Wimble Don
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2024
1:46 · 83K views · Jun 1, 2018
A two-minute excerpt of Robert Kennedy's 1968 University of Kansas speech criticizing GDP as a measure of national worth. He notes it counts harmful spending while ignoring what makes life worthwhile.
HN quotes it whenever debating GDP and metrics of success beyond money.
3 comments from Hacker News
It baffles me that the US has been the nest of some of the greatest things for human beings, and now has completely forgotten itself, it baffles me that you had a guy called Kennedy coming up with this perfection this video And now you remember nothing of what he said, it is unbelievable that you're here only measuring the success of a company regardless of the effects it has on the people, you measure the success of the company by money, ok. I consider US tech company as the worst, as the most exploiting, depressing, cheating, dangerous, who serve no purpose other than the one of their shareholders. Do you own the definition of success?
GDP is a measure. I'm very much not an economist, but I am extremely skeptical that the health of an economy can be reduced to any single number. Goodheart's law and all. I concede that GDP is a good indicator, but I think you can have things that help GDP while simultaneously hurting the economy. Otherwise any scam or con would be considered beneficial, and it would make sense to mandate minimum individual spending to ensure economic activity. A low GDP inherently shows poor economic health, but a high GDP does not guarantee good health. In my mind (noting, again, that I'm no economist), economic health is defined by the effectiveness of allocating resources to things that are beneficial to the members of that economy. Any amount of GDP can be "waste", resources flowing to places where they do not benefit the public. As Robert Kennedy famously pointed out, GDP includes money spent on addictive and harmful drugs, polluting industries, and many other ventures that are actively harmful.[0] [0]: this video
Gross Domestic Product, is a very gross way to measure progress as the name implies. Robert Kennedy said in respect of GDP “It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life really worth living.” [1] You have alternatives like the genuine progress indicator (GPI) that includes aspects such as pollution, criminality and health to the GDP. Most of all we can have many measures, we should not reduce progress to only a number. [1] this video