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by paxys 1323 days ago
I have no idea who Luke Smith is but none of that article makes any sense. GDP is the measure of economic activity. A self-sufficient community would not have a GDP of 0 because they would still have transactions among themselves. Perfect self-sufficiency would actually generate a very high GDP number because of how diverse and specialized the community would have to be to take care of itself.

Outside of that everything in it is just a generic "companies are bad" "fiat currency is bad" "government is bad" spiel that has been said a billion times already.
2 comments
hot_gril 1323 days ago
Initially, he means that a single self-sufficient person contributes 0 to the GDP. Then it seems like he means people in this village don't trade with each other, but I'm not sure. If they trade without money, first of all that's very inefficient, secondly there's still a GDP of sorts but maybe he means it's not measured.

But he doesn't care about efficiency. He's not saying GDP is a poor indicator of economic growth. He's more saying that economic growth is bad, globalism is bad, and maybe hinting that *skims other article on site* an ancient, simple life according to Orthodox Christianity is the true path to happiness. And this is too off-topic for me to discuss, I'm just laying out what the dude is saying.

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thereisnospork 1323 days ago
>Initially, he means that a single self-sufficient person contributes 0 to the GDP

There is probably an argument that for accounting purposes a person should bill themselves at market costs for self-work. E.g. mowing the lawn, changing one's own oil, doing one's taxes -- all are economic activities with a value associated which is 'lost' in a traditional GDP calculation.

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hot_gril 1323 days ago
Yeah, if it were possible to do that, it'd make sense. Best people can do is mentally bill themselves for their time and factor that into personal decisions.
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mxkopy 1323 days ago
> A self-sufficient community would not have a GDP of 0 because they would still have transactions among themselves. Perfect self-sufficiency would actually generate a very high GDP number because of how diverse and specialized the community would have to be to take care of itself.

And all this is assuming that the community uses money. A self sufficient community would have 0 GDP iff no money was exchanged.

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paxys 1323 days ago
That doesn't matter. Value was still exchanged, and can be measured.
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mxkopy 1323 days ago
I'd agree. Pedantically, though, this wouldn't be GDP by definition.

I do think you can substitute "sum of numerical value" for GDP in most non-technical contexts and have them make sense.

In this case it could be that an economy doesn't trade 'rationally', so summing numerical values doesn't make sense. E.g. I'll trade you 1 chicken -> 2 shoes, someone else will trade 1 shoe -> 2 chickens.

I guess there would still be some numerical measure, but it'd be more of a matrix than a single number.

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