Thank you! To the first part of your comment, I certainly hope so—Nobel-winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz edited an international report (supported by dozens more famous researchers) all the way back in 2012 saying that GDP was fundamentally deficient, if not broken, as a national guide. Many European countries have started collecting national satisfaction data as part of a way to fix this problem, but I don’t know how much it’s paid attention to, and I know the US doesn’t even collect this data to begin with.
I think the larger point you’re making is that there might be dependencies between the discovered variables, with which I absolutely agree. In the same way I think it’s dangerous to guess what the right variables are, I think it’s dangerous to guess at exactly what the dependencies are, but I do think it’s critical to understand these relations better. Still, we certainly can’t do that if we don’t even get the variables right, so I believe this is at least a first step in an important direction.
Thank you! To the first part of your comment, I certainly hope so—Nobel-winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz edited an international report (supported by dozens more famous researchers) all the way back in 2012 saying that GDP was fundamentally deficient, if not broken, as a national guide. Many European countries have started collecting national satisfaction data as part of a way to fix this problem, but I don’t know how much it’s paid attention to, and I know the US doesn’t even collect this data to begin with.
I think the larger point you’re making is that there might be dependencies between the discovered variables, with which I absolutely agree. In the same way I think it’s dangerous to guess what the right variables are, I think it’s dangerous to guess at exactly what the dependencies are, but I do think it’s critical to understand these relations better. Still, we certainly can’t do that if we don’t even get the variables right, so I believe this is at least a first step in an important direction.