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Comment by vladms | Hacker News Reader

Generally true, although population ratio seem a bit off (EU population is 75% of USA population and USA GDP is 1.5 of GDP EU).

But GDP is not the only thing that matters. I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.

Also, worth mentioning EU has a lot of countries that grew a lot because there were so far behind (the ex-communist ones) which means it was playing "catch-up". There are advantages to not having lately a war on your territory (USA)...

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USA pop: abt 350 million EU pop: abt 450 million

> I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.

It's quaint to think that but compounding interest is a doozy. If your competitors are growing at 4% a year and you're growing at 1% a year, they will triple their economy over 30 years while your economy sees a meak 30% boost. At some point you'll find your economy an entire century behind in development. And you'll no longer even have power or influence over the decisions made at the grown ups table.

> I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.

GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.

>GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.

Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time.

The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.

Quality of life scores are completely subjective. There is no scientific way to measure it and it involves thousands of vectors that differ in importance for each individual. There's no way to objectively balance it.

GDP, while imperfect, is at least rooted in a quantitative value.

I disagree. There are objective measures for wellbeing...

You've got health measures like life expectancy, infant / maternal mortality, disability adjusted life years, BMI, cortesol, blood pressure, suicide rates, etc. Economic ones like labor market participation, un[der]employment, poverty rates, gini coefficients. Societal ones like crime rates, trust levels, civic participation, environmental metric, public transit accessibility, international test scores, human rights, marriage and actual vs wanted fertility rates. The list goes on. There are countless measures, just few that economists genuinely value.

I googled some numbers for human development index, as the most developed/popular/reliable, and have following findings:

- there is strong correlation between index and EU countries GDP per capita: countries with high GDP are at the top, and countries with low GDP are at the bottom

- US index is higher than combined EU index, some EU countries with high GDP top US

I mean HDI includes GDP / capita as one of it's primary measures, so yes, the US does well if you double count the one metric where it outperforms Europe...

Per wikipedia, it has per capita income, but not GDP.

Ok, does it make a difference? You're still double counting

Difference is that personal income is absolutely direct metric for well being, unlike GDP.

Not sure how its double counting.

No, you don't even have life expectancy as it is confounded by several things: for one, there are racial differences between countries. It turns out some races are naturally prone to die earlier than other races, even when you control for income.

And how would you weigh life expectancy vs suicide rates? Let's say we try to create an index. You think life expectancy should be weighted at 80% and suicide rates at 20%? Why? There's no rhyme or reason for that figure, it just sounds good. Well it gets more and more confounding as you add up all the other vectors. Labor market participation now thrown into the same broad index, despite all three values being completely orthogonal.

There is no objective way to reconcile that.

I hold pat on my assertion. There are countless better measures of quality of life, and even the inventor of the metric admitted as much.

That's like a textbook McNamara fallacy - Y is what we care about, but X is what we can measure, so what matters is improving X even if it means we diminish Y.

If you can't quantify Y you can't even prove Y is diminishing. What a bogus fallacy.

> If you can't quantify Y you can't even prove Y is diminishing

Indeed. But what matters is whether Y is diminishing, not what's easy for you to prove. The world is not obliged to make the important things easy to measure, and it generally doesn't.

GDP is an extremely imprecise inaccurate rough measure of economic strength. Every country is unique and has its own set of footnotes and caveats. Even within the same country there are often huge differences (e.g. North of England is not the same as London, and California is not the same as Mississippi).

Sure, GDP is not totally accurate (not sure about extremely though), you feel free to bring better metric and we will check it.

You can't capture a complex reality in a single number.

you can capture approximation/estimation, which is much better than ignoring reality completely.

GDP and stock market does not reflect quality of life very well.

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