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Seriously. If there was an obvious alternate metric, we'd already be using it. Measuring well-being and happiness will never be straightforward and uncontrover

by _skel 4y ago

Seriously. If there was an obvious alternate metric, we'd already be using it. Measuring well-being and happiness will never be straightforward and uncontroversial, despite what the authors of the article say. You don't need to look much past the first few paragraphs of the article to see an obvious bias about income inequality. That reveals what attempts to find new metrics are really about: the authors want to use a set of metrics which have built-in left-wing assumptions about how society ought to look. To think that such controversial metrics could serve as a replacement for GDP only reveals the authors' own naivete.

mxkopy 4y ago
[flagged]
robocat 4y ago
> a set of metrics which have built-in left-wing assumptions Introducing political statements on HN and feeding them is frowned upon, but I will bite: the right wing also needs an answer to the problems caused by inequality. Solving issues caused by inequality can easily be a right wing objective: for example when fixing an issue also helps the middle class or the rich. A metric for inequality can be politically completely neutral, yet it will trigger partisans on the left or right. I do agree that metrics and solutions often have covert political biases. I think that regardless of your political inclination, the core message of the article remains the same.
jerojero 4y ago
There is actually a lot of knowledge that's been built that shows many effects of inequality on societies. It might not seem obvious but inequality is actually a big driving factor in people's feelings of dissatisfaction in their everyday lives. But to argue the point a bit more, and this is something that Thomas Piketty (an economist that studies inequality) always brings in his books: one measure is not enough. GDP is one measure, we need to look at many more measures. GDP does say something, it's not meaningless, but we need other measurements to get the full understanding of the picture. And we actually have lots of them, GDP sadly fails to capture a lot of externalities, so it doesn't really capture very well for example environmental damage; think of china, their GDP is growing a lot but we can all see it's not growing in a sustainable manner. Or think of the USA, highest GDP in the planet but this isn't being reflected in life expectancy for example which actually has been declining for a while now. And as I said in the beginning, inequality very much affects people's well being and the well being of an economy as a whole as well. So it is definitely a measurement that we ought to take seriously. It seems silly to me to say "these are left wing metric". These are metrics that have a reason of being, inequality has real effects on our economies and there is a lot of work, and good work at that, that you can read on why precisely this is the case.

by _skel 4y ago

mxkopy 4y ago

[flagged]

robocat 4y ago

> a set of metrics which have built-in left-wing assumptions Introducing political statements on HN and feeding them is frowned upon, but I will bite: the right wing also needs an answer to the problems caused by inequality. Solving issues caused by inequality can easily be a right wing objective: for example when fixing an issue also helps the middle class or the rich. A metric for inequality can be politically completely neutral, yet it will trigger partisans on the left or right. I do agree that metrics and solutions often have covert political biases. I think that regardless of your political inclination, the core message of the article remains the same.

jerojero 4y ago

There is actually a lot of knowledge that's been built that shows many effects of inequality on societies. It might not seem obvious but inequality is actually a big driving factor in people's feelings of dissatisfaction in their everyday lives. But to argue the point a bit more, and this is something that Thomas Piketty (an economist that studies inequality) always brings in his books: one measure is not enough. GDP is one measure, we need to look at many more measures. GDP does say something, it's not meaningless, but we need other measurements to get the full understanding of the picture. And we actually have lots of them, GDP sadly fails to capture a lot of externalities, so it doesn't really capture very well for example environmental damage; think of china, their GDP is growing a lot but we can all see it's not growing in a sustainable manner. Or think of the USA, highest GDP in the planet but this isn't being reflected in life expectancy for example which actually has been declining for a while now. And as I said in the beginning, inequality very much affects people's well being and the well being of an economy as a whole as well. So it is definitely a measurement that we ought to take seriously. It seems silly to me to say "these are left wing metric". These are metrics that have a reason of being, inequality has real effects on our economies and there is a lot of work, and good work at that, that you can read on why precisely this is the case.