You don’t need one metric to measure countries, it’s ok to look at different things for different purposes, like crime versus income.
But one reason GDP is good is it doesn’t involve a bunch of social scientists sitting around and deciding what’s good for people. The beauty of money as a measure is that if people value something, they can buy it. There’s no reason to have a measure for education but not appliances or sports entertainment or the size of houses. This is just the value of left wing academics, who share this tendency that communists have to value health and education above all else. But people care about other things too when left to their own devices.
It matters if the purpose is doing some study trying to predict country well-being. Since we know GDPpc has problems, we would want something better, something more broad. But it seems it is difficult to find an easy, obviously better alternative.
It depends on what you are trying to do with the statistic.
If someone spends a lot of money on housing it might mean that the housing is awesome, or it might mean the land is expensive because you aren't building enough housing. Or that high prices are the only way to keep out the riff raff. Or there just isn't a lot of land fundamentally due to geography (Asian Tigers).
We can't even always reason from objective measures like size of housing. Singapore has a much higher GDP than Japan, but the average living space is smaller then Japan.
We could play the same game with cities and rural areas in America. Or different neighborhoods within cities. There are neighborhoods in Baltimore that are completely impoverished, but people live in relatively spacious row homes built seventy years ago.
The same applies to a lot of GDP. Spending money on healthcare, education, housing, security, transport, etc can be a sign of genuine wealth or could just be a sign of inefficiency and waste. A giant Red Queen Race.
The War on Terror counted towards GDP. 42% of GDP is direct government spending. How much more is indirect?
None of this really matters unless you have a convoluted and empirically false theory that people in Baltimore shooting each other leads to a breakdown in social trust which causes free markets which is why America has high GDP and we need to import more violent poor people to increase GDP further.
Stating the obvious, but just in case any readers are confused, Luxembourg's position is due entirely to regulatory arbitrage, just as much as Ireland's. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with that but it should be clear as well.
But the samples might have been taken from a czhech group of people that are close to the dutch? Even some Ukrainians are very close to Swedes, due to the Goths being there
1) The smaller an entity the more of a problem measuring GDP becomes.
For instance Baltimore City has a very high GDP per capita despite having a very low per capita income. The reason is that the businesses and agencies are located in the city and so they count towards the cities GDP, even though the people doing the work to create that GDP all live elsewhere (some in the suburbs, some not even near the metro area). It's a similar issue to Ireland, and I would not be surprised if this is a common theme with cities and GDP calculations.
2) Age matters if your age curve is off from the normal. For instance, Florida always seems low income but it's also got a lot of retirees. These people are low income but high asset, and the fact that you can attract such people to live in Florida doesn't make Florida poor.
It's always weird to look at an income map of say beach communities and it says its "low income" even though an obvious look around shows that people have money. Probably they are measuring only the income of permanent residents who work in the hotels, not people with vacation homes.
3) A bigger problem with GDP is that it just measures what people spend money on. War famously raises GDP, at least in the short run. Similarly America's 18% of GDP on healthcare spending obviously adds a lot to GDP, but it's questionable if it represents better well being. Singapore spends 6% of GDP on healthcare and most would agree its equivalent or better quality.
Lots of Red Queen Races increase GDP without increasing well being.
You don’t need one metric to measure countries, it’s ok to look at different things for different purposes, like crime versus income.
But one reason GDP is good is it doesn’t involve a bunch of social scientists sitting around and deciding what’s good for people. The beauty of money as a measure is that if people value something, they can buy it. There’s no reason to have a measure for education but not appliances or sports entertainment or the size of houses. This is just the value of left wing academics, who share this tendency that communists have to value health and education above all else. But people care about other things too when left to their own devices.
It matters if the purpose is doing some study trying to predict country well-being. Since we know GDPpc has problems, we would want something better, something more broad. But it seems it is difficult to find an easy, obviously better alternative.
It depends on what you are trying to do with the statistic.
If someone spends a lot of money on housing it might mean that the housing is awesome, or it might mean the land is expensive because you aren't building enough housing. Or that high prices are the only way to keep out the riff raff. Or there just isn't a lot of land fundamentally due to geography (Asian Tigers).
We can't even always reason from objective measures like size of housing. Singapore has a much higher GDP than Japan, but the average living space is smaller then Japan.
We could play the same game with cities and rural areas in America. Or different neighborhoods within cities. There are neighborhoods in Baltimore that are completely impoverished, but people live in relatively spacious row homes built seventy years ago.
The same applies to a lot of GDP. Spending money on healthcare, education, housing, security, transport, etc can be a sign of genuine wealth or could just be a sign of inefficiency and waste. A giant Red Queen Race.
The War on Terror counted towards GDP. 42% of GDP is direct government spending. How much more is indirect?
None of this really matters unless you have a convoluted and empirically false theory that people in Baltimore shooting each other leads to a breakdown in social trust which causes free markets which is why America has high GDP and we need to import more violent poor people to increase GDP further.
Another neutral measurment is genetic distance between two groups. Difficult to find for heterogenous countries, but it can be done
Stating the obvious, but just in case any readers are confused, Luxembourg's position is due entirely to regulatory arbitrage, just as much as Ireland's. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with that but it should be clear as well.
and they also have a bunch of very well paid european bearcats as Luxembourg is one of the seats of the EU.
I find it interesting that several East European countries rank as high as the US in some of these rankings.
It would be interesting to see the correlation with genetic distance to, for example, the Dutch. I made this graph if you would like some more data: https://pga3d.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/index.html?P=1&pca=6&pcb=7&pcx=3&pcy=4&pcz=5&zoom=1&a=0.0461486&b=0.040469&x=0.1267527&y=0.1313048&z=0.0610935
I guess there is problem involving czechoslovakians in pca.
Why? Closest populations to the Czech are:
Scottish(0.044)
Orcadian(0.050)
Shetlandic(0.053)
Irish(0.054)
Dutch(0.057)
Czechs are obviously closer to various slavic groups(slovenians, poles etc.) than to dutch or british people.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Genetic_PCA_of_European_countries_2022.jpg
But the samples might have been taken from a czhech group of people that are close to the dutch? Even some Ukrainians are very close to Swedes, due to the Goths being there
Maybe. It depends to variation among czechs. List seem generally reasonable.
1) The smaller an entity the more of a problem measuring GDP becomes.
For instance Baltimore City has a very high GDP per capita despite having a very low per capita income. The reason is that the businesses and agencies are located in the city and so they count towards the cities GDP, even though the people doing the work to create that GDP all live elsewhere (some in the suburbs, some not even near the metro area). It's a similar issue to Ireland, and I would not be surprised if this is a common theme with cities and GDP calculations.
2) Age matters if your age curve is off from the normal. For instance, Florida always seems low income but it's also got a lot of retirees. These people are low income but high asset, and the fact that you can attract such people to live in Florida doesn't make Florida poor.
It's always weird to look at an income map of say beach communities and it says its "low income" even though an obvious look around shows that people have money. Probably they are measuring only the income of permanent residents who work in the hotels, not people with vacation homes.
3) A bigger problem with GDP is that it just measures what people spend money on. War famously raises GDP, at least in the short run. Similarly America's 18% of GDP on healthcare spending obviously adds a lot to GDP, but it's questionable if it represents better well being. Singapore spends 6% of GDP on healthcare and most would agree its equivalent or better quality.
Lots of Red Queen Races increase GDP without increasing well being.