As discussed above, there are also good reasons to believe that increased GDP per capita causes many of these increases in welfare.
Can you help clarify what the causal evidence is? I don’t really see any non-correlational evidence in the preceding section. (I’m assuming that’s what this sentence is emphasizing given that the opening sentence in the preceding paragraph is “The foregoing arguments show that GDP per capita is strongly correlated with many objective and subjective measures of welfare.”) I think causality and evidence of it is actually pretty central to the debate—one of the chief advantages of RCTs is the ability to make causal claims. You can of course use things like instrumental variables and natural experiments to make causal claims about national development-type interventions but that’s pretty hard (see e.g. The Skeptics Guide to Institutions—Part 1).
The claim that increased GDP per capita causes other beneficial changes seems plausible to me, but I also don’t have too much trouble half-convincing myself that all these things are driven by common causes (e.g. it’s pretty easy for me to believe (based on a substantial literature) that increased social trust leads to both increased GDP per capita and increased welfare).
hello. The causal evidence was the claim that we would expect people with more income to buy more basic private goods which improve their private welfare.
This could go the other way also.
Education can cause reduced disease risk burden, education allows people to participate in industrial economy, and therefore increases money.
How do we know that when countries transform from illiterate to educated. It is an effect of money, and not government policy?
How exactly does the transformation happen?
Suppose there were no public schools in the USA or UK would the population be able to buy education? Would the country be more or less educated?
Can you help clarify what the causal evidence is? I don’t really see any non-correlational evidence in the preceding section. (I’m assuming that’s what this sentence is emphasizing given that the opening sentence in the preceding paragraph is “The foregoing arguments show that GDP per capita is strongly correlated with many objective and subjective measures of welfare.”) I think causality and evidence of it is actually pretty central to the debate—one of the chief advantages of RCTs is the ability to make causal claims. You can of course use things like instrumental variables and natural experiments to make causal claims about national development-type interventions but that’s pretty hard (see e.g. The Skeptics Guide to Institutions—Part 1).
The claim that increased GDP per capita causes other beneficial changes seems plausible to me, but I also don’t have too much trouble half-convincing myself that all these things are driven by common causes (e.g. it’s pretty easy for me to believe (based on a substantial literature) that increased social trust leads to both increased GDP per capita and increased welfare).
hello. The causal evidence was the claim that we would expect people with more income to buy more basic private goods which improve their private welfare.
This could go the other way also. Education can cause reduced disease risk burden, education allows people to participate in industrial economy, and therefore increases money.
How do we know that when countries transform from illiterate to educated. It is an effect of money, and not government policy?
How exactly does the transformation happen? Suppose there were no public schools in the USA or UK would the population be able to buy education? Would the country be more or less educated?