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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to think current measures of "the economy" are bogus. It can't grow indefinitely - that's probably just inflation. If you measure productivity in hours rather than dollars, inflation gets a more direct measure: how many hours do I need to work to buy food?

Making a better product than last year is also a strange way to claim growth.

What would be a better measure?

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Why do you think the economy can't grow indefinitely? Living standards have skyrocketed in the last 200 years. Most people no longer die of appendicitis or dysentary in the USA. We have a/c now. And unlimited access to free information.

To your measure of food and work hours, here's 70 years of progress in less work buying more food-- https://cepr.net/publications/in-the-good-old-days-one-fourt...

The backbone of what you are saying is planned obsolescence and other predatory practices

Good news! The average worker has gone from spending about 25% of their paycheck on food in 1930[1] to about 11% today[2]. This is during a time period where the average worker has decreased their total hours[3]. This is confounded by more people entering the workforce, but the earliest data I can find suggests that we've gone from 58% of the population in the workforce in 1950 to 63% today[4].

[1] https://flatworldknowledge.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-ec... (Note that "Food" is "food as a percentage of income", and "eating out" is "eating out as a percentage of food" which makes the chart look weird. This means that the 11% number below includes the cost of the private taxi for your burrito.)

[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/02/27/price-food-us-inflation-dat...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=18H2H

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

I don't believe we work less hours now. Something about that chart seems off. Wish I knew the methodology of its calculations

I'm more concerned about the graph attributed to flatworldknowledge.lardbucket.org. I've lived on the internet long enough to know a shitposter when I see one and that's a whale of a URL that every fiber of my body says never to click. I know it is a logical fallacy to dismiss an entire argument simply by association with a crank, but that's my gut reaction to that post.

... I didn't even notice the name. That site is an archive of a collection of textbooks that were Creative Commons-licensed before 2012, dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Evidently https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/beginning-economic-an... goes to the same place.

I feel like I just got pranked by SEO somehow

Alas, the government provides no transparency into these calculations. What can a concerned citizen do, other than say "I don't believe"?

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2022/article/improving-estimate...

wait, are you saying they actually don't or is this some form of sarcasm? because the link clearly shows, to me at least, that they document the methods publicly

You can look at per capita GDP in inflation-adjusted dollars

Few people are concerned about growing indefinitely, more people are concerned about can it grow until they retire

GDP was always a horseshit measure (the inventor of GDP essentially says so *in the paper in which he invented it). But it should still be extremely worrying when ~every possible indicator points toward bad.

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