It sounds silly but we should take it one step further and look at life satisfaction. Who cares about jobs if people are unhappy?
Stay at home parents could be way more valuable than more Wall Street jobs.
Stay at home parents could be way more valuable than more Wall Street jobs.
You optimize for one to the detriment of the other. American culture is atypically biased toward the "life satisfaction" side of that tradeoff.
I think the bottom line is that there is no one figure that informs us about all questions. But certain figures have strong correlations. People rag here almost daily about how GDP/Capita is a poor measure of x, y, or z, yet cannot name a low gdp/capita country they'd prefer to have been born in. Because GDP/Capita correlates very precisely with higher standards of living.