Citation needed.
Moreover, dedicating resources to finance can be seen as dedicating resources to better dedicate resources.
(I upvoted the article since it's interesting stuff)
I asserted that using money as a mechanism for gradient ascent is not working. I will walk you through my thinking, since this is an off beat claim.
1) Not all human needs are related to resources. Money cannot buy dignity, or love, and in-fact can generate the opposite of these qualities in one's life.
2) Most 1st World Humans have everything they need, materially, and more
3) Suicide is the ultimate statement of 'I am not having a good time'
4) Wealth is not hugely overwhelmingly correlated with lower suicide rates, with some of the wealthiest countries clocking in the highest rates of suicide. Source: List of countries by suicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... (Sort by all descending)
5) I believe some other element or spirit is being maximized in happy countries, which also leads to wealth.
6) We should try to maximize a certain social spirit, which then maximizes wealth, instead of trying to directly maximize wealth.
7) GDP is a strange metric, which doesn't directly map to abundance. Yet, socially, we try to maximize it. I think this metric is victim to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Thoughts?
but what other metric are you going to use?
not an anti-communist, but so far central planning has shown itself to be equally ripe for corruption.
I believe that balancing our minds and our heart's influence on our decision is how we should proceed.
> Thoughts?
My thought is please don't do this. You get no useful information. Wikipedia strips out all the necessary context. The source that Wikipedia uses explicitly tells you that comparing rates across countries is difficult and fraught with problems.
Heck, comparing rates across a single country - the US - is tricky because they've only just developed a unified definition of "suicide".
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide
> Globally, the availability and quality of data on suicide and suicide attempts is poor. Only some 80 Member States have good-quality vital registration data that can be used directly to estimate suicide rates. This problem of poor-quality mortality data is not unique to suicide, but given the sensitivity of suicide – and the illegality of suicidal behaviour in some countries – it is likely that under-reporting and misclassification are greater problems for suicide than for most other causes of death.
Insofar as wealth makes life less nasty and brutish it probably makes life more loving but money buys a lot of dignity.
I assert that around the 1990s money started to disconnect with utility generation. Instead of the work week reducing in hours, with the advent of telecommunication, we start getting always-on-call jobs, yet people are paid basically the same. Productivity goes parabolic; median wages stay the same. You have to admit that there is something fishy about this, right? I think we basically have found a method to optimize towards a local maximum in productivity, but we are missing the strategies which lead us to a global maximum. And I think this method of optimization towards the maximum is basically serfdom.
The Economist once commented that the last subatomic particle to have commercial value was the neutron, discovered in 1932.