alt Hacker NewsHigh streets are dying, pretty sure half the restaurants closest to me are either closed or going to close down soon. Coming back from Japan it was certainly a whiplash to find just a row of fried chicken shops and empty restaurants.
It made me rethink how great of a signal GDP growth really is on how good things are economically.
Replies
kmeisthax • today at 8:25 PM
The arithmetic mean is one of the great tools of statistical lies. You can sweep so much sample variance under the rug with this baby!
It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good.
I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that (see also: the significant multiple more that we pay for most infrastructure compared with peer states). It would help explain why a lot of "poorer" countries reportedly don't feel poorer to live in, for a normal family, than the US.