The US is wealthier than Europe, and the gap between the two keeps growing. No one can deny this anymore, so some have taken to arguing that we shouldn’t care that much about GDP, because other countries do better on other measures. Here’s one particularly annoying piece, which includes the following chart.
I like how this treats left-wing policy goals themselves as accomplishments. “Paid maternity leave”, “higher minimum wage”, and “statutory paid holiday.” What if a country just declared the entire year a paid holiday? I guess that would be a great success story. This reminds me of how the Soviet Union had an endless number of rights guaranteed in its constitution, for all that was worth.
Economic statism is always sold as something that will help make societies richer. When it fails, you can just point to the policies themselves as a success that refutes the need to worry about economic comparisons at all! I can just start listing right-wing political goals like more religious freedom, free speech, and lower taxes to prove America is a better place to live.
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This is true to a large extent. But what’s funny is you posted a chart that has Ireland with some crazy GDP that isn’t real. It’s just due to accounting quirks related to corporate profit shifting. You didn’t really argue for the validity of GDP as a measure of income here. I think it is a useful measure, but the map isn’t the territory here. China targets an annual level of GDP growth and basically achieves it without fail. Because GDP is actually easy to create and does not correspond one to one with wealth creation, at least in practice, they can just jack up credit creation and pour money into unproductive investment that counts as GDP.
To me the real debate shouldn’t be around whether GDP is a useful metric, which it certainly is when considered in its full context. We should consider whether it is a suitable target and what qualifications are required to use it as a measuring stick of policy success. To Vance’s point, you can have all the gambling apps and porn in the world and it won’t help you produce warships or replacement fertility from health families. There is some share of GDP in any given country that’s really just straight exploitation and may have knock on social benefits in terms of exports or tax revenue created, but it has no more value than just giving all the people in its employ their income through welfare checks.
Your attack on GDP attackers is entirely on-target, but you create a straw man. There are real problems with GDP's failure to accurately assess national wealth.