[SHOwnsYou]

I don't understand your argument here.

You won't find an economist (or any other person person) in the world that thinks GDP exhaustively covers every aspect of an economy and how it provides a standard of living.

What you will find is that they all agree GDP is the best available measure to determine a standard of living that is derived from some level of economic production.

If GDP is a terrible metric for determining standard of living, I'd like to know why it is still the most often used metric (by economists and non-economists alike) and a coherent argument for some alternative standard.

Any satisfaction based metric means that the majority of the developed world is doing something wrong -- numerous happiness studies show indigenous peoples often have a higher "happiness index" than people in the developed world.

Environmental based metrics have their own problems because environmental benefits and harms are not internalized by nations.

Income distribution based metrics aren't acceptable because the harms of great income distribution disparity are not easily mapped and are rarely agreed upon.

The only thing that might make sense is a metric based on life expectancy and education (Human development index from your Wikipedia link), but even that is problematic. Research created free-riding, regardless of patents.

The second a US company makes a drug that eliminates cancer, any lab that gets their hand on the drug can reverse engineer it with ease. The however many millions of dollars that went into building it (and become a function of its cost) are undercut by countries/people that do not respect the intellectual property rights of such a patent.

The outlay of spending becomes highly concentrated while the company doesn't see the returns that it expects. The drug copier gets the benefits of the hundreds of millions in R&D expenditure while only spending a few extra days of a scientists time.

[aloneinkyoto]

The reason why GDP is still used is because we have a lot of historical GDP data available and it is a fairly simple measure to understand and collect data on. Nor do we have a good enough alternative measure yet. We do have several candidates, but just as you state they all have weaknesses that needs to be understood.

The problem with economic sciences is that the GDP measure is used without critique, without fully understanding its trade-offs or by simply ignoring it deficiencies. That I believe is very careless when you are in the end dealing with the lives of real people.

[SHOwnsYou]

I have a (procedural) problem with your critiquing something not inherently bad with no alternative. You haven't presented any new arguments against the GDP nor have you attempted to argue that any possible alternative is more viable than the GDP. I invite you to respond to any of the arguments I made against GDP alternatives.

> The problem with economic sciences...

Honestly, this is hard for me to read.

Lectures on the inadequacies of the GDP are Macro 101 stuff. Throughout college in my different econ classes the shortfalls of the GDP were frequently discussed by several different teachers.

This economic sciences conspiracy to prevent indictments of the GDP you're trying to present as fact is completely fabricated and gives a bad name to economists that do discuss the shortcomings of the GDP (read: every economist ever).