We should really be trying to maximize a human happiness metric with the _minimum_ amount of GDP. Quantifying that is a challenge, but if we don’t start, we’ll never get there.
It’s possible to call out externalized costs (eg greenhouse emissions, many plastics) and be optimistic about our ability, as a species, to produce more.
Using dollars spent as a measure of happiness is unfortunately the best we can do (so far).
I’m also unconvinced that obesity is caused by “the economic policies that improve GDP”.
When those objective metrics do map strongly to the subjective metrics, then it's awesome. But the problem is that in practice near to any objective metric can be completely and utterly gamed in, more or less, "honest" ways. Essentially, a government can find ways to increase it without increasing the things that it's supposed to represent. But you can't game how people themselves perceive things without outright lying and fraud.
The subjective metrics would also measure things objective metrics fail on hard. For instance war, as the aggressor or 'backer', is absolutely awesome for near to every economic metric. And national "defense" was one of the big winners in this GDP report. But do these wars provide a subjective quality of life improvement, or deterioration, for people? Basically I don't think the goal of the government should be to provide value to shareholders. That's the point of private industry and capitalism at large. The point of the government is to create a desirable state of life for people living within a country.
Subjective metrics are even easier to game though. Just dope everyone up, or tell them every other country is worse off, or.... And it's harder to prove lying or fraud because it's all subjective ideas, whereas when you have an objective number then at least if someone actually lies about the number that's provable.
> And national "defense" was one of the big winners in this GDP report. But do these wars provide a subjective quality of life improvement, or deterioration, for people?
The point of defense spending is so that you don't get invaded. Getting invaded tends to cause a major deterioration in quality of life.
In some countries people seem totally disconnected and frustrated (France, Italy come to mind), in others people feel a personal responsibility to make their country a success (Scandinavian countries come to mind)
That to me seems a better indicator for the future