[didibus]

GDP does not require that the goods or services were sold for money. GDP measures the market value adjusted to constant quality of all final goods and services produced. GDP can grow even with fewer workers, fewer hours, fewer buyers, and fewer units sold.

So the way I understood it, productivity, efficiency and quality gains can increase GDP year over year.

Say we are a country of 1 person. If that person can make a car in 2025, but in 2026 manages to make both a car and a house, the GDP has more than doubled. Doesn't matter that nobody paid the money for them.

Another weird thing is, say that 1 person country makes a car in 2025, and in 2026 makes a similarly priced car, if the car is higher quality, it counts as a higher GDP, because they'll measure its value as greater than last year's model, even if it sells for the same price, because the old model would now be worth less.

[arximboldi]

I have a theory (actually I wanted at some point to write more seriously about it) about how GDP also expands by consuming life itself. If you're burnt out, or don't have time to see friends and are depressed have to pay for therapy, GDP grows. If you don't have time to care for your children so you have to keep them busy with million classes, or paid for caretaking, GDP expands. If you don't have time or confidence to meet people IRL and have to pay for Tinder, GDP expands. If you don't have time to cook (even if you enjoy it) so UberEats all the time, GDP expands. When you replace public services by extractivist and more inefficient private ones (see healthcare, education) GDP often grows. The list goes on and on. The more every aspect of human existence is replace by a transaction in the market place, the more GDP grows. We replace a variety of motivations to do and to be based of human relationships and affection, by cold self-interested exchanges between strangers.

GDP is a fucked up way to look at life. It's go to way to look at whether a country is doing good, but it's consuming our environment and our own sanity in so many ways.

That's one of the reasons why I think that actually limiting the working hours (bringing it down to 30, and eventually to 20 hours a week) should be one of the main agenda points for this coming century. It's important for our environment, but also for our own sanity.

One could argue that given a sufficiently large GDP, one can make the individual choice to earn less and have more time. But that's sadly not how things work, since having more workforce available also devalues work relative to subsistence goods (e.g., you can't afford a roof without a full time job). Also, individualism is such a powerful ideology in a market driven economy. Maximizing individualism itself can help you get ahead in the marketplace, and spreads through society via marketing, private media. At some point, we even stop seeing how to behave differently than to maximize our own profit. We need democratic instruments outside of the marketplace to steer our society in a way that improves our lives, regardless of what that does to GDP.

[R_D_Olivaw]

Monkeys invented numbers. And then created a world where numbers are all that matters.

A human life, it's worth what? 1 millions usd? 10million usd? 20 million usd? Is it worth saving lives of GDP goes down?

We're due for a reckoning.

[ghm2180]

But this only addresses the supply side. The demand side has to be buying those two cars. The 1 person country car that one or two car would need to be bought by someone else there is no GDP consumption recorded

[didibus]

GDP doesn't measure the consumption side, it's just measuring production.

That's why in my 1 person country example, GDP still goes up, nobody has to buy the cars.