GDP is a flawed way of measuring quality of life in many regards:
- If a window were to be broken, and replaced a few days later, this would be measured as a positive in GDP, yet the quality of life has not increased, in fact, for the days in which the window was missing, it would have decreased. The same goes for any maintenance or repair work.
- GDP makes no effort to measure the negatives of economic activity - people suffering from pollution related illness clearly haven't seen their quality of life increase, nor does it take into account the destruction of the environment, biodiversity loss, or any other suffering.
- Healthcare costs are billed as a positive. Whilst it is true that some of the costs will be a positive on the quality of life, the fact that healthcare is required at all in many cases is a negative.
- It makes no mention of the things that truly make life worth living - relationships, friends, family, liberty, etc - things that might be restricted or monitored in a totalitarian regime with a fast growing economy.
- Then we have the statistics themselves. You can't trust any statistic coming from any Government agency, as far as I'm concerned - ESPECIALLY those from the likes of China. Sure, China had ~10% economic growth last year... according to China...
- Spending on arms and military. Sure, a certain level is required in order to protect the quality of life. But, if we look at the USSR, which was the second largest economy back in the day... people were starving, or dying from the cold, whilst billions were spent on an arms race with the USA. It's all that money spent on militia that made their GDP so large, and yet it had no representation on the standard of living.
- Finally, when being used to compare different country's economies, as is the point of this article, it is flawed, due to the nature of currency conversion. Countries with a larger leniancy on exports will appear stronger than what they really are, as their currency will be stronger when converted over to dollars.
This, btw, wasn't a stab at the USA, or anything like that. Its GDP is a massive achievement... fortunately, the USA also tops out on many of the more important aspects to quality of life - natural beauty, liberty, etc. Sure, some inner-cities will have issues with pollution, but that's the same everywhere on the globe (probably a couple of exceptions).
