I think it’s not perfect but probably the best we have.

People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth).

Agreed. Long term economic health is always tied to long term social health. We should be, ultimately, trying to look at a broader index than some simplistic view of just money. It is a hard problem though to pin down an index for social health. As soon as we name a measure or index it becomes a target and its value drops. I tried to think of a more 'universal' index, one that could be applied to civilizations in the past and present and the best I could come up with is the healthier a civilization the more people can live together, longer, without killing each other. Not rigorous, but in general when I view history it seems to fit reasonably well.

GDP and growth are blunt instruments, but they're not meaningless... They tell you something about aggregate capacity, incomes, and whether the system is shrinking or expanding

What is a good measure of meaningful growth? Genuinely asking. I imagine all measures have pros and cons.

> Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

> meaningful measures of economic health

As someone who lived in a handful of countries with GDP per capita ranging from $3k to $70k I must say that GDP is a great proxy of the QoL and median citizen wealth. Not the only one and not the perfectly correlated one, but a very good one.

GDP per person should be the measure. The UK managed to make GDP go up while making GDP per person go down.

GDP as a concept, and "growth" and "inflation" figures, remind me of that line from HBO's Chernobyl: "They gave them the propaganda number".

Do not mistake indicators by using them for things they do not measure.

There’s a lot of work being done by the term “all other things being equal” when using a measure like GDP.

I don’t think we are in times when all else is equal.

I try to see it positive. With the AI bubble, I finally habe a tangible example to point to when I say that GDP growth is a bad indicator for economic success

Unless you have better alternatives you’re not really saying much.

And I don’t think anyone relies only on GDP. Typically you’d look at employment rates, inflation, etc.

It is an indicator and it's not totally non-meaningful. But GDP growth, when it's at the price of increasing the public debt and inflation, is no real growth.

Instead of looking at the US, let's look at what used to be a relevant ally...

In the eurozone, for example, politicians are hiding the lack of growth behind a growing mountain of public debt and the GDP growth ain't even beating inflation since the 2008 crisis. In 2008 the eurozone represented about 25% of the world's GDP. Now it's not even 15% anymore.

Falling into irrelevancy doesn't begin to describe the state of things for the eurozone: from 25% of the world's GDP to less than 15% in 17 years is more than alarming.

And yet if you look at the eurozone in Euro, it looks like it's been growing since 2008. But it's actually been stuck since nearly two decades now and there aren't signs of anything getting any better in the eurozone. German carmarkers, the number one export of the eurozone, are in huge trouble (with China eating their lunch).

The US and China are, obviously, less fucked than the eurozone but the USA's growth has also been achieved at the cost of a runaway public debt and runaway inflation.

I don't know what protectionism can and cannot do for the US and it's not clear if manufacturing can really come back to the US but one thing is certain: the eurozone is a failure and whatever it is that they did or do should definitely not be copied. Unelected bureaucrats have managed, in 17 years, to drive the eurozone into the ground. It's mostly true for non-eurozone EU countries as well but some, like Poland (which is in the EU but not in the eurozone), are doing fine.

Basically: if you want to slash your part of the world's GDP by 40% in 17 years, do what the eurozone did.

Now we must understand this: the eurozone didn't just slash it's part of the global GDP by 40% in 17 years... They did so while, at the same time, creating a gigantic mountain of public debt and experiencing inflation.

Another 17 years of this, so another 40% loss, and the eurozone would only represent 9% of the world's GDP. And these unelected bureaucrats are so incompetent that I don't discard the possibility that they'll actually be able to crash the eurozone even faster than that. For example at the moment, while german carmarkers are in trouble, EU bureaucrats are hard at work trying to kill them for good.

Anti-americanism and anti-trumpism is a thing on HN but people should really look more closely at what's happening elsewhere.

What about an article from The Economist as to the reasons the eurozone managed to lose 40% of their share of the world's GDP since the 2008 financial crisis?