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Comment by kamikazeturtles | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, I know GDP is a flawed measure, but as long as its flaws are consistent over the years it is useful for scaling.

I don't think they can be considered consistent over the years. 20% of our GDP is healthcare and that's only going to grow as the population ages. I don't know what percent of the GDP is financial services but that'll probably also grow until we get something akin to 2008 again.

Including healthcare and financial services in GDP figures feels out of place and unproductive but I'm not an economist so I don't know what I'm talking about.

Then you have the services sector which makes you reconsider what the point of calculating a country's GDP is to begin with?

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> Including healthcare and financial services in GDP figures feels out of place and unproductive

You reminded me of something: a nurse in San Diego sleeping through her entire shift is more productive than half a dozen nurses in many third world countries working hard, because the way economists measure productivity is the $/hour output. People doing nothing in America are much more productive than people doing a lot in most of the world because that is how we define productivity, and how the term is discussed in articles and papers.

Doesn't matter, the same articles and papers will bring up that US enjoys higher productivity due to better technologies, etc, but since all of that makes it very hard to be really measured, it's always a mixture of some heterogeneous ideas together.

In practice third world countries are very unproductive, and it's immediately visible to the naked eye. Many shops and restaurants have half a dozen people (or more!) taking the order and handling the check, there are entire extended families manning market stalls that barely sell anything, cabbies just hang out all day waiting for a ride, etc. You might be theoretically right, but I think that's not actually how it works out in reality.

I have made a very specific example, you extrapolated some other data from it.

If you want a clearer comparison take Japan and tell me their average driver, nurse, teacher, policeman, factory worker, carpenter, painter, car mechanic, shop assistant, barista, bank clerk, etc does "less" or "less efficiently" than his american counter part.

Because there is a huge difference in measured productivity between them.

There might be, at times, some added productivity in US due to having more capital at disposal to adopt some technology, there might be some other benefits from being more risk prone in US? Sure. But that amounts for smallish differences and sure not for the immense gap measured by economic measures, which, at the end of the day, as explained with the initial sleeping nurse example is still $/hour.

Taxi driver in USA is 5 times more productive than taxi driver in Indonesia!

Unironically. His passengers will produce more money working and/or spend more money buying. The taxi driver is a direct enabler of all of this.

> Doesn't matter, the same articles and papers will bring up that US enjoys higher productivity due to better technologies, etc, but since all of that makes it very hard to be really measured, it's always a mixture of some heterogeneous ideas together.

It's actually worse than that, because in lots of EU/western countries health is provided by states which gets booked against GDP at cost. In the US, because it's more private it gets booked higher because of the margins. It's actually responsible for a bunch of the US's "productivity" growth since the financial crisis.

It reminds me of the early days of the russian invasion when everyone was mocking russia for having the same gdp as spain. As it turns out having a small gdp doesn't mean much as long aas you have industries and resources.

France includes illegal drug traffic and illegal prostitution in its gdp too

Most countries include criminal enterprises when determining economic statistics. It's important, because economic crises can begin in shadow industries.

Having small GDP per capita means people are poor. Having poor people is even better to the war. Russia is economically weak, but can continue this war for 5 years or even more, paying immense price for it, sacrificing their feature.

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