🚀 go-pugleaf

Jay Hanson (jhanson@ilhawaii.net) wrote:
: Greig Ebeling wrote:
:  
: > My complaint is that not that we should not have responded to ozone
: > depletion, but that we apparently over-responded in panic, and failed
: > to implement a solution in an economically efficient manner.

: As I have pointed out in the past Greg, you are optimizing
:  for the wrong variable.  Instead of asking "What's good
:   for the economy?", ask "What's good for the people?"

: Neoclassical economics admits to NO objective measures
:  of human welfare.  Thus, when an economist says "trade
:   makes people better off", he probably means that trade
:    makes his own personal finances better off. 

It's more likely that he means that the exchange is mutually
beneficial. In the local context of the exchange this is correct. The
knock on effects when applied to a large population however complicate
the picture/

: Since our society has accepted no objective measure of
:  welfare, we are forced to rely on gross domestic product
:   (GDP) as the de facto measure of our welfare. 

: But a close look at the GDP reveals that what passes for
:  welfare, is actually the satisfaction of more and more
:   trivial wants, while creating more and more unwanted costs
:    that are destroying both our life support and social systems.
:     For example, the costs of treatment of cigarette-induced
:      cancer, pollution-induced emphysema, and television-
:       induced crime show up in the GDP as increased welfare.

This is a fair criticism of GDP. Better measures of welfare would
factor out such costs from GDP, and then combine what's left with such
measures as live expectancy, crime rates, pollution levels,
literacy/education levels, unemployment rate, levels of poverty and
incidence of major diseases. 

: There is now strong evidence that the U.S. economy is
:  making us poorer by increasing unwanted costs faster
:   than it increases benefits.

: See:
:  http://csf.Colorado.EDU/authors/hanson/page11.htm

This is quite an interesting page. The genuine progress indicator
described (GPI) seems to be on the lines of what I've said above. The
question is why has GPI gone down? It'd be interesting to see which of
the factors included in it has the most impact.

James

--
	   James Hammerton, PhD Student, School of Computer Science,
	 University of Birmingham | Email: J.A.Hammerton@cs.bham.ac.uk
		 WWW Home Page: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jah/
   Connectionist NLP WWW Page: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jah/CNLP/cnlp.html