Do not mistake economic indicators such as GDP or "growth" for meaningful measures of economic health.
Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth).
A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite.
Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...
There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50.
"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age."
"Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age."
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.
The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.
But pivoting to the "but it's not my lived experience, bro" is weak.
If you made the claim that "millenials have it harder than their parent" then we're talking something where experience can be more useful.
Although anecdotally my father moved to the UK with my mother with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and by 27 my dad was able to afford his first property in London start a family, all without a uni degree and hadn't even yet finished his accountancy training. He did that without any family help and in fact was sending money home. This has always helped provide a bit of colour of how things have changed
0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of... 1: the best I could find was median at 38 in 2022: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennia...
I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Also, see what djtango said. It's not that simple.
I'm all for trying things for sure, but it has to be done in very small scale and over significant time scales.
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Being pedantic about how we measure progress might create the impression that it’s not about the progress but instead about being right.
Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following.
Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe.
It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.
> Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars.
A bit of nuance, they ended in 1999, however the whole thing is still influencing Europe negatively and is not as isolated as it seems. Not just there are now seven countries instead of one to consider and negotiate with, a couple of them are utterly disfunctional. Further, two biggest chunks are deeply sunk into nationalism. Far too little effort had been made back then to try to reform the place into a functional system.
In fact, in the vast majority of cases (including North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, India & South-East Asia) progress is entirely about countries choosing how quickly they are comfortable with improvement happening. Africa and the Middle East it is a combination of policy choices and cultural problems. Arguably foreign interference - although even then policy and strategy tends to be the bigger thing over time.
This is an extremely bold claim. Always was, but especially in today's world it is. I am not saying that Modi's policies are bad, what I am trying to say is that he is basically playing the game on the easy mode. He has access to the unprecedentely dynamic and resilient global economy _and_ he has access to cheap Russian resources Europe doesn't want to buy anymore. All Modi needs to do is not do anything really stupid - the economy will perform well unless clubbed to the head.
And that is all fine, and I am genuinely happy for India. My problem is that Modi is using that easily achieved success to erode democratic institutions - and that will become a problem in the long-term, as it always historically has, everywhere.
The world has been in easy mode for 70 years now. Any government can choose to sit back and let people get wealthy. It is literally so easy that even the communists figured it out.
The electronics industries of a couple decades ago were producing stuff that are incomparable to what we have today. Taking that into account, I would say today is "better".
It always is but not everyone has the option of buying. It takes investment and not everyone's parents are wealthy.
As always, local circumstances matter.
Some places like Austin, which haven't gone down the NIMBY zoning route, are still somewhat affordable.
Everybody mocked Russia for having the same gdp as Spain. As it turns out your economy is much stronger when it's focused on heavy industries, steel, mining, oil, &c. Than when it is focused on tourism and other services
One produces value, the other generates money, when shits hit the fan you need energy, the drunk brits coming in your strip clubs aren't that useful anymore
Do you think Spain would fair better than Russia against Ukraine ?
But you’re not taken into account how many men Russia is losing to maintain that level of aggression. It’s compensating its small GDP with humans.
Spain would never do that and thus fail.
How exactly is their economy "strong"? By what measure? You cannot really eat tanks, that is what made life in the Soviet Union unsatisfactory as well.
Current price of Ural oil is some 9 dollars above their breakeven costs. As the classic says, not great, not terrible.
Industry focused economies are going to continue to come under pressure due to automation. The US for example has a lot of industrial output, but shrinking industrial jobs. And that’s a good thing. Sending people into coal mines should never be a long term plan.
idk man, France's economy minister said he would bring "russia on its knees" economically, 3 years later it's still not anywhere close to being a reality, the minister isn't here anymore tho.
Put half of the sanctions on spain and it would fold in a month
On its own? Sure. (Although to be fair to Spain, they've invested heavily in solar and high-value agriculture in recent years).
But seen as part of a system with Germany and perhaps the UK (no longer part of the EU, but was better for both when they were), it's a valuable part of quality-of-life in the overall economic bloc.
Where would you rather live? Spain, easy.
Who would win in a war? Russia, easy.
Some will read this as an argument against the Spanish lifestyle. On balance I prefer to read it as an argument against war.
Really? Russia has not even done all that well against Ukraine, a much smaller economy.
What sort of war? I agree Spain could not successfully invade Russia, on the other hand Russia could not invade Spain either. No working aircraft carriers so their air force would be operating from very distant bases (even if they were allowed to pass over the countries in between), limits on ability to land large numbers of troops, etc.
> no longer part of the EU, but was better for both when they were
I do not understand why you even mention that as the EU does not have a military, NATO is relevant and the UK is in NATO.
Its a matter of opinion. I think the UK is at least as well off (growth has been similar to comparable economies like France and Germany since Brexit) without even seeing the long term benefits AND the EU is better off as the UK was a major impediment to the political integration the Euro zone needs.
Spain army's is 1/10th of Ukraine's and basically haven't been in anything close to a war in decades, so yes, really and easily lmao.
Ukraine alone produces more military drones per month than the entire EU per year btw.
They do not have a border with Russia so how could Russia get their army to Spain?
Ukraine has armed forces geared to fight a land war with Russia. How do Ukraine's air force and navy compare to Spain's?
> Ukraine alone produces more military drones per month than the entire EU per year btw.
Because they are in a war. You cannot compare fully geared up war time production to peacetime production. What was Ukraine's drone output prior to the current Russian invasion?
And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.
In advanced western countries that is. If you compare Nigeria from 2000 to Nigeria today, sure, maybe...
Infant mortality was 10.4 per 1,000 live births in 1986 in the US. It was 5.5 I'm 2023.
Life expectancy was 74. Now it's 78.
The crime rate peaked in the US in 1991.
Life isn't perfect now. Housing needs to be a lot more affordable, for one. University costs in the US are insane, for another.
But to paint this as no progress? Come on.
Are you just saying this thinking no one will ask you to back it up with data? Care to quantify what "so much better" actually means?
Most of those apply both here in Europe and the US.
And that's without even getting into more subjective QoL stuff, from cultural production to the widespread depression and the loneliness epidemic.
https://energyforgrowth.org/article/watch-countries-climb-th...
- Intergenerational social mobility trend
Not doing great on either.
1. Look at income and consumption rather than production
2. Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth
3. Emphasize the household perspective (with this they seem to be focusing on more meaningful measurement of in-kind services and inter-sector payments, like government provision of healthcare and education, etc.)
4. Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption, and wealth
5. Broaden income measures to non-market activites (their examples here are things like childcare, where a shift from non-market childcare to market childcare over time can create the illusion of an increase in productivity)
Personally #4 is my biggest beef with GDP (and related measures like GDP per capita). Without some kind of adjustment for inequality, GDP can easily make bad things look good. What we need is not overall growth but equitably distributed gains; even a decrease in GDP could result in most people being better off if it occurred because of wealth redistribution.
Which mechanisms exist to redistribute wealth fairly?
There’s a lot of work being done by the term “all other things being equal” when using a measure like GDP.
I don’t think we are in times when all else is equal.
Likewise for the bottom of the list it's an emphatic No.
Is it a completely accurate indicator? Probably not. Is it directionally accurate? Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.
Granted it might not be fine grained enough to distinguish between Number 4 and Number 5 on the list.
As someone who lived in a handful of countries with GDP per capita ranging from $3k to $70k I must say that GDP is a great proxy of the QoL and median citizen wealth. Not the only one and not the perfectly correlated one, but a very good one.
And I don’t think anyone relies only on GDP. Typically you’d look at employment rates, inflation, etc.
Notice how the term “housing bubble” is used much less frequently today than 10 years ago? That’s because that so-called bubble has been ballooning in size for three decades now, and almost nobody still believes that it will “burst” in any meaningful sense. The Dotcom bubble was in many ways an outlier.
People dont talk about housing bubble as much, because it is history at this point. Not something that would go on now.
And no, housing being expensive is not the same thing as a bubble. We dont have bubble in housing now.
<Australia weeps>
That's because Boomers live far longer than prior generations thanks to medical advances. The housing bubble will collapse (at least outside of the megalopolises) once the Boomers finally start to die en masse due to their over-representation in demographics.
But before that, the pension systems will crash hard. For people in systems with redistributions (like most of Europe), there simply aren't enough working age people contributing payments for the pensioners, and for people in stonk-based systems (e.g. US 401k), they will run into the issue that someone has to buy the stocks that the pensioners sell off to fund their retirement, and ain't no one of my generation buying stocks, thanks to us having to spend insane amounts of rent.
Without the AI bubble artificially propping up the GDP, it is most likely the US economy is in a recession [1].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/ai-infrastructure-boom-masks...
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/housing-index
Unsuccessfully, I might add.
So everyone who's not considered a deadbeat shall be indebted to the bank for decades to come. Their prices are also supported by the collective power of the people - for whatever unreasonable price they're charging for it, you can be certain that someone (or some bank) has paid it, therefore it's in the best interest of significant chucks of regular folks that house prices don't go down.
Imo something similar is going on with retail investing.
Btw housing in China is not an appreciating asset, because you don't own the land, you merely lease it from the government for 70-100 years, which is about the natural lifespan of a lot of buildings, after which maintaining them becomes more expensiv than rebuilding them.
Housing is being propped up by the governments of the west because it was already so problematic if it fails that millions of people would be severely impacted.
Even the housing backed mortgage crisis of 2008 was as large a shock as the great depression, the reason we’re not all using money as toilet paper is due to government intervention. Rightly or wrongly. Some people believe that this intervention makes something worse bound to happen later- and based on the cost of housing I tend to believe them. It is not sustainable to keep housing at its current cost, and the financial model requires that they continue to increase in price. If house prices fall it is a disaster for millions.
Then there is the fact that housing is a fundamental human need whereas AI, as frequently demonstrated, isn‘t even a want by many people.
I am not saying that AI cannot demonstrate todays value 20 years into the future. But there is zero reason to believe the short to medium term payoffs on AI investment will be proportional to the investment we‘ve seen over the past few years
That’s no longer true for datacenter-class GPUs. The A100 came out six years ago, and it still sells for $15k+, with no meaningful drop in the foreseeable future.
"The official protocols define the scope of GDP as measuring all monetised activity between willing parties in a given period. It is a pragmatic definition, but leads to some counterintuitive results. The sale of stolen goods for cash contributes positively to GDP, for example — so theft is good for growth. A parent’s housework and childcare, however, being unpaid, are excluded — resulting, by one recent evaluation, in a $3.8 trillion underestimate of the size of the US economy."
I vaguely remember a similar one around traffic jams as well.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b6182440-f21e-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974...
Instead of looking at the US, let's look at what used to be a relevant ally...
In the eurozone, for example, politicians are hiding the lack of growth behind a growing mountain of public debt and the GDP growth ain't even beating inflation since the 2008 crisis. In 2008 the eurozone represented about 25% of the world's GDP. Now it's not even 15% anymore.
Falling into irrelevancy doesn't begin to describe the state of things for the eurozone: from 25% of the world's GDP to less than 15% in 17 years is more than alarming.
And yet if you look at the eurozone in Euro, it looks like it's been growing since 2008. But it's actually been stuck since nearly two decades now and there aren't signs of anything getting any better in the eurozone. German carmarkers, the number one export of the eurozone, are in huge trouble (with China eating their lunch).
The US and China are, obviously, less fucked than the eurozone but the USA's growth has also been achieved at the cost of a runaway public debt and runaway inflation.
I don't know what protectionism can and cannot do for the US and it's not clear if manufacturing can really come back to the US but one thing is certain: the eurozone is a failure and whatever it is that they did or do should definitely not be copied. Unelected bureaucrats have managed, in 17 years, to drive the eurozone into the ground. It's mostly true for non-eurozone EU countries as well but some, like Poland (which is in the EU but not in the eurozone), are doing fine.
Basically: if you want to slash your part of the world's GDP by 40% in 17 years, do what the eurozone did.
Now we must understand this: the eurozone didn't just slash it's part of the global GDP by 40% in 17 years... They did so while, at the same time, creating a gigantic mountain of public debt and experiencing inflation.
Another 17 years of this, so another 40% loss, and the eurozone would only represent 9% of the world's GDP. And these unelected bureaucrats are so incompetent that I don't discard the possibility that they'll actually be able to crash the eurozone even faster than that. For example at the moment, while german carmarkers are in trouble, EU bureaucrats are hard at work trying to kill them for good.
Anti-americanism and anti-trumpism is a thing on HN but people should really look more closely at what's happening elsewhere.
What about an article from The Economist as to the reasons the eurozone managed to lose 40% of their share of the world's GDP since the 2008 financial crisis?
The point being is that the US should NOT follow ANY economic advice from EU leaders, it is a recipe for disaster.
One example is when the same stuff gets more expensive. If I have something, like a loaf of bread, a house, a smartphone all of them the exact same get more expensive, GDP increases if demand doesn't change (let's say because its inflexible).
You could argue this is due to some increased foreign demand for said product and the price increase legit represents increased economic output.
But in the case of tariffs for example, we know that's not the case - stuff became more expensive because of levied taxes. No new stuff got produced, no foreigners are buying up this stuff, demand likely decreased for said product, yet the GDP contribution increased.
Another very typical example are things with inflexible supply, such as housing, where due to the increased volume of money, the exact same house now costs more. But since transactions still happen, that means the economy got better, right?
Aren't they the same thing?
Italy's debt has ballooned to 150% of it's GDP, France is heading for 130% in the near future. Whatever happened in the EU, was not Germany's responsibility. Even Greece's debt is way higher than it should be after the Euro zone austerity "cure".
If there had been real austerity and real slashing of the national budgets so that all countries of the euro-zone actually complied with the fiscal pact that says that euro countries should not have a level of debt higher than 60% of it's GDP, then the Euro-zone would actually have some dry powder left to face these uncertain times.
Instead, the only country who seems to try to do something currently is Germany, precisely because it's debt is lower than most Euro-zone countries and therefore it can afford to spend more to try to create growth.
France is running 5%+++ deficit each year and it has not complied with the euro-zone fiscal rules for the last 20 years. Finland has 10% unemployment, Italy is not doing much better.
Where do these countries go from here? Do they cut social services and risk getting ousted in the next election? Do they borrow more and more with not much to show for it? That is the question that is facing these countries and nobody has the answers.
If you cripple the gdp through austerity policies (killing borrowing to chase the “responsibility dream”) the fiscal multiplier becomes a ruinous curse.
Of course, pissing money into a spending bonfire, driving inflation with excess liquidity, isn’t going to help; bit it’s just as bad as crippling growth by holding it back for lack of capital injection
I realize that. I just don't agree that any austerity measures have been taken which was the point of the comment I was responding to.
If real austerity had occurred then the countries' debt to gdp ratio should have been going down for at least a few years in order to get the expenses under control.
Unfortunately, that did not happen as many EU countries including Italy, France and Greece are still not within the EU rules to this very day.
> If you cripple the gdp through austerity policies (killing borrowing to chase the “responsibility dream”) the fiscal multiplier becomes a ruinous curse.
I agree except that these austerity measures as you put it if they ever existed, did not work because the debt to gpd ratio is still increasing in many EU countries.
> Of course, pissing money into a spending bonfire, driving inflation with excess liquidity, isn’t going to help; bit it’s just as bad as crippling growth by holding it back for lack of capital injection
Well Germany doesn't care supposedly. Where that takes us, who knows.
I don't disagree with the sentiment you expressed at all though.
In any case where the European union keeps failing is that it keeps not focusing on creating as many common rules and regulations across the EU, so, yet again, scaling your french business beyond your borders, or bulgarian one, is always very difficult.
Most countries in Europe are ridden by pointless nationalism on so many matters when our biggest issue is creating a strong internal market in Europe, but our biggest economies are still manufacturing and exporting ones, with little focus on the strengthening of our internal markets.