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What’s a better measure than GDP? Something that actually measures the amount of raw value produced, rather than the amount of money that has changed hands? Does such a thing exist?
A reliable measurement that I found is the change of side by victims of Communism from mainland China. My abusive ableist family who fled Mainland China to continue their toxic authoritarian practices from the warlord rule had stopped slandering the Chinese Communist government a decade ago. They are now rooting for the mainland Chinese government with the claim that communism is bad but that Communist government is good. My family still wants to avoid Mainland China due to fear of punishment and overpopulation problem.
Damn, someone somewhere down the line ate some humble pie
Purchasing power parity is imperfect but a step in the right direction, but direct metrics that aim to summarize all economic activity in a country generally don’t capture much nuance.
Trying to separate non productive things like finance capital jerking itself off and productive things like tangible goods and services is hard since the line between useful service and frivolous bullshit can be quite thin. It might be better to try and compile multiple metrics into an index that measures things like per capita income, purchasing power, home ownership, access to healthcare, education, transportation etc. but that’s a massive undertaking in it’s own right.
The USSR (until gorby 🤢) measured Gross Social Product instead, which is pretty much exactly what you describe. You can read more here
Great resource, thanks
I prefer Physical Quality of Life Index myself. There’s actually a study that compares capitalist and socialist countries in measures of PQL, taking into account the level of economic development https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/
That’s kinda what gdp used to be. But besides gdp there is basically no equivalent measure thats all encompassing like gdp because any measure that uses monetrary value is basically just gdp minus/plus a few things so if u want actual production capacity u basically just have to look at the actual raw numbers of what each country produces for example China makes 1000 million metric tons of steel a year while Japan makes 84 million (which is probably more representative of the actual sizes of their economies cuz China puts out very conservative gdp numbers while the global north like to go absolutely fucking wild and include everything they can possibly justify like illegal drugs or rent for example). But those kinds of numbers are very hard to find for most things.
