Is GDP the Best Measure of Happiness and Well-being?
Money For the Rest of Us
J. David Stein
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2020
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What factors determine the well-being of an individual or nation and why gross domestic product is an inadequate measure of prosperity.
Topics covered include:
- Evidence many Americans are poorer than before the Great Recession.
- Why life expectancy in the U.S. is falling.
- How satisifiedare U.S. citizens.
- What is GDP and why is the U.S. Bureau of Economics developing a new methodology
- What are the flaws with GDP and why does it fall short in measuring well-being.
- Which countries around the world are the most and least happy and what are the factors that contribute to that happiness.
- Why were U.S. founding fathers worried about too many luxuries.
- How the U.S. in the 19th century followed the same manufacturing model that China does today.
Thanks to Policygenius and LinkedIn for sponsoring the episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm your host David Stein today is episode 282. about it's |
| 0:14.0 | I'm your host David Stein today's episode 282 it's titled |
| 0:15.1 | Is GDP the best measure of happiness and well-being? |
| 0:20.3 | Rina a listener to the show, emailed me and sent a column by David Leonhart of the New York Times. |
| 0:29.3 | The column was titled Why You Shouldn't believe those GDP numbers. |
| 0:35.0 | He wrote, Americans are dissatisfied and have been for years, |
| 0:40.0 | largely because the economy, as most people experience it, has not been booming. |
| 0:45.4 | GDP, or gross domestic product, the economy's total output keeps on rising. But it no longer tracks the well-being of most Americans. |
| 0:57.0 | Instead, an outsized share of economic growth flows to the wealthy and yet GDP is treated as a |
| 1:06.4 | totemic measure of the country's prosperity. Potemic means representative or symbolic of a particular quality or concept. |
| 1:17.0 | What is it that GDP is measuring? |
| 1:20.0 | He defined it, the total output of an economy. |
| 1:24.8 | What is produced the dollar value of the goods and services produced over a given period. |
| 1:33.0 | The on-heart is saying that output number, GDP, is no longer tracking the well-being of most Americans. |
| 1:41.0 | But is that what GDP was put in place to do, track the well-being, or maybe |
| 1:47.2 | more specifically, the economic well-being of a country's citizens? |
| 1:55.0 | Rina asks, if GDP does not measure a nation's economic well-being, |
| 2:00.0 | then what is the proper way to measure it? |
| 2:04.0 | We're going to explore her question in today's episode. |
| 2:08.0 | Leonthart continues in his column. |
| 2:10.0 | Consider the true picture. |
... |
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