Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
GDP is a reflection of a abstract construct bounded by the parameters of its model.It's not reality.Reality lies outside the mind of the economist.
Your well-being may be a source of misery, suffering,even death for those outside the bounds of the model.
Anthropologists may argue that a hunter-gatherer in Africa today,has more well-being than you.They don't live outside a natural economy.Or a pygmy in the Congo.They can build a home in 3-hours from indigenous material,require no knowledge of a mortgage lender,credit scores;they don't worry about unemployment,repossession,bankruptcy,interest rates,recessions,depressions,stagflation,downturns ,boycotts,tariffs,union strikes,wars.
I'd have to check,but I believe that pre-October 1973,all Americans were better off than today.I'll know more over the coming two weeks.
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All science disciplines are a reduction of reality into simpler models of the parts of reality that matter to us. A map wouldn't be useful if it were an exact recreation of the terrain it represents, but instead is useful because it simplifies the infinitely complex into something manageable and useful to our infinitely limited minds. Economics are as much a model of economic reality as climate science is a model of climate reality.
Indigenous tribal living is disappearing, not because colonialism is forcing it upon tribes, but because human nature is such that it's not content to have less when examples of others having more are available. I'm perfectly willing to accept that cavemen could have been happier than me, but given the opportunity they would have traded their caves for my standard of living and would no longer be content having had their eyes opened to this way of life.
Plenty of people lived in the 70's, so we don't need to check any fact to see if they are better off today or not. Just ask yourself if you'd rather be whisked away from the standard of living we enjoy today and trade it for that of the 70's. No more internet, no more fuel injection, no more Amazon... you name it, and basically everything we enjoy doesn't exist.