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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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GDP as the benchmark for economic performance is a key piece of propaganda that supports capitalism though. It’s the most prominent of several numbers that we use to orient and measure the success of the economy despite having little correlation with actual human well being.
Calling that propaganda is far fetched. It was the standard because it gave the best measure of economic strength before the information age gave us easy ways to gather other measures.
It's a relic of how things used to be and needs to be reevaluated.
GDP is good metric to measure industrial output of a country. However for any sort economic activity, which does not include exchanging money, it does not work. A homestead farmer, who is mainly self sufficient, besides selling some goods on the market, is in a much better position then a clothes factory working earning the same amount of money. Both would contribute about the same to GDP. Another one would be the very simple fact that having a natural disaster usually increases GDP a year later or so, due to increased spending on rebuilding. That clearly is not a sign of economic strength of the country though.
Many of the prominent, public uses of GDP would be better replaced with life expectancy, which has been around since 1660. And if you don’t like that one, we’ve had lots of much better economic data for the past 50 years, so take your pick. Yet we still look at GDP and little else to measure how successful the economy is.
GDP in and of itself may have some validity in measuring specific types of economic activity, but its use as a singular number to measure overall well-being is propaganda and always has been.
Literally all points by Nicola Sturgeon in her TED talk. I recommend it.
The reason it's not been reevaluated it what makes it propagandistic. It's wrong in clear ways, but it's not been abandoned because it's still useful to the beneficiaries of the status quo.
In specific cases GDP is flawed, but generally – looking at a lot of countries and a long time frame – a higher GDP means higher living standards.
But that’s the propaganda at work lol. It doesn’t necessarily mean that.
It does, though. Countries with a higher GDP have higher living standards.