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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Hypothetically, what would the net change to the GDP year over year be if we killed all people over a threshold age when they were diagnosed with a terminal disease?

My point is not that this would be a good idea, it's that GDP growth is not a good measure for a society across the board.

Maybe GDP growth would be higher if we could simply dump toxic waste in water supplies, and the threat of lawyers/class action suits that helps prevent that behavior hurts economic growth.

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I think there are a thousand nails and you hit one of the most outstanding ones in the head. GDP is as much a metric of wealth as it is of the speed with which we consume natural resources.

If we account for externalities witha reasonable "weight" most economic activity must be operating close to or at an absolute loss

GDP growth is a questionable metric even for wealth.

For example, if two housewives join the workforce by cleaning each other’s now unattended houses, GDP shows a large increase even though the situation is (arugably) a net loss for everyone involved.

The difference is they have to pay tax on what they earn, so they are technically contributing to the society.

But where would that money come from? If they both clean the other person's house for $20, where does $5 in taxes come from? (Answer: from the other income earner.). So the "contribution to society" doesn't just magically appear when we make this a commercial transaction.

Yup, they just decided to give away some money to the society (via govt taxes). Not saying this is good, just saying there is a difference.

Consider an alternate viewpoint: The universe is destroying natural resources both via growing blackholes as well as by entire galaxies moving beyond our accessible light cone due to expansion.

Thus we are wasting an unfathomable amount of natural resources by delaying our transition to a space-faring civilization. And world GDP is currently the best measure we have of human technological progress.

Most of the unfathomable amount of resources being lost isn't even within traveling distance, right? And there's a massive bounty to be found in the asteroid belt here in our solar system, we could make trillions of dollars of "wealth" by transporting rare metals back here, surely?

The main reason for delays on this front seems to be a lack of long-term thinking, as well as a general disinterest in advancing space technology.

If we can develop warp drive those light cones won't be constraining

They may not be as constraining but we will still be constrained by available energy. Bending spacetime requires huge amounts of energy. So maybe instead of a light-cone it would be a warp-energy cone.

> Hypothetically, what would the net change to the GDP year over year be if we killed all people over a threshold age when they were diagnosed with a terminal disease?

That depends on how profitable it is to provide the treatment for terminal illnesses.

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