solarpunk memes

GDP just says how well a country is doing and is a good summarization for how imports and exports are doing. However, it also takes into account military spending and real estate, so you could argue the GDP can be inflated via those two measures (to a degree) to look better.

Consumer Price Index does a better job of showing how well the economy is doing for its citizenry.

Economists of course know of these flaws and use GDP accordingly. Its for example a great measure how complex the economic flows are.

Of course its known, that countries can easily manipulate the data, for example China, who retrospectively changed their measuring of the economic data of 2022 and increased their GDP growth 2023 that way to 5.2 %. Or Russia, who spent an enormous sum for arms production, financed by debt, which of course led to a higher GDP at the cost of debt.

Nevertheless, if you consider these kind of 'tricks', its a good measure for growth year on year. But this growth can mean two things: higher living standards for its population or a more complex economy.

Its the same with the BMI. Its a good measure in general, but looking at a specific individual, its a highly deceptive measurement.

Degrowth babyyyyyyyyy

And you don't see the problem with that?

The criticism of using transactions as a measurement is that at the end, neither has the $200 needed to buy a $200 Lego Millennium Falcon. If you can't buy $200 of goods, was anything really produced?

They basically traded each other the entertainment of watching the other one eat shit. The money was actually entirely unnecessary.

In this case, each person paid for the entertainment of watching their friends eat shit.

Not to overanalyze the joke even more, but:

Eating feces is not $100 worth of entertainment by any rational standard.

No rational person would spend $100 to watch his friend eat feces.

No rational person would accept $100 to eat feces.

No rational society allows someone to either eat feces or pay others to do so, for public health reasons if nothing else.

I mean, if you went to an unhoused person and offered him $100 to eat feces, you'd get arrested. And you'd deserve it. Because even the United States isn't quite that bad yet.

(And this is not a hypothetical. People do those kinds of things. There are unhoused people I know from Food Not Bombs who refuse food from strangers because too many of them have gotten adulterated food. And most of them have stories about people offering them money to do degrading things.)

So this $200 in GDP represents an activity that's injurious to public health, morally bankrupt, and leaves everyone participating in it worse off.

But from the Economics 101 worldview, the economists created $200 worth of entertainment, because both of them were willing to pay $100 to see each other eat shit and that means, by definition, eating shit was worth $100 in entertainment.

Which makes the punchline an even more vicious satire of capitalism and its bullshit metrics than it originally appeared.

If, instead of eating it, one economist picked up some shit and sold it to the other. Then, the other sold it back. This would suggest the "goods" part of goods and services also doesn't have value.

Or knows it's an easy way to make $100, so then secures a loan to cage a bear, and plans to hire a team to eat the shit instead for $75, all while pocketing the surplus $25 and skimming from the bear's feed - finally defaulting on the original loan.

Bitcoin fixes this.

(sarcasm)

It's the same requirement for being a regular talking head on any TV channel. Watching Anderson have to let Israeli PR by without any critical questions drove that home for me. Real economists are out there dropping giant data laden takes on the economy. Like some of the ones at Rand that calculated the amount of systemic wage theft since productivity diverged from wages.

GDP as the benchmark for economic performance is a key piece of propaganda that supports capitalism though. It’s the most prominent of several numbers that we use to orient and measure the success of the economy despite having little correlation with actual human well being.

The joke doesn't work because both transactions were welfare enhancing. In the end, both of them agree that eating shit is worth it to see the other do it. At least $200 of value was created.

Yes. And after overanalyzing it I realized that's the second level of the joke.

The Economics 101 idea is that value is defined by how much money someone is willing to pay for something. And the satire of that idea is vicious. Because by every measurable standpoint those two economists are worse off coming out of the forest than going in - they've both had a exceptionally unpleasant experience and are now at risk for parasites and food poisoning and other health concerns. And yet they're patting each other on the back saying they created value for the economy.

And there are people on this thread - like you - seriously arguing that watching someone eat shit is worth $100 by definition because someone was willing to pay $100 for it, and therefore the two economists really did create $200 in value.

If that's what capitalism means by "welfare enhancing" it uses a different definition of welfare than any rational human being ever.

But that's why economists are the butt of the joke, I guess.

And if you agree with the characters in the joke, the joke is on you.

This falsely assumes that economic actors necessarily have sound judgment about value. Imagine someone who has had a bad day at work going and spending $10 for the privilege of being rude to a fast food clerk. If given the option would they directly trade the humiliations they themselves endured to earn that money to be able to inflict the same? Probably not, but their workday is already over, they don't see a way to translate the cash they have onhand into an overall better life, and this is what they feel like doing in the moment.