I have a theory (actually I wanted at some point to write more seriously about it) about how GDP also expands by consuming life itself. If you're burnt out, or don't have time to see friends and are depressed have to pay for therapy, GDP grows. If you don't have time to care for your children so you have to keep them busy with million classes, or paid for caretaking, GDP expands. If you don't have time or confidence to meet people IRL and have to pay for Tinder, GDP expands. If you don't have time to cook (even if you enjoy it) so UberEats all the time, GDP expands. When you replace public services by extractivist and more inefficient private ones (see healthcare, education) GDP often grows. The list goes on and on. The more every aspect of human existence is replace by a transaction in the market place, the more GDP grows. We replace a variety of motivations to do and to be based of human relationships and affection, by cold self-interested exchanges between strangers.
GDP is a fucked up way to look at life. It's go to way to look at whether a country is doing good, but it's consuming our environment and our own sanity in so many ways.
That's one of the reasons why I think that actually limiting the working hours (bringing it down to 30, and eventually to 20 hours a week) should be one of the main agenda points for this coming century. It's important for our environment, but also for our own sanity.
One could argue that given a sufficiently large GDP, one can make the individual choice to earn less and have more time. But that's sadly not how things work, since having more workforce available also devalues work relative to subsistence goods (e.g., you can't afford a roof without a full time job). Also, individualism is such a powerful ideology in a market driven economy. Maximizing individualism itself can help you get ahead in the marketplace, and spreads through society via marketing, private media. At some point, we even stop seeing how to behave differently than to maximize our own profit. We need democratic instruments outside of the marketplace to steer our society in a way that improves our lives, regardless of what that does to GDP.
GDP is a fucked up way to look at life. It's go to way to look at whether a country is doing good, but it's consuming our environment and our own sanity in so many ways.
That's one of the reasons why I think that actually limiting the working hours (bringing it down to 30, and eventually to 20 hours a week) should be one of the main agenda points for this coming century. It's important for our environment, but also for our own sanity.
One could argue that given a sufficiently large GDP, one can make the individual choice to earn less and have more time. But that's sadly not how things work, since having more workforce available also devalues work relative to subsistence goods (e.g., you can't afford a roof without a full time job). Also, individualism is such a powerful ideology in a market driven economy. Maximizing individualism itself can help you get ahead in the marketplace, and spreads through society via marketing, private media. At some point, we even stop seeing how to behave differently than to maximize our own profit. We need democratic instruments outside of the marketplace to steer our society in a way that improves our lives, regardless of what that does to GDP.