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Philosophy bear's avatar

I've been a GDP sympathizer since I ran a first order regression of GDP on self reported happiness in European countries and found that it explained virtually all the variance.

I think it's important for a variety of reasons to measure other things though, and I would prefer to use other measures of both psychological and economic welfare for this reason.

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Brad & Butter's avatar

Cross-calibration is always a good idea, see Collins' ideas on metric blindness. https://desystemize.substack.com/p/desystemize-8

One of the calibrations I would highly recommend is any stability-related psychometric measures by Emil Kirkegaard and Sebastian Jensen. You never know if a plan is dependent on ones ability to follow-up on it.

If there are ways to measure political power distribution and access to free markets, that would be even better.

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Connor Tabarrok's avatar

Great stuff! Excited to see more

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Bob Jacobs's avatar

According to this study ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259208570_A_Reassessment_of_the_Relationship_between_GDP_and_Life_Satisfaction ), the relationship between GDP and life satisfaction is 'hump shaped', life satisfaction seems to peak at around $30,000-$33,000 and then slightly but significantly decline among the richest countries. (This could potentially be an explanation for the Easterlin Paradox)

The study, however, doesn’t tell us *why* this is the case. Since, this is a European dataset it could be something cultural. Or maybe after a certain level of productivity the market creates a negative mental-health externality. Or maybe it has to do with a change in how GDP is measured ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History )

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