The case against GDP: time to change the way we measure the wealth of nations - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/765781fe-f136-11e7-b220-857e26d1aca4 <comment><USER3> If I invented a cheap machine that did all your housework and fixed your car for free, GDP would fall. Despite the fact that everybody's lives would be permanently improved.

Say a person saves his money and lends it to people in another country. He's creating wealth for himself. The other country is getting further into debt. Maybe the money is spent frivolously or invested in a soon-to-collapse bubble. Or it's spent on productive investments. Either way, the effect on GDP is the same. And it goes to the borrowing country, not the one accumulating assets (unless the borrower makes successful investments).

As individuals, trying to maximize our own GDP would mean spending every dollar we get and avoiding investments that could reduce how much we need to spend to live our lives. That's the opposite of our best interests.

<comment><USER4> I think a more apt example is this.

It's definitely bad to live in a society where violence and robbery are common. We'd rather be without those things.

But if everyone spends money on bodyguards, that ends up in GDP.

In a comparable society where violence and robbery was not common, you would use the money for other things that are definitely preferred over giving it to bodyguards, security camera shops, locksmiths, and so on.

So measuring GDP in the way we do is defective; it gives near equal figures for both societies when clearly one is better than the other.

<comment><USER5> Are there any GDP alternatives or variations that attempt to give more weight to socially-positive output and less weight to anti-social output?

<comment><USER6> What is "socially-positive" output and who gets to decide that?

<comment><USER7> Whatever consensus based decision making body your society uses to engage in collective action.

<comment><USER8> Well, that would make it hard to impossible to compare different societies, or the same society at different times.

Even if we ignore corruption and bad incentives, values change.

<comment><USER7> So change the metrics with them.

Cross comparisons are certainly not that valuable if the metric you're using to compare is motivating people to engage in maladaptive policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A child goes to the doctor for a checkup. The nurse weights the child and measures their blood pressure. After the doctor checks out the child, the parent picks them up and asks, "So, how much bigger are you than last year?" Smiling, child replies "120 over 80!".

GDP is important, because it is a measure of economic activity. That is like blood pressure for the economy. Unlike humans, where our blood pressure is pretty constant, the economy has periods of with lots of money flowing and times with little. This is the reason why politicians and smart media people focus on it, because it indicates are we in recovery or recession.

That is not the same thing as measuring change in wealth. That is like gaining weight (in the healthy sense of a child growing). When the GDP goes up, it doesn't mean more wealth, it means more money changed hands.

Like managers are taught, what you measure is what you get. We as a society focus too much on moving money around and too little on generating wealth.

<comment><USER10> That is a wordy way to say that national wealth is a stock and GDP is a flow. How does it relate to the criticism of GDP at hand?

<comment><USER11> National wealth is a flow. The supply of bread is somewhat more important than creating piles of gold bars.

<comment><USER8> That's some extreme cherry-picking. What about sugary drinks versus house construction? There are good and bad consumables, and there are good and bad durables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author brings up a good point wrt GDP not accounting for debt. If the US were to borrow $1tn from China and splurged it all on military spending, we'd see a massive increase in GDP next year, but we would only be impoverishing ourselves in the long run.

Adjusting the GDP figures to account for foreign-debt, and investments held by foreigners, seems like something that can be computed objectively, and would still serve as a superior metric.

<comment><USER13> Another way to think of it is that China would be giving us $1trn worth of stuff for only the cost of servicing that $1trn of debt (remember to subtract inflation). Does that make us or them poorer? Think carefully.

<comment><USER14> So the only way the US comes out ahead in that situation is through playing games with inflating the currency while lying about it to recoup the costs of servicing the debt.

In the end, once the US is caught with it's pants down it will definitely not be making the US any richer.

<comment><USER13> All fiat currencies have significant inflation though. Few also benefit from mercantilists incessantly wanting to sell products for that currency.

Mind you, mercantilism can have significant detrimental effects on the importer -- no doubt. But it's not all roses for the mercantilist exporter either.

Really, a multi-decade trade imbalance is not a good thing for anyone, but it's not that clear who is the worst off.

<comment><USER15> Why is a multi-decade trade surplus bad? Doesn't that mean you have an extremely productive / competitive economic engine?

Is it bad because of the opportunity cost of not levering up and investing research and future productivity growth?

<comment><USER16> You are giving goods to people in exchange for IOUs, but those IOUs can't be redeemed for anything you want, by assumption

<comment><USER13> Correct.

The only way you can use those IOUs is if the roles are reversed and the U.S. starts maintaining a trade surplus with the rest of the world (and so the rest of the world a trade deficit with the U.S.).

Before the dollar became the reserve currency of the world, the world settled trade in gold. With gold as the reserve currency it was very important to not run out of gold, and this served to keep trade balanced in the long term (and probably also served to keep the lid on growth of international trade, since to buy one kind of thing you'd have to sell some other kind). Incidentally, the concept of comparative advantages is probably a lot more meaningful in the context of balanced trade...

But the dollar is the reserve currency. Which means that the world maintains a trade surplus with the U.S. Which means they export things to the U.S. in exchange for IOUs that will get them nothing much (it does help to defend their currencies during crises, but not much more).

Meanwhile, Chinese people (in China) are effectively paid less than they should be for the labor they put into manufacturing things to sell to the U.S. This is obvious in that China forces exporters to exchange their dollars for Renminbi, which means those exporters can't buy other things with those dollars than Renmimbi. Also, all those factories in China make things people want in the U.S., not things that people want in _China_ (though maybe there's a lot of overlap).

So my take is that mercantilism hurts the mercantilist. It does also hurt the importer in different ways: by reducing employment, for example, and removing productive assets for another, and these things might hurt more when it comes time to rebalance world trade. Who knows, maybe Chinese people in China and Americans will gladly continue this state of affairs. But somehow I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> GDP measures of the value of the total economic output. Take two countries with similar population in 2016 [1] - Mexico (127,540,423) and Japan(127,748,513) and compare it with the GDP of the two countries[2] - Mexico(1 Trillion USD), Japan (4.9 Trillion USD).

This says nothing about the wealth of Japan or Mexico. It does say that the Japanese economy is producing 4x more than the Mexican economy.

This metric is interesting in itself. When taken alongside the resources consumed by Japan and Mexico, or the population of Japan and Mexico, one can determine which country is using it's resources more efficiently and which population is more efficient at producing things of value.

When historical GDP numbers are taken into account along with a history of government policies, it provides insight into how efficient the government bureaucracy is, how efficient the financial markets are, how education and computerized tools are impacting the economy and so on.

The author appears to have completely missed the point behind GDP.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_\(United_Nations\))

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\))

<comment><USER18> > This metric is interesting in itself. When taken alongside the resources > consumed by Japan and Mexico, or the population of Japan and Mexico, one can > determine which country is using it's resources more efficiently and which > population is more efficient at producing things of value.

Except you can't, reliably. If I mow my lawn and cook my dinner, and my neighbor does the same, it has no contribution to GDP. If I mow my neighbors lawn for $5 and mow mine as well, and my neighbor cooks my dinner for $5 and cooks his own as well, well, look, $10 of GDP.

GDP measured value of _traded_ output, not total output, and so doesn't measure how effectively resources are used. You can make assumptions about the relations between the two values being constant, but that's probably not true across societies with different cultural patterns, or even in the same country over time given cultural change.

GDP is, for many purposes, apparently the best measure we have. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking it tells us more than it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The best metric we used when optimizing low latency systems was fixing the slowest outlier. Maybe a similar metric could be used for economies eg focusing on the worse off person.

<comment><USER16> This is the Gini Coefficient

<comment><USER20> The Gini coefficient is about the relative inequality in a distribution. If everyone were brought down to the level of the person who is currently worst off, the Gini coefficient would improve, although everyone's quality of life decreased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://archive.is/vXmyX](http://archive.is/vXmyX)

<comment><USER22> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Related, an excerpt:

 _One of my pet peeves are people who try to reduce a vector to a scalar, with no admission of the information loss. For some reason, this has become accepted practice when it comes to estimating our standard of living.

Suppose the economy grows 5% but violent crime goes up 10%. Has the standard of living increased?

Suppose the price of gasoline declines 30% but people stop going to church. Has the standard of living increased?

Suppose the price of cell phone plans decline 90% but the people who speak your language become a minority, and people who speak a different language become the majority. Has your standard of living increased?

Suppose your wages increase 10% but the amount of air pollution increases 200%. Has your standard of living increased?

Suppose your wages increase 20% but the government changes the law to make it easier for companies to fire workers, so you face a greater risk of losing your job. Has your standard of living increased?

In every case, we are talking about a vector that can not be reduced to a scalar without information loss._

[http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/if-women-had- invented...](http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/if-women-had-invented- economics-there-would-be-no-assumption-of-a-global-optimum)

<comment><USER24> even with all these itemized points it's still not enough information, if violent crime was already low, and a 10% bump of low is still low.

<comment><USER25> > it's still not enough information

That's the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The very first impression after I land at any US airport is - why everything is so inefficient and of such a low quality? Roads, hotel rooms, transportation, food - everything looks inferior to what you see in an average European country. But still, US has higher GDP. Strange.

<comment><USER27> The total US GDP is higher because the US population is gigantic compared to typical European countries.

The US GDP-per-capita (adjusted for purchasing power) [1] is only somewhat higher than highly developed European countries.

Given the relatively small GDP gap, the differences you are seeing have to with different cultural and therefore political priorities around spending on public infrastructure and social goods like education and job training. Different as in less.

Also, a lot of the US pattern of production and consumption is based on premise of disposability (with the notable exception of some infrastructure built leading up to WWII).

That has an effect on the durability and perceived quality of the things you see and experience in the US.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

<comment><USER28> Even by your source, US GDP PPP per capita is quite significantly higher than most European countries. Most larger European countries are ~75% of the US as a rule of thumb.

<comment><USER29> Oil and finance distort things quite a lot. Therefore Norway and Ireland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The GDP is only an approximate measure and is only roughly correlated with wealth.

There are many things that contribute to GDP but do absolutely nothing to increase wealth, prosperity, or productivity.

This funny video reminds me of that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBgJqgUmSZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBgJqgUmSZE)

Summary from the video:

Person A says he'll pay Person B $20K to eat poop.

Person A does it.

Person B says he'll pay person A $20K to eat poop.

Person B does it.

Nobody is wealthier. They both ate poop. Yet $40K was contributed to the GDP.

Moral of the story: Don't eat poop.

<comment><USER31> (I can't access this article, so I hope people will excuse this comment that is not informed by the article.)

That all depends on how much Person A and Person B enjoy watching coprophagia performances, doesn't it? If either Person A or B wanted something more with that $20k, they could have gotten that instead.

The $2k I spend at the opera each year doesn't increase "wealth, prosperity, or productivity" from the view of people that don't enjoy opera, but I certainly feel that it increases my prosperity.

The bigger problem with the GDP is it not counting serious economic activity that does not have an exchange of dollars, such as child care in a family. A stay-at-home parent does not get compensated for their work, but that work definitely has value as evidenced by the cost of day care.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, the more canonical counterexample/paradox about GDP is different... and you hint at it at the end.

Imagine I stay at home watching my kids and you stay at home to watch your kids. Nothing is added to GDP.

However, what if I pay you $20 to watch my kids for the night, and you pay me $20 to watch your kids for the night? The same amount of work was done, we each up with the same amount of cash as before, but we've somehow added $40 to GDP. (There are no new performance arts events in this case, everything's literally the same as it was before.)

You might think at first this is a quirk of child care... but you can run the hypo with other industries.

Imagine two bakers on the same street in friendly competition. Each of their families goes through a loaf a week, one from their own production.

What if, one day, each baker wants to check out the competition, buys one of the other bakers' loafs? Each family eats the same amount of bread and each baker produces the same amount of loaves. GDP goes up by the full price of the loaves.

<comment><USER33> GDP does not have to be accurate to be useful, it just needs to be consistent for comparison.

<comment><USER25> Question is how strong the argument is that it isn't.

To pick up on the examples provided above, you could live in a friendly caring community where you occasionally babysit family B's babies and they occasionally babysit yours, for free.

Or you could live in a materialistic community where you won't babysit family B's babies unless they pay you, and they won't either.

Community 2 will have a higher GDP.

<comment><USER33> Couple of thoughts on this.

1\. GDP would still be useful to show growth in the same community over time.

2\. It sounds like an edge-case, and when talking on national scales across most of the big economies very few countries actually operates like that to a significant degree. GDP is of not too precise but still pretty alright on a big picture level.

3\. If there is a demand for it an adjuster can be made. Well I'm not an economist so there might already be one. I'm sure someone thought of this at some point.

4\. GDP values are not cumulative, so even if there's an error in one year it does not stack and fixes itself in future years.

<comment><USER16> A recent trend here on HN is complaining about the loss of free-range childhood. Quality of life is dropping in this dimension, but it isn't seen in GDP.

<comment><USER33> It'll be in GDP eventually when the child ends up less productive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The GDP is not invariant to the "Sound of Music" case: a widower marries his children's governess. Before the wedding, her work was paid, and it counted towards the GDP. After the wedding she puts in the same work, or more, and her implicit pay is probably higher, but she is completely invisible to the GDP.

Similarly, when a company aqcuires a supplier, the flow of products and cash between them stops counting towards the GDP. Conversely, if Target creates a real estate company and starts paying rent to it (Bill Ackman's idea when he was Target's largest shareholder), a few billion dollars would show up in the GDP from nowhere.

The GDP is an accident of the granularity of the economy. All things being equal, a more vertically integrated economy will have a lower GDP than a more granular one.

</comment><comment><USER35> If we are going to stick with GDP we should at least use GDP per hour worked [0] so we look at the only thing that matters in the long run - <USER2> efficiency.

Looking at this I am amazed how much more efficient Australian labour is than New Zealand labour $55.87 verse $36.83.

0\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_hour_worked)

<comment><USER36> Except the easy way to increase productivity is to fire all the low paid workers, productivity would go up but I'm not sure that would be desirable.

<comment><USER35> Or the alternative of raising the minimum wage.

No business is going to fire a worker they need to increase the nation's GDP per hour worked, but as an aim for the nation it would be better if everyone if we worked towards increasing the efficiency of labour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> We should have a number that combines numbers like GDP, average net worth, average wage and inflation. This may give a better balanced picture of an economy. The current GDP growth is pretty useless if it goes mostly into the pockets of a few.

<comment><USER18> Or we could have multiple different numbers (including all the things you describe, plis employment measures, plus medians where you've already named averages, plus gini coefficients of wealth and income, plus other distributional measures, plus...) and recognize that the economy is multidimensional and how to balance the importance of those dimensions is a matter of ongoing debate.

Which is what we—when we choose to look beyond what mass media focus on as the headline number—already have.

<comment><USER37> Totally agree. It just seems that public discourse likes single factors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This basically works out to the difference between income & net worth — and it's as important to nations as it is to people.

</comment><comment><USER39> As soon as a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a useful measure.

<comment><USER40> Goodhart's Law: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The current economy including GDP does not account for garbage and co2 emisssions. If we only optimize in one dimension for maximum GDP output then we will have huge economic output and also destroy the planet we are living on.

We should optimize for gross happiness and long term sustainability. Gross happiness include more vacation, using sustainable materials like wood and metal instead of cheap plastics. Recycle more materials in the goods we consume so that its a continuous cycle instead of buy consume and throw.

If we prized the carbon emission on the production and transportation of all goods we would have a totally different economy.

The automation economy allows us to be both rich and have more spare time.

</comment><comment><USER42> While we're at it, can we stop talking about the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

</comment><comment><USER43> All of this seems to be well-known and convincing. Yet, GDP is still the only metric media and politicians seem to care about. Is it a another case of the "emperor has no clothes"?

<comment><USER44> I think unemployment is more politically significant. The followup question for anyone reporting a rising GDP is "sure, but what does this do for job growth?"

<comment><USER45> Unemployment is even less useful then GDP. At least GDP is some sort of proxy for how well-off a country is.

You can have 0% unemployment (I hear North Korea is currently there), with mostly poverty-line wages with everyone making a meager third-world living, or you can have 30% unemployment with everyone being relatively better off, with fewer people working more productive jobs, and paying for an overall social safety net/others to go to school/raise children/retire. I'd far rather live in the second society, then the first.

<comment><USER44> While it's true you can't have 0% unemployment in a free market, going from, say, 8% to 5% is a big deal that helps in a lot of ways.

30% unemployment, the way it's normally defined, means 30% of your population are looking for jobs and unable to find them. Which is an unmitigated disaster.

<comment><USER45> There are millions of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, because they are unable to find a job that pays enough for them to stop caring for their children/relatives/take time off schooling/pay for costs of working.

They are not represented in unemployment numbers (Because as it turns out 'I need to earn $25/hour to be able to afford daycare for the kids, but I could never get a job like that, and I've stopped looking') does not get counted in UE stats.

Putting those people to work would not actually make any of us better off... Yet it would reduce unemployment.

The point of my post was that jobs are not created equal. 0% unemployment because everyone is working jobs that pay very little is an unmitigated economic disaster. 30% unemployment because a smaller group of people are only working productive, highly remunerative jobs is an incredible economic success.

It does, however, raise the hackles on a few people.

<comment><USER44> >There are millions of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, because they are unable to find a job that pays enough for them to stop caring for their children/relatives/take time off schooling/pay for costs of working.

>They are not represented in unemployment numbers ...

Depends on the set of numbers you're looking at. DoL produces different numbers that encompass different assumptions. Normally these people are not considered unemployed, so putting them to work wouldn't change the unemployment statistics.

And I don't believe having 30% of the population carrying the other 70% is at all an economic success. That's an unstable situation that can't continue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> AFAIU (prolly not much), GDP measures money that comes and goes to/from a country. If, let's say, products/services were exchanged directly, without moving money, that wouldn't be counted; OTOH, if certain country, say the US, gave money to another country only to buy products from US companies, that would count doubly... Which is why it's really bad as a tool for comparing wealth of nations.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

</comment><comment><USER47> I really don't understand the point of this criticism. Isn't GDP the best way we have of measuring the volume of work being done?

If I exchange production of some craft for money in the bank and then exchange that money for some other product I fancy, we've not only moved the money around, but created real quantifiable new value through the production purchased.

GDP - Gross Domestic Product. Producing things. That's what it's all about.

<comment><USER40> Short answer: no.

It is, however, the _accepted_ answer in most parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index)

</comment><comment><USER49> Related: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness)

</comment><comment><USER50> GDP is not measuring wealth. It's measure of market value of all final goods and services produced.

National wealth is completely different measure.

<comment><USER40> Adam Smith defined wealth ... well, several ways. But his initial definition is "the annual produce of the land and labour of the society". Which, as numerous commentators have comentatored, is a _flow_ rather than a _stock_.

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Introdu...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Introduction_and_plan_of_the_work)

In his other statements, Smith isn't consistent on this distinction. It's a curiosity, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't have an FT subscription. Can someone tell me whether the article suggest an alternative measure of wealth?

<comment><USER40> [https://archive.fo/vXmyX](https://archive.fo/vXmyX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Thank you for sharing this. FT is the only print newspaper I'll give at least benefit of doubt when reading.

</comment><comment><USER40> For those looking to read the content but stymied by FT's paywall, the author has just published a book, _The Growth Delusion_ , and discusses it in numerous other articles.

Unpaywalled: [http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-03-31/the-growth- delu...](http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-03-31/the-growth-delusion/)

</comment><comment><USER40> In the opening example, Pilling discusses income vs. wealth of a banker and gardener. One of the more interesting (and novel) approaches I've seen to this question comes from Yonatan Zunger based on discussions over the past few years, and culminating in his _Medium_ essay, "What is Your 'Financial Shock' Wealth?", which examines financial security by an individual's (or organisation's) capability to withstand financial shocks of various sizes, _and then looks at the likelihood of such shocks._

[https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock- wealth-4845e6dc1...](https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock- wealth-4845e6dc1d2f)

So far as moving the discussion of poverty forward, this strikes me as a significant advance, and one I'm not aware of having been made elsewhere in the economic literature.

But that's still not GDP.

On that front, I've been looking at combining a number of concepts, a key element of which is the idea of tiers or levels of economic activity. There are classifications ranging from 3-5. One of the first such I'm aware of comes in Alexandre Dumas, _The Count of Monte Cristo_ (I'm exploring the origins of that notion), and one of the latter being the one James Beniger gives in his 1986 book, _The Control Revolution_ Breaking that out as bullets, but other wise quoting Beniger.

* The primary sector -- agriculture, fishing, lumber, mining, oil and gas -- represents the extraction of matter from the environment to produce energy, including the calories to sustain individual organisms.

* The secondary sector -- processing primary goods, as in construction and manufacturing -- represents the synthesis of matter and energy into more organized forms (negentropy).

* The tertiary sector, including transportation and utilities, represents the infrastructure for distributing matter and energy about the system, while ...

* the quaternary sector -- trade, finance, insurance, and real estate -- constitutes a parallel infrastructure for the collection, processing, and distribution of information that is necessary in all living system for the control of material flows.

* Finally, the "highest" of all sectors in its remove from the physical environment is the quinary sector, including government, law, and education, representing the societal programming -- socialization, education, law making -- and collective or representative decision making to effect control.

You can quibble over which activities should attend which tier (trade and commerce are often classed with #3, giving #4 exclusive domain of the FIRE sector, which has certain coherences). There's a strong correspondence between these levels and classifications of industrial sectors (the SIC, NAICS, or ISIC). There's also some correspondence to the classifications of goods early classical economists derived (particularly Smith), and perhaps to technological mechanisms.

What I see, though, is that actual useful benefit derives from the first two tiers, with the others being _necessary_ but not _of themselves directly of use_ \-- they're coordination, management, and information flows. Moreover, you can divide the primary sector into _stocks_ and _flows_ , where virtually all extractive material and energy sourcing _is drawing down of some natural stock_ , whilst agriculture, forestry, fishing, and renewable energy are (or at least _can_ be) sustainable, taking from a _flow_ as that flow is replenished.

Accounting for the stock draw-down, and _not_ counting the outputs of the 3rd - 5th sectors as "useful", would tend to arrive at a much-modified measure of GDP. And one almost certainly much smaller than is presently computed.

I'm looking at how valid such measures might be, and the history of GDP formulation. It's interesting. (Kuznets is among those who argued for a three- tiered economic classification.) More discussion at the link below.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking_research_on_inclusive_measures_of/)

</comment><comment><USER53> Or perhaps it is time to stop measuring them altogether.

<comment><USER25> The approach of Sir John James Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong in the 1960's, who famously "refused to collect economic statistics to avoid officials meddling in the economy." He is subject of a recent well-received biography, _The Architect of Prosperity._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Cowperthwaite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Cowperthwaite)

[http://architectofprosperity.com](http://architectofprosperity.com)</comment></comment>


Why European Children Are Quieter - <AUTHOR> http://acculturated.com/european-children/ <comment><USER3> Man, when do we stop this European thing? Have you tried to compare a kid in Naples with a kid in, say, Denmark? Come on, the kid in Naples will be a 24/7 hurdle, shouting in the street from when the sun rises. I even have a hard time talking about Italians since kids from North and South are very different.

<comment><USER4> Came here to reply the exact thing. I said already once on HN and I'll repeat it: Europe is not a nation, and especially it is not _a_ culture!

<comment><USER5> Neither is India....or even the United States for that matter.

Also, while we're at it, can we also stop using "Cancer" as if it were a single disease that we can "cure"? "Cancer" is an umbrella term for a wide range of diseases that can affect vastly different parts of the body in different ways. It's not all the same thing.

<comment><USER6> The United States are very homogenous _in comparison_ to Europe. The US have a strong race issue between "blacks" "whites" "asians" etc.

Europe has a discrimination issue between what the US calls "whites". For example in France, Polish people are supposedly all plumbers and Portugese are masons.

In the US there are only two languages, English and Spanish. In Europe there's too many to count with the modern revival of local dialects.

<comment><USER7> This is rather like arguing if Christianity is a homogeneous or diverse religion. The answer is "yes".

In the US, views on race are very different in Alaska or Hawaii than in Alabama or Puerto Rico.

The US also has discrimination issues between different whites. For example, in the US you can be "White non-Hispanic" vs. "White Hispanic". While less common than in my youth, the US also has slurs and stereotypes about US-born whites based on their family's historical culture. This lead to expressions like "dumb Swede", the stereotype of the Irish cop on the beat, and many ethnic slurs, including those concerning white Jews.

"Only two languages"? What do you even mean by that? San Francisco has Chinese language TV broadcasts, and of course Chinatown. There are 40,000+ Hmong in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area. A radio station I used to listen to had shows in Navajo. Hawaiian is an official language in Hawaii. Quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States) :

> Tagalog and Vietnamese have over one million speakers each in the United > States, almost entirely within recent immigrant populations. Both languages, > along with the varieties of Chinese (mostly Cantonese, Taishanese, and > Standard Mandarin), Japanese, and Korean, are now used in elections in > Alaska, California, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Washington. ... > The state government of Louisiana offers services and documents in French,

<comment><USER8> Obviously very many languages are spoken in the US. How many are used in the bureaucracy? What languages are the laws written in?

Because in Europe[1] there are 24 official languages and these are used to create the bureaucracy.

EDIT:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States)

> English 80%, Spanish 12.4%, other Indo-European 3.7%, Asian and Pacific > island languages 3%, other languages 0.9% (2009 survey by the Census Bureau)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union)

> The five most spoken languages in the EU are English (51%), German (32%), > French (26%), Italian (16%) and Spanish (15%). At 18% of the total number of > speakers, German is the most widely spoken native language, followed by > Italian, English, French and Spanish.

<comment><USER7> Your comments are so noted. However, I objected to the phrase "In the US there are only two languages, English and Spanish. In Europe there's too many to count with the modern revival of local dialects."

The US has more than two languages, even in official government use. (You linked to the same source as I did, which points out both Hawaiian and French use.)

If we use the same metric, which points out the "modern revival of local dialects", then we must also accept the modern revival in the US of indigenous languages, and their use in tribal governments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's really hard to give much credit to an article talking about "Europeans" and "Americans" as if these were homogeneous groups.

<comment><USER10> Here are a few hints for reading these things:

1) Nothing is homogeneous. Even a single static object is not 100% the same now compared to how it was 10 days ago. But in order to make any observation, one has to generalize to the point that has statistical significance.

2) Despite saying Europeans and Americans such articles don't mean ALL Europeans and ALL Americans. For Europeans they mostly mean Western Europe: Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, etc. For Americans they mostly mean the stereotypical middle class suburban American, not a Manhattanite yuppie, nor some Idaho farmer, or "white trash".

3) The idea is not to see if the article's observations hold 100%, but whether they hold more often than not.

<comment><USER4> > For Europeans they mostly mean Western Europe:

Western Europe includes Italy, Spain, Portugal and UK, too. As soon as I read the title, I thought to children in my country (Italy) and I saw the enormous gap.

<comment><USER10> > _Western Europe includes Italy, Spain, Portugal and UK, too._

It does, but there's also the North/South division (even within a single country, like Italy, but even more so generally).

South Europe is not really "Western" in this sense (and in other senses, e.g. with respect to religious heritage and ethics, catholicism and orthodoxy vs protestants, etc).

<comment><USER11> What? Italy is not "Western"? Well, your definition of Western Europe is very weird. Italy is one of the foundations of Western Europe.

What you wrote about religious heritage is also weird... Protestant Austria? France?

What you're meaning is just Germanic countries (except France).

<comment><USER12> His definition of Western Europe would also be my definition. Western European states have a high standard of living, low levels of corruption compared to Italy, well maintained and developed infrastructure, low levels of unemployment, and discipline. Compare and contrast with Italy, Spain, or Portugal.

<comment><USER13> Those comments sound a little stereotypical and xenophobic

<comment><USER14> He does, but I don't think name calling will change his mind. Besides, let's be honest, his ideas are already there in most people's minds.

To the grandparent: Luxembourg's dirty secret is corruption. France has high unemployment. Standards of living are actually pretty nice under the sun, and outside of the high-pay but nerve-wracking shitty weather of "the north". I agree on the more discipline part, but only when it comes to public behaviour.

Where in western Europe have you lived?

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I will rephrase it to not sound so harsh

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just want to say, as a Brit used to no eye contact and downright rude and grumpy retail service...

Man was it hard to get used to all the smiles and good service when I moved to the USA in 2009.

I know that sounds like a joke, but it really felt like everyone was being fake and sarcastic.

A major culture shock!

<comment><USER12> Yep that's right, the smiles and the good service is all fake, from people being paid a minimum or below minimum wage and no incentive to excel at service.

In contrast, my experiences while I was in central England as far as politeness and service have been very positive, and are a credit to your nation.

However, that all utterly pales in comparison to Japan: I didn't know what service really is until I visited there. Nowhere else did I feel like I was on top of the world as a customer; I will never look at quality of service with the same eyes again.

<comment><USER16> Totally agree with you about Japan!

I'm from the UK, and find the massive smiles and "y'all have a nive day" in the US to be... just so over-exaggerated that it almost becomes ridiculous.

In Japan everyone is so incredibly polite (e.g. train conductor bowing to passengers as he moves through the train, cleaning staff waving off the train as it leaves etc), but it feels very natural and genuine.

<comment><USER17> I'm from the UK and often find the default dismissive, critical and judgemental attitude that prevails as insincere as my experience of overly nice Americans, I'd rather live among the latter, or ideally, a mix of all from everywhere!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not just the kids, the adults are quiet also. The first time I went to Germany I couldn't believe how quiet the airport was when I landed. It's like a library in America.

<comment><USER19> For those of us who grew up and live in this culture, you wouldn't believe how loud the average American is.

It's like someone shouting in a library, whether it's my American colleague asking sometime else in the office a question, a couple of tourists on the metro, or an American family in a restaurant.

It's probably a large part of why Americans are often considered rude.

<comment><USER20> We forgave the Germans for getting up early to reserve the deckchairs when the Americans showed up. Everybody forgave the Americans when the Russians and Chinese from the provinces started travelling.

<comment><USER21> This is hilarious

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > [..] students are expected to sit with a partner and engage in quiet > conversation. They are supposed to be able to hear each other, but not be > heard more than one meter away. This allows other conversations to take > place around them, creating an expectation of privacy and personal space in > a crowded room.

The key here is: "This allows other conversations to take place around them". I was raised (in Germany) to understand that unnecessarily loud talking or shouting at each other is considered _rude_. As a kid I was far more often told to speak at an adequate noise level than to shut up.

On the generalization of "Americans" and "Europeans": Yes, it is BS, but the author reveals that she is mostly drawing from experiences in Austria and Germany and I'm pretty sure that everybody in this thread unjustly generalizes when (s)he does not know better due to lack of experience. Nobody complains when somebody writes about Scottish or Welsh people even though every valley there seems to have its own flag and slight cultural and even linguistical variations that we are too uneducated to see.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am just here to +1 what everyone else is saying: Austria/Germany/etc. != Europe

I have heard very similar comparisons using Portugal/Denmark instead of America/Europe.

<comment><USER10> > _I am just here to +1 what everyone else is saying: Austria /Germany/etc. != > Europe_

I'm not from Western Europe either, but it doesn't matter if they don't include us while talking about "Europe".

Most of such articles discuss the cultural core of Western Europe, even if they call it just "Europe". Europe might have 30+ countries, but it's mostly those Western/Northern few that define "Europe" for such purposes.

This stems from a lot of things, but the historical divide of the "Eastern Block" and the "North/South" also helped solidify it. Those Western/Northern European countries were large global empires and they still have the EU power, are big global economies, are members of the G8/G20, etc.

So other countries get the short end of the stick, even if nominally they are "Europe" too.

Portugal or Greece or Czech Republic, etc., might not even exist in most such treatments of "Europe" \-- those, when are mentioned, are explicitly called "the south", "balkans", "eastern europe", etc.

<comment><USER23> I guess I can't blame them for excluding the PIGS ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIGS_(economics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIGS_\(economics\))) when thinking about Europe.

<comment><USER10> Well, if anything why not exclude the Swine (e.g. the countries that fostered and collaborated with Nazis)?

What's a bad economy comparing to exterminating millions and causing global bloodshed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a European (UK), I laughed out loud when I read this title.

I've travelled extensively, and Americans seem to speak so much more _loudly_ than... well, anywhere!

<comment><USER24> Yes yes, I've live in Europe for 13 years. When there is an American group in a restaurant, you KnOW, no matter where in the restaurant they are.

I've observed this in Hungary, Germany, Spain and others.

My theory is that most Europeans, living all their life on a crowded continent, tend to move in closer to talk, and hence talk at a lower volume. Americans, used to grand amounts of space, sit back and project their voice.

<comment><USER25> Spanish are the loudest Europeans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sadly, most of these comments attack everything but the fundamental thesis. In my experience, in most countries in Europe, children are quieter and better behaved than in the US. They're also more capable of having sustained conversations with adults.

</comment><comment><USER27> When Americans say Europe they usually mean Western Europe, which is not really how the rest of the continent is. For instance in Mediterranean or Balkan people (and kids) are anything but quiet.

<comment><USER28> I am living in the Balkans for the last four years and my personal experience is that kids here are generally quiet. Very similar to Western Europe. (Zagreb - Croatia, Belgrade and Novi Sad - Serbia).

Before coming here I visited and lived in many European countries and Italians for sure are the loudest in public settings (restaurants for example) - especially when there are many of them together. From my experience from Greek Islands Englishmen are the loudest of all - at home in England they are quiet and polite though . Germans are the quietest ones when traveling to other countries but loud at home sometimes.

All this is totally my subjective point of view of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I doubt most Italian mothers would be too different from mine that yelled all the time when I was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd like to know if there are regional differences even in the US. An analogous situation is restaurants. I live in the Midwest, and I've noticed that restaurants are a lot louder here than what I've encountered in Europe -- even when there are no children around.

<comment><USER31> I know that it's an old stereotype, but in my experience it's true - <USER2> talk very loudly. I'd really like to know why.

<comment><USER32> I'm American, and I sometimes ask myself that too: I catch myself talking loudly and I have no earthly idea why. Probably because that's what everyone else is doing!

<comment><USER31> Kind of like an arms race then. I sometimes wonder if this is the reason that American vehicles are so much bigger than elsewhere - once a few people have trucks and suv's, it puts pressure on others to buy bigger vehicles (maybe for safety reasons - not because they would otherwise want to).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't think "privacy" is the right word to describe the lack of communication you're experiencing. I can respect a culture where people's default mode is not to socialize, especially as a more introverted American, but I don't see how your privacy in a public place can be anything other than zero.

<comment><USER34> There's a Finnish expression for this: you can _see_ , but you do not _look_. For example, it's accepted that everybody in a sauna is naked, but you wouldn't go ogling at somebody's genitals -- even if they're the opposite sex.

It's "wilful privacy", if you will: as long as everybody respects the privacy, everything stays private, even though it takes only one person to break the illusion.

<comment><USER19> Another example: many Nordic people don't close the curtains, so everyone could see inside.

But the shame is on the person looking, who is violating the expectation of privacy.

<comment><USER35> Lots of windows here, Norway, don't even have curtains that can be drawn all the way across.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > For city dwelling Europeans, the parks and playgrounds are their backyards

This system is efficient for citizens, but it is both fragile (requires a population of cooperators) and doesn't generate much profit for corporations. Expect to see it go.

<comment><USER19> No? You can charge more in rent or resale value for an apartment close to a park or playground.

<comment><USER36> That's true as soon as good public spaces are getting scarce, and is part of _why it will happen._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> European children are quieter because demographically there are fewer children, meaning that children will be more likely to interact with an adult than with other children.

Adults do not like unquiet children, so they become conditioned to be more quiet.

<comment><USER38> My anecdotal experience is that families, instead of having a uniform distribution, tend to concentrate in some places while avoiding others. In such places, children have an equal propensity to interact with another child as they do an adult.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea whether this is true as I have zero data. I don't even know whether European children are more quiet, let alone all the other assumptions and assertions going on here. We live near to a school (in UK, just outside London), and the kids definitely don't use their "1 metre voices" during the lunchtime break.

<comment><USER37> How about age difference with their parents? In developed countries people take more to get married and old people might not be all playful.

<comment><USER38> We can play at batting 'truthy' statements back to each other all day, but without evidence it's kind of pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Americans find it jarring when they are sitting at a European café or restaurant and someone takes the empty seat at their table"

I've experienced this and I had to exert will power not to get up and move. It was very unnerving. In the US I would have thought the guy was a creeper of some sort, or needed to be shot or stabbed quickly before he got me. I also was in a hotel restaurant once and there was only one other person at a table. The hostess wanted to seat me at his table, even though there were a dozen or more empty tables. Ack.

</comment><comment><USER40> Now a single city in germany is ~europe~...

</comment><comment><USER41> She has obviously never been to a European football game. Those people are louder than any American.

</comment><comment><USER42> "You are a product of your environment." \--Clement Stone

<comment><USER43> We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Winston Churchill

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I suppose then that Spain is not Europe because here, children are not so quiet :)

</comment><comment><USER44> I had always assumed it was the beatings

[http://lizgarrigan.tumblr.com/post/17712385923/french- childr...](http://lizgarrigan.tumblr.com/post/17712385923/french-children- dont-throw-food-when-people-are)

<comment><USER34> Physical beatings, not so much, but difference in attitude, definitely. To boldly caricature, in America it's all about how every child is a special snowflake whose antics must not just be tolerated but encouraged; while in "Europe" (France), children in adult spaces like restaurants must conform to adult rules or be punished.

Edit: Hmm, that came off snarkier than I intended. I didn't intend to imply that either approach is necessarily superior, just that surely there's a happy medium somewhere between the two extremes.

<comment><USER28> It's getting like this in Europe as well. Little snowflakes. Now at least one adult has to take to and pick up kids from school until 11 or 12 years old where I am from. When I was 7 years old and started first grade we went to school which was 2km away and came home alone from the first day.

Currently we are all raising kids that will not be ready for the world in 10-20 years. I am sure of that. Kids from other parts of the world will have the advantage in pretty much all fields.

<comment><USER45> Oh yeah? Back in MY day we walked 10 miles to school! Uphill! Both ways!

Back then a "little snowflake" was what we called our classmates who froze to death walking home from school in a blizzard!

<comment><USER10> In actual parts of Europe, kids DID walk 10 (or close) km to school, often uphill, both ways, and not that far back ago. That's not some BS folklore.

Here's a fifties school to get an idea: [http://aromalefkadas.gr/wp- content/uploads/2014/09/68.jpg](http://aromalefkadas.gr/wp- content/uploads/2014/09/68.jpg)

This is from around the fifties. The kids aren't doing yoga or something -- they really don't have shoes -- they usually had just an incredibly warn-out pair at most, which they wore as part of their "good outfit" (for going to important events, church, etc).

No school buses -- actually no highways between lots of rural villages until late 60s, and a single school (in the central/bigger village) catering also for 3-4 nearby villages in what could be a 10-20 km radius.

And yes, they also did that with snow.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Yes, you don't need to go more than 60 years back before even the socialist democracy utopia Norway was radically different from today. My grandfather grew up in the 40's and 50's, having eight siblings. At thirteen, his father died, so the three oldest boys (aged 11, 13 and 15) had to stop going to school and start working on fishing boats to provide for the family. He lost four of his cousins when they were trying to salvage scrap iron from a naval mine left after the war and it exploded.

The stories of our grandparents are stories that we would associate with a war-torn country in the third world if they happened today.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cancer cell lines evolve in ways that affect how they respond to drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/cancer-cell-lines-evolve-ways-affect-how-they-respond-drugs <comment><USER2> >"Long thought to be genetically stable and identical, cancer cell lines harbor significant levels of genetic variation, which may help explain why it can be hard to reproduce findings in cell line-based research."

Who thought this?

<comment><USER3> When people say "cell line" they mean a proliferation of a specific subclonal population in the lab.

Cancer cells in vivo are known to have clonal evolution [1]. This paper is specifically talking about in vitro growth on a petri dish. The problem is when a biopsy is taken it includes some cancer cells and some normal tissue. The cancer cells need to be isolated, then multiplied to have enough material to work with. This paper suggests this process results in heterogenous progeny - differing in key mutations related to immunotherapy.

(disclaimer: not anywhere near an expert, software guy in bioinformatics)

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367003/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367003/)

<comment><USER2> Yes, it is well known there are a certain number of mutations (indels, point mutations, chromosomal rearrangements, etc) per division and cells in a dish divide many, many times.

Why would anyone think they would not harbour significant levels of genetic variation? This makes it sound like they just spent 40 years misinterpreting data because they didnt do some basic algebra.</comment></comment></comment>


Highly Compressed Richard Hamming's Lectures - <AUTHOR> http://vaclavkosar.com/2019/03/03/Highly-Compressed-Richard-Hamming-Lectures.html <comment><USER2> These sound terrible. The lowest-quality audio from Youtube is about 10x the size (which is still small), but at least it doesn't sound like a rescued wax cylinder recording from the turn of last century.

I had hoped from the title that this would be a summarized or edited cut of the salient points from these lectures. My limited resource these days is not bandwidth or disk space, but time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I store these in an archive in my syncthing directory. I don't have to think about running out of space on mobile or too much cost for the cellular downlink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank you! these are very cool.

> you can save some bandwidth in exchange for recording quality by using high > compression of Speex algo

how about using opus[0], the comparison chart[1] shows that opus is supposedly significantly better even at a lower bitrate.

[0]: [https://www.opus-codec.org/](https://www.opus-codec.org/)

[1]: [https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/](https://www.opus- codec.org/comparison/)

<comment><AUTHOR> actually I encoded the files to 4kbps but opus goes only to 6kbps?

<comment><USER4> [http://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?page_id=452](http://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?page_id=452) is a bit more exotic but should sound way better even though it caps out at 3.2 kbps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Impressive, the Codec 2 can go down to 0.7kbps! [http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_700c.wav](http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_700c.wav)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the idea, but I find Speex distorts the audio way too much in a way that makes it hard to understand afterwards. I'm willing to sacrifice as much quality as I can as long as the speech remains easy to understand, but after that, any space savings aren't worth it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I cannot recommend highly enough, You and Your Research. Great life and career advice from a great man near the end of his life.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw)

</comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for your service, sir.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why are people thanking the OP?

Cool how you CAN compress 47 minutes of audio down to 1.6MB if you're willing to accept awful sound quality, sure. Why though? I mean, why thank the OP for their service? I don't get it.

<comment><USER9> Because processing power,bandwidth, storage space, battery capacity are not limitless resources. Computing power has been massively increased over the last few decades and yet we don't often see the 1000x increase in performance that we really should as developers have often squandered that performance.

The closer we get to pushing the limits of physics, while still expecting computing to be faster, higher resolution, etc. We should commend any efforts to make computing more efficient and less resource intensive.

<comment><USER8> Speex is cool technology from what I can tell, but it's not exactly designed to run on a Commodore 64. E.g. it's used for the voice compression of commands sent to Siri.

What it saves in bandwidth, it pays in processing power.

But anyway, that still doesn't explain why posting these files is so cool that the post shot to the top of HN.

<comment><USER10> >> that still doesn't explain why posting these files is so cool that the post shot to the top of HN.

This article shot to the top because of at least three things:

1\. It was well written.

2\. It had to do with cool tech in a complicated problem space.

I only know those two.</comment></comment></comment></comment>