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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

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

GDP is not useful to measure how good an economy works. The core problem of GDP is that it does not account for usefulness of spending.

GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.

If you had a Rawlsian veil pulled over your eyes and someone said to you "You won't know how rich you will be in that society, but would you rather live in a top ten GDP per Capita country or a bottom ten?" I think we all know what we would reply.

Granted it might not be fine grained enough to distinguish between Number 4 and Number 5 on the list.

Might still be a useless indicator considering that many of the low GDP countries also rank badly in other indicators that are often taken into consideration more broadly, like quality of life indicies, corruption indices or just the Gini coefficient. Correlation does not mean causation

Would you choose to live in one? I'm sure you could move if you believed it was better.

GDP per capita has basically all the same problems.

I'm sure it has problems, but if I look at the top of this list (and exclude the tax havens) the answer to "Would I like to live there?" is Yes.

Likewise for the bottom of the list it's an emphatic No.

Is it a completely accurate indicator? Probably not. Is it directionally accurate? Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Part of the problem though is that people often try to use GDP (or GDP per capita) to compare within the top of the list. Like they try to draw conclusions about whether "Germany is doing better than Italy". It's true that big differences in GDP per capita can distinguish between really good and really bad places, but so can many other measures (like life expectancy or education expectancy). Plus, even on a coarse rubric GDP isn't perfect. I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in Spain than Qatar or Greenland. :-)

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