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Comment by bopbeepboop | Hacker News Reader

I really want to see how the US being the richest is calculated.

Not that I doubt it, but simple metrics like GDP per capita have obvious problems.

For one, if two women instead of taking care of their own families take care of the others for pay, GDP has increased (and the government took money from both).

Those two families, however, just lost money (taxes on income) while having inferior care and losing 1-2 hours of care a day (travel time).

Maximizing GDP can be negative to well-being and it’s possible that untracked labor such as traditional wives in other countries could actually be a gain for their populace over a higher GDP nation.

I think how to measure wealth in real terms is difficult.

(This is all setting aside that Wall St is cooked book stew at this point and much of US wealth depends on that fabrication.)

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>I really want to see how the US being the richest is calculated.

I don't think it's really a mystery. When people say this, they are referring to the fact that the US has the largest GDP (total, not per capita) in the world. Of course there are pros/cons to this measure. That said, while your hypothetical is true, I'm not sure it's realistic for all the reasons you said; it wouldn't make any sense for the parties involved.

I didn’t know that — I knew it was a measure, but not necessarily that it’s the measure most people mean.

> I'm not sure it's realistic for all the reasons you said; it wouldn't make any sense for the parties involved.

I would argue that a major economic viewpoint is exactly this has happened — women entered the workforce to do jobs that replaced the role they traditionally did at home, which boosted GDP but crashed a bunch of untracked value.

I’ve had several economists explain that to me as the source of growing worker discontentment: they give more labor for less value delivered to them, but it makes the number bigger on the books. You say it doesn’t make sense for the parties involved, but that’s only true of the two families: the government gets extra tax revenue if the families make that exchange. People outside those families have an incentive to force them into that position because those people benefit from the families loss.

I think if you added a couple steps to my scenario (and some information fuzziness), you could see it happening in the real world.

I overly distilled the point to highlight the absurdity.

There's a lot wrong with the way GDP is measured. Economist Michael Hudson writes about this.

Nevertheless the US is a very wealthy country by any measure.

It's not some one-for-one trade where Mom A shows up at Family B's home for her shift as nanny, while Mom B does the reverse.

In reality Mom A is a nurse, and cares for 20+ people in a day, and Mom B is a school administrator, both provide more than one-day-of-mothering value per day worked, so it's actually in everyone best interest that they leave their kids at daycare, consuming 1/6th of a less-talented person's day, enabling their professional output. Even the daycare worker multiplies their output by watching multiple children.

Right, I understand the theory.

What I’m saying is striping out “mom” work into “preschool”, “restaurant”, and “laundromat” leads to inefficiencies that don’t come back at scale — for most families. Rich families have always had maids, etc. precisely for the reasons you state: it makes economic sense.

We’re making that up in decreased quality: your family gets worse childcare, food, and laundry plus some extra lost time to transit in exchange for mom spending her day doing those things for other families. (Eg, McDonalds or Denny’s or preschool or a maid.)

The on-the-books increase from “nurse” and “school administrator” aren’t due to increased efficiency, but rather, due to off-the-books losses, like the value of homemakers.

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