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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

And that is exactly what New Zealand started doing in 2019[0].

A large problem with metrics is that they have a tendency of becoming a goal of their own. Instead of them being used as mere indicators, we end up with entire countries whose sole goal is to eternally increase their GDP - to the extent that it ends up harming the general population.

People do not solely exist to generate revenue, and it is about time we stop pretending they do.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/07/11/new-ze...

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> A large problem with metrics is that they have a tendency of becoming a goal of their own.

I read this in Project to Product:

"As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right." --Jeff Bezos

"It is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise." - Terry Pratchett, from Thief of Time (2001)

> we end up with entire countries whose sole goal is to eternally increase their GDP

What countries are you talking about? I don't know of a single country that does this.

China for the longest time judged officials based on how much they were hitting or exceeding GDP targets set out in the 5 year plans.

This has become less so only fairly recently.

Clearly China's sole goal isn't GDP growth when they're still trying to pursue zero-covid.

Dying is very bad for GDP.

>We confirm that both mortality and morbidity have a negative effect on GDP per capita growth. The effect of reducing mortality by 10 percent is that of adding at least 9.6 percentage points to GDP per capita growth over a period of about one quarter century, according to [13] bounding strategy.

Eternal lockdowns and keeping kids from going to school also has an impact on GDP/productivity.

That's a general trend. Obviously it's not going to apply to every case. Usually, reducing mortality is about improving healthcare and nutrition, especially during the period your study tracked (1990-2014). Keeping working age people healthy is obviously going to increase their productivity. This is very different from shutting down an entire city due to a few dozen Covid cases.

Given how overwhelming majority of Covid deaths are elderly and sickly people, it is virtually guaranteed that on net, Covid deaths themselves are positive for the economy. The elderly overwhelmingly have their productive years behind them, and in the retirement, they mostly consume the resources instead of producing them. So no, Covid deaths are not bad for GDP. Situation would have been much different if the Covid victims were younger and healthier on average.

The problem is that COVID patients overwhelm medical systems and end up causing other types of mortality to rise too.

Up to a certain limit until hospitals are saturated, as the quantity of healthcare cannot go negative.

The quality sure can, if you can catch COVID and increase your mortality by going to the hospital.

We saw this in the early days of both Wuhan and later NYC. The beds overfilled, then the hallways, then it start spilling into surrounding streets, and then the armed forces had to be called in to set up makeshift hospitals.

None of the makeshift military hospitals were actually used in NYC. They were only set up in the interest of preparedness, but they did not end up being necessary.

If a hospital is saturated then by definition no more people can further enter the hospital.

There's a physical limit to how many people can fit inside a hospital, and that limit is the saturation point, at least in my definition.

It's possible that a mildly sick patient became a moderately sick patient because they received some disease while within the premises that they otherwise wouldn't have.

And in an extreme scenario, hospitals could possibly kick out moderately sick patients to accommodate even more severely sick patients, which could cause the former to spread diseases to otherwise healthy people. But this seems highly likely.

I thought it seemed obvious that the social credit score is an estimate of one's expected value of contribution to GDP.

While it is true that no _entire country_ has GDP increase for _sole goal_, it is often the main metric used for government driven economic and social policies, and more often than not, compared to concurrent and/or rival country GDPs, when applicable.

Trying to change that means going from a productivity driven economy to a social wellbeing driven economy (as per government economic policies).

That's quite a shift, in line with the idea of universal basic income.

I don't think New Zealand has stopped calculating GDP. They do both now

> we end up with entire countries whose sole goal is to eternally increase their GDP

This is a pernicious straw-man. No county focuses only on GDP. No government focuses only on GDP.

Unemployment, interest rates, inflation, balance of payments, national debt etc, are all prominent indicators in any economy.

And show me a country that doesn’t also measure educational achievement, crime rates, divorce statistics, birth rates, suicides, alcohol consumption… the list is endless.

The only people who want an alternative to GDP are the ones who mistakenly think that the economy or society can be summed up in a single measure.

I strongly disagree, the world is governed on the basis of GDP measurement.

>A large problem with metrics is that they have a tendency of becoming a goal of their own.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Part of the issue (at least in public discourse) seems to be the conflation of "revenue" in the narrow sense of being measured in money, with "utility" or "value" or "welfare" in the broad sense.

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