In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.
gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.
And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.
Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.
Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious
We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.
But this doesn't change that richer countries really are better off than poorer countries, and GDP is a reasonable measure of that.
https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
Which was new to me, but puts some numbers behind the non-discretionary discretionary spending concept raised by this article.
Who? Obviously they are ignoring monopolies but I thought that was more of a quiet corruption thing.
Not very far in and this seems like a propaganda piece already. I’m not even gonna claim they don’t care about middle class wages going up, but they have way too many side quests to claim that’s all they care about.