736 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 7 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: Anti-Capitalist Fallacies econ
I'm by no means an ecological economist or radical environmentalist, but Herman Daly offers a persuasive critique of how we currently measure economic progress.
Some prime examples (not necessarily from Daly himself):
- If we generate more trash and that causes us to build more landfills, the economic activity of creating and servicing the landfills is counted as output growth, but the trash is not counted as a cost.
- If Twitter hires a bunch of engineers and designers to steal eyeballs from Facebook, then Facebook hires a bunch of other engineers and designers to steal them back, this is counted as economic value creation. Of course, the disconnect here is whether the offering of a service that captures a person's attention is real value or not... a philosophical debate that can be had. But based on the studies of adolescent well-being and social media usage I'm thinking most of this is not real value creation. Far be it from me to be a paternalist, but we do have to wrestle with the truth that not all of our choices are good. In that sense, I really appreciate the insights from dual-self models in behavioral economics. I'm just not sure what to do about it yet...
This is partly why some people use more "holistic" indices like the Human Development Index which includes education and longevity. It's an attempt to account for non-monetary goals that people have. The truth is that there just cannot be an objective and accurate measure of human wellbeing, and therefore there can be no true measure of economic progress.
That leaves us with imperfect proxies and resorting to questions like whether similar lifestyles could be afforded in the past.
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