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Comment by mentalgear | Hacker News Reader

The key missing metric is "Happiness/Contentment." While its definition may be somewhat subjective, asking people how satisfied they are with their lives could be a good start. However, it'd be less surprising if that metric might not have the same trajectory as the overall trend of the other graphs.

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Happiness being subjective is exactly why it is an important metric. We are conscious beings with subjective experiences. I don't care how many studies say that I'm objectively happy I read, if I'm not happy, the metrics are meaningless and perhaps even harmful to me.

That being said, optimizing for some of these collective benchmarks does create some baseline stability from which people can pursue and build their own rich, meaningful and happy lives.

They optimize for system health, not health of each node. However, a healthy system is great, though if all the nodes kill themselves, or tear the system apart, maybe it isn't so healthy?

I'm referring to slow suicide through "lifestyle choices", and war, both physical and cultural.

So work should be done on all levels of abstraction, from the system level down to the compute node, and even lower, to the energy, and maintenance of compute subsystems.

Hard to measure that. Even GDP/capita is too rough a measure. People who do subsistence farming may not be starving or dirt poor, but GDP/capita completely fails to capture their production and consumption. But at least GDP/capita is a decent enough measure because as a nation gets wealthier there is more specialization of labor and subsistence farming becomes a thing of the past (and along the way food security improves dramatically). But let's just say that food security enables happiness/contentment -- that the rest is up to each individual, because how else could it be?

There are plenty of such measures. They just aren't very flattering for the GDP-growth dogma.

See e.g. The World Happiness Report, (I)HDI, GNW, GNH.

I checked the first two, and both the World Happiness Report and IHDI seem to be very well correlated with GDP per capita.

The Happiness Index includes GDP per capita in their metric, IHDI includes GNI per capita.

That seems pretty flattering for the GDP-growth dogma, then, if organizations trying to measure happiness and human development feel that GDP statistics are an important input.

GNI is about inequality, which again many of us in this thread argue is not a good measure. Bringing it back in through the backdoor doesn't help. Argue the points.

GNI is Gross National Income, which is not about inequality. It's essentially GDP corrected with money transfers from and to other countries.

You're probably confusing it to the Gini coefficient.

Ah yes, sorry -- both pronounced the same way.

Would such a metric even honestly exist on the historical time-frames covered? I would guess late industrial-early modernity at best as the beginning of such data systematically.

That metric is globally in slight increase, but in decline in the richer world, especially in younger populations.

https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-of-the-young...

I wonder how much social media use and campaigns have to do with the decline in happiness in industrialized countries.

Apparently some, but e.g. in USA happiness has been in decline since the 1980's.

https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happi...

The social "sciences" and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race. We'd be better off if we just stopped applying labels like "metric" or "data" to subjective concepts altogether.

Especially economics.

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