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Micron Document

Why It's Bad to Have High GDP

To put it in other words...

The common way of looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is that it's a metric

of economic success: more GDP is more wealth. Wealth is good. "Poverty" (meaning

low per capita GDP) is bad. Nowadays, pretty much everyone talks about

"economics" like this as if this truism was scribbled on the back walls of the

cosmos.

This is just looking at one side of the ledger in a kind of global double-entry

accounting book. A logically equivalent way of looking at it is that GDP is a

metric of economic exchange required for survival in society as it exists. You

can say that some area "produced" $1 billion of output (sounds good), but you

can just as easily say that $1 billion was required for that area to sustain

itself (sounds bad). These two are simply logically equivalent.

Living on $1 a day

![/pix/ivanov01s.jpg)) don't

want you to know about

this.")](https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/ivanov01.jpg)Antediluvian Hyperborea. GDP: $0

per year.

Let's dive into the Gestalt: when you hear that a family of eight lives on less

than a dollar per day (PPP adjusted), you might wonder how they manage! To

actually do such a thing would require buying large bags of rice for the

whole family, eat only that and live in free cardboard boxes.

The reality is that that often uttered phrase means that they use less than $1 a

day in the general economy, while the rest of their livelihood is

"off-the-grid" or self-sufficient. They may grow food in a family farm, hunt for

food, and most of their daily needs from cooking oils, to plates, to pottery,

to soap are often made at home as well.

There is still "an economy" but often one that is barter based or socialist

in the real pre-socialist sense of the word: mediated by direct face-to-face

social tit-for-tat between neighbors and friends, none of this mediated by

currency being exchanged, thus it is not part of the GDP.

If you read about some Bangladeshi village where the only product is "textiles",

that doesn't mean that everyone there makes textiles all day and, without a

textile company, everyone would've starved to death. It means that the only

on-paper, measurable global industry practiced there is textile manufacturing.

Other villagers might farm, hunt, even do some kind of gathering in some places.

They will produce the arts and crafts and live the way people live when you

leave them alone. If your view of the world is mediated by GDP, you're only

seeing the extremely small sliver that pops into existence when people exchange

something involving legal tender.

This is extremely difficult for us modern bugpeople to understand because to be

a bugman in a large city is to produce absolutely nothing on one's own and buy

literally everything you need from the store. To us non-productive people, GDP

means income, which means survival. But the further out of Bugmanville you go,

the clearer the vacuousness of GDP becomes. When you realize that most of human

wealth is unmeasured by GDP, you realize that Whig History and Steven Pinkerism

is based on shaky foundations.

A Personal Example

A minor example. We had a large Thanksgiving feast near my uncle's house in very

rural Florida. As it got cold in the night, we had a fire in a repurposed old

sugar cane cooking vat artfully standing on used symmetrical cinderblock pieces.

A bugman hipster might pay two hundred dollars or more for a similar looking

"authentic" piece of equipment. Those $200 would be counted in the GDP. A bugman

hipster might have also bought or rented chairs for the event, "contributing"

more to the GDP, but my uncle, as part of the local wholesome church community,

simply borrowed some from the church. Thus our event produced basically no GDP

output in goods or services, despite being functionally equivalent to some

similar but expensive and ergo "productive" "Friendsgiving" practiced by

urbanites. In reality we are richer than the bugmen hipsters who blew

hundreds of dollars on a faux-folksy party. In this case, we owned the firepit

and had easy access and permission to the chairs, thus we are more economically

flexible than they are. That GDP that they produced/expended is evidence of

deeper reliance on the economic system. That GDP output is a marker of

fragility, reliance on the conditions of the outside economy in the same way

that a village of Bangladeshis who abandon their traditional way of lives to

work on textiles are more fragile, despite being able to save up for iPhones.

What GDP really measures

Most of the increase in GDP across the world is simply the movement from local

partially-social partially-under-the-table economies to economies mediated by

taxable currency. An economically self-sufficient village with close social

relationships and a barter economy has 0 GDP. A township of entrepreneurs and

artisans you partially barter and partially use currency which they don't report

has 0 GDP. All of these people are "in poverty" and "earn less than a dollar a

day". And if you want to be truly self-sufficient, that means having a personal

GDP of zero.

More than that, pretty much everywhere, GDP is a strong indicator of social

upheaval. If you think that GDP is some eternal goodness, remember that

everything "good" about industrialization shows up in the GDP, while at the

same time, everything bad about it will not show up. Or, sometimes bad

things are registered as positive economic growth: urbanization has caused

mass-disease, and if that means a market for new medical services and

pharmaceuticals, great! The GDP just went up! The Ganges is polluted due to the

textile plant? That just means more opportunities for local entrepreneurs to

sell bottled water! The GDP just went up! Are people being pushed out of fishing

or other subsistence occupations because of it? Even better! Now they have no

choice but to contribute to the GDP! With every passing year, in fact, more and

more of the GDP is produced by dealing with the problems that our higher level

of GDP have caused.

At the end of the day, GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a place or

country is on the global economy. Self-sufficiency has a GDP of 0. Wasteful

consooomerism has an extremely large GDP.

Planned obsolescence

I have one of my great grandfather's early electric circular saws. It has a

bunch of gunk in it, but it still works (although I recently took it apart to

replace some old screws and springs and other little parts to be careful). They

literally do not make circular saws like it; it's all metal, while even the

fancy modern stuff is mostly plastic.

The "unfortunate" thing about it and other durable tools is that it's "bad for

the economy," especially the GDP. Since that thing has been around since maybe

the 50's or 60's, that's as long as 70 years the economy has gone without the

"stimulation" of us having to buy another saw.

Viewers of my technology videos: Which would be better for the world, if

everyone used the material equivalent of a classic American-made IBM ThinkPad,

or some Apple Laptops that are unfixable computers made of mostly batteries

designed to conk out right before the new version comes out? Regardless, the

Apple Macs that cost thousands a piece are much better for the "economy."

That's what I mean. If you have quality tools and do not need to constantly

throw money at the system to buy things, fix things and otherwise waste money,

you are going to be having a lower GDP. That's just how it is.

The propagandistic role of GDP

When you don't think things through like this, GDP is supposed to appear as an

objective measure of economic goodness. You're supposed to be looking at those

GDP charts and saying, "Wow, my life might be terrible, I am not free, I am

subject to forces out of my control, and I am told I have to participate in

mass-consumerism to survive, but these charts are the facts[!], and the facts

say that things are better now, so I believe them!"

It's legitimately surprising to me how big of a boon the idea of increasing GDP

is for Whig history and NPCs of many different ideologies. People of the Left

and Right will matter-of-factly tell me that a plastic-based economy taking over

the world is still good because the line is going up. I've heard it as a

justification for everything:

Don't like globalization?