Do not mistake indicators by using them for things they do not measure. There’s a lot of work being done by the term “all other things being equal” when using a measure like GDP. I don’t think we are in times when all else is equal.

refurb 10mo ago

Unless you have better alternatives you’re not really saying much. And I don’t think anyone relies only on GDP. Typically you’d look at employment rates, inflation, etc.

gadders 10mo ago

GDP per person should be the measure. The UK managed to make GDP go up while making GDP per person go down.

BrenBarn 10mo ago
GDP per capita has basically all the same problems.
- gadders 10mo ago
  I'm sure it has problems, but if I look at the top of this list (and exclude the tax havens) the answer to "Would I like to live there?" is Yes. Likewise for the bottom of the list it's an emphatic No. Is it a completely accurate indicator? Probably not. Is it directionally accurate? Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
  - BrenBarn 10mo ago
    Part of the problem though is that people often try to use GDP (or GDP per capita) to compare within the top of the list. Like they try to draw conclusions about whether "Germany is doing better than Italy". It's true that big differences in GDP per capita can distinguish between really good and really bad places, but so can many other measures (like life expectancy or education expectancy). Plus, even on a coarse rubric GDP isn't perfect. I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in Spain than Qatar or Greenland. :-)
p0pularopinion 10mo ago
GDP is not useful to measure how good an economy works. The core problem of GDP is that it does not account for usefulness of spending. GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.
- 10mo ago

ErigmolCt 10mo ago

GDP and growth are blunt instruments, but they're not meaningless... They tell you something about aggregate capacity, incomes, and whether the system is shrinking or expanding

ernst_klim 10mo ago

> meaningful measures of economic health As someone who lived in a handful of countries with GDP per capita ranging from $3k to $70k I must say that GDP is a great proxy of the QoL and median citizen wealth. Not the only one and not the perfectly correlated one, but a very good one.