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Comment by houseplant | Hacker News Reader

we gotta stop chasing the whole "line go up" ideology. I know that's all capitalism is and how it exists, but we need to be okay with just simply doing well for the sake of doing well. You don't need to instantly go berzerk with investors and stocks and shit. unfettered growth will never truly pay off.

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> unfettered growth will never truly pay off

It did for the US, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, China, everywhere that free markets were tried.

China is the worst example you can make for that point. They're sitting atop of a giant pile of debt, particularly in housing, and millions of people have lost their life savings as a result. China's economy is a house of cards just waiting to come crash down, and that's without the threat of the CCP wanting to take over Taiwan.

None of the problems China is facing is anywhere close to undoing 50 years of economic growth.

Thank you for pointing this out! It did for them on the back of others. The line has to go up mentality just puts resources from place A to place B.

Now lets get past that stage and make sure that it pays off for everybody.

On the backs of who?

How free markets work is the creators of wealth get to keep it. I.e. it's on their own backs.

But is the market actually free if you never get the chance to play? Or if a majority of players get nerfed by default because of "reasons"?

That's circular reasoning. You're defining "success" as "line go up" and then saying we made the "line go up" therefore we were successful. If you define success as GDP per capita, then sure, the countries with the highest GDP per capita won. However, even by other flawed metrics, such as Real GDP with purchasing power parity taken into account, India and Russia are also top of the list[1]. Even this metric is flawed, though, because humans are complicated and GDP != happiness or success.

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/real-gdp-purcha...

>However, even by other flawed metrics, such as Real GDP with purchasing power parity taken into account, India and Russia are also top of the list[1]

Country wide GDP figures (PPP adjusted or otherwise) are worthless for comparing quality of life. You need to compare per capita figures.

Any single number is worthless for comparing quality of life, per capita or not. How do you use a number to take into account the fact that some people don't have access to healthcare in the US or "freedom" in Russia?

My point isn't that GDP per capita is the end-all-be-all of quality of life metrics. It's that pointing out that Russia and India are at the top of the GDP list, and therefore GDP per capita (your previous comment seems to conflate the two) is a flawed metric, is such a poor argument that you're not giving the pro-GDP side a fair shake and possibly misrepresenting their argument. No "line goes up" or "GDP = quality of life" proponent thinks India has high quality of life because their country level GDP tops the list.

> line go up

Pick any measure you like. Free markets are the most prosperous.

> India and Russia

Do you really think their standard of living is higher than the US? Why is Seattle full of Russian and Indian immigrants? Why do you think zillions of immigrants are coming to the US? Because the US is a hellhole?

> GDP != happiness or success.

If you're happier being poor, just give away all your stuff to your favorite charity. Nobody is forcing you to be prosperous.

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