Comment by mrtksn
16 days ago
Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals.
Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.
If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.
> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction
Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6)
[1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former.
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-b...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/
I’m sure Americans are dying healthy and happy at young age. Crunching the numbers until the fit the narrative aside, the chocolates are horrible too.
This is called handwaving away an inconvenient truth.
The highest HDI in the world is possessed by dozens of counties in the US. The lowest in the US is on par with... Poland.
> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price.
No? This is exactly the opposite of why companies exist, they are specifically there to increase the stock price via development of their products. That we get better happiness via rising wealth standards is just a coincidence, albeit a very useful and historically true coincidence. And even then, companies can last quite a while trudging along but it will stop at some point if new innovation is not kept up in the form of new companies (as older companies are usually at capacity for hiring). Look at the youth unemployment rate in many European countries compared to the US.
> Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.
Changing a measure does not change the underlying thing it's measuring, no more than I can time travel by changing a clock. Obviously people are talking about what those numbers represent, not the numbers themselves. GDP is a useful enough concept as I mentioned above, one that correlates well to overall citizen wealth. Europeans are generally quite a bit poorer than Americans, even with the addition of the value of free (or rather, "free") healthcare. Tech employees are even more so advantaged, as their health insurance is excellent while they make multiples of their European counterparts. It is not "libertarian" to acknowledge this fact, and it's one of the main reasons you see many European tech people moving to the US and Silicon Valley.
Right, that's why at the heart of the tech innovation peple are running from mentally ill homeless people the insulating themselves in gated communities to pretend like living in a german village. Huge success.
I wouldn't obsess too much with the GDP too, its not as good as a proxy to the important stuff as people are trying to make it. An appendicitis surgery generates much more economic activity in USA than in Europe and Americans don't end with better appendixes.
The homeless people is a regulation failure, other cities have much better ways of dealing with them, California simply doesn't want to.
GDP is a good measure in general, because again, economic activity is correlated with higher outcomes. See China now versus 100 years ago.
If you paid me just the difference between a US and European Google software engineer salary, I’d be willing to run from homeless people all day
Besides, that’s why americans have cars to insulate them from the unwashed masses