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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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