this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Had a sociologist class with one of those dirty communist neo something something professors who asked the class "why do we measure how well the country is doing using unemployment or GDP instead of happiness".
Crazy thing was that my first instinct was to think how stupid it was to measure happiness. I'm such a fucking brainwashed idiot
Happiness, while a useful metric, isn’t a very consistent one from person to person, or even from day to day. It’s a very subjective and hard to quantify metric.
Not that GDP or unemployment are better indicators, but they’re solid numbers that can be definitively and accurately counted and done so consistently over decades.
Still there has to be a better non-subjective metric than those, they’re not very telling.
That was actually a big part of the lecture. Is measuring happiness actually inconsistent. He put a good argument for it not being inconsistent. That we can not only measure happiness pretty consistently but that we can also measure all the things that contribute to it pretty accurately. One of my favorite lectures in school